Cookie Cutter Slasher With Some Nice Shots And Music

Rating: 4/10 (11 April 2016)

Having been born after the era of the horror greats, I have gone back and watched most of them after the fact to see how they hold up. The first classic horror movie I saw many years ago was Psycho, which while somewhat problematic and outdated, at least held up as a pretty good film otherwise with great use of suspense, twisting the plot in unexpected ways and having a lot of character development both for the main character and the killer. The next one I saw was Halloween, and I just don't see why this is hailed as a classic honestly when compared to other movies of its era.
Halloween is a slasher film (not the first by any means though, Psycho, Black Christmas and Texas Chainsaw Massacre beat it by many years) about a boy named Michael Myers who kills his sister as a child and is then sent to a psychiatric institution for 15 years, only to escape to kill again. And that's about it really for the plot as none of the other characters are even remotely given any sort of character development, there are no twists to speak of and it's all very predictable.
The main character, a teenage girl played by Jamie Lee Curtis, basically just gossips with her friends most of the movie before going to babysit some kids while her other friends are out being killed in their underwear. She has no memorable lines of dialogue, no motivations of her own and basically could easily be replaced with a cardboard cutout, though credit to her for doing her best with the bare bones character she had to work with.
The only other characters we meet in the movie are Dr. Loomis, the psychiatrist who looked after Michael during his time in the psych ward, and the sheriff. The sheriff basically does nothing during the entire film, and has no bearing on the plot at all, while Dr. Loomis is a hammy scenery chewing ball of cheese who runs around shouting at people that the evil boogieman has escaped and will kill them all, which is both unintentionally hilarious and also give off the impression that he is completely unfit to work with mentally ill people and was probably the real killer all along (he is not though, the movie has no plot twist).
This lack of character development and a lazy mildly offensive "psycho killer" shtick at least could have been somewhat forgivable had the movie been really frightening or had some themes to it that could give you something more to think about, but honestly I feel the movie lacks that too.
The movie's attempt at creating suspense mostly relies on long loooooong shots of Michael stalking people while the admittedly spooky theme song plays in the background. However, it rarely builds up to anything. In fact, it takes almost an hour before we see any sort of action or horror unfurl after the intro sequence outside of a small glimpse of a dead man in a ditch that Michael killed off screen. Look, I am not saying every horror movie needs a ridiculous body count or anything, but you still need to have something unsettling happen once in a while during the build up, and this movie just has nothing to offer there other than Michael making a music video for Every Breath You Take, which gets old after a while.
The atmosphere in the movie is pretty spooky at times, I'll admit, with lots of dark shadows accompanied by the iconic film score, but fear of the dark relies on not knowing what is out there that you can't see, and this gets completely ruined when we get a good idea of where Michael is at most times, even with his weird out of nowhere supernatural teleportation skills.
The only time the film actually seems to try and utilize keeping the audience in the dark about what horrors are unfurling is during the kills themselves, which are mostly committed in dark, claustrophobic areas. However I feel it falls flat here too, as they look very unconvincing even in the cover of darkness, show no blood at all, have a goofy buildup (he is dressed up as a Charlie Brown sheet ghost before one of them for crying out loud) and make me feel completely unaffected when I had no connection to the characters at all before they were killed off.
All in all, there really isn't much to this movie that I can see. Outside of the flat characters and family friendly horrors there is no deeper theme other than "mentally ill people are spooky and the boogieman will get you!" which is both mildly offensive and juvenile; the holiday of Halloween is not utilized in the movie in any substantial way (the film could have taken place during Easter and nothing would change), and the whole thing is just sorta dull and middle of the road throughout.
Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre are much more memorable and scary movies with much more substance to them, and are much better films to watch if you want to see some of the roots to the Slasher genre while also being entertained. Halloween is mostly just good for it's soundtrack and filming techniques, and is probably best left for film history classes rather than hallows eve movie nights.