Not great

Rating: 2/10 (1 September 2013)

Hmmmm this was very disappointing. I watched this movie back to back with the original Black Christmas hoping to be thoroughly entertained by two classics of the genre. I was only half right. I have to say the lesser known and criminally under-rated BC walks all over Halloween which sadly didn't live up to the hype. Black Christmas has a far more interesting screenplay with some very lively and interesting characters, some deliberately humorous moments, a great non-intrusive but suspense- heightening score and an intriguing premise of telling you nothing at all about the villain. You don't even see him. HW was originally intended as a sequel (prequel?) to BC and I suspect Carpenter was trying to flesh out the villain's character and explain his behaviour. What he failed to understand is that it was the very fact that there was no explanation for the killer in BC and no way to identify with him that made the killer so intriguing & scary. This lame back-story of Michael Myers doesn't add a thing to the suspense, in fact it diminishes it even more because the back-story is silly and thin. A complex & interesting back story might have worked but replacing the eery mystery of BC's killer with a half-a**ed background was a mistake.
Both movies have pretty bad acting but that's a product of the times. JLC was marginally better than her ridiculous co-stars but no better than anyone in BC. Mind you, she didn't have much to work with given the script for HW is one of the lamest horror scripts I've encountered.
There were some very neat camera shots here and Carpenter plays with texture and lighting well in his direction but it wasn't enough to make this movie a genuine classic (regardless of how many people think it is - emporer's new clothes n all that!!) He kept some of the clever plot techniques and camera work from BC, thank goodness, including the POV shots from the killer (but we lost those half way through along with the intrigue) and the nasty phone calls (altho this wasn't used anywhere near enough or as successfully as it was in BC). But there was no humour or interesting characters in Halloween. Just a bunch of boring teenagers doing boring things and some wholly uninteresting children.
Also the ending made no sense whatsoever. You can't have things both ways. If you're going to write a lame back-story that explains that the killer is a just some psycho bloke who killed his sister - ie HUMAN - then you can't have him surviving so many fatal attacks. It's just plain ridiculous. If they'd kept the killer a mystery as BC did then they could get away with that ending. As it stands though it just felt trite and contrived - with sequels in mind rather than a good creative conclusion.
Anyway, I gave it 2 points for the great camera shots/bits they kept from BC and recommend it ONLY to people who are interested in the history of horror movies - it's a relic but don't expect it to be as good as people are deluding themselves into thinking it is. Watch Black Christmas (the original with a young Margot Kidder as a wise-cracking drunk!!) instead. It's far more entertaining AND it's the very beginning of slasher flicks as a genre.