Disappointed

Rating: 3/10 (6 September 2002)

Even though I have been a horror fan for two decades I still hadn't seen Halloween until now. No special reason, it just didn't happen before. I was excited and expected a lot from this pioneer movie that taught later movie makers so much. I was utterly disappointed.
Spoilers ahead. The movie starts off really well and is quite promising for a period of time, though weaknesses are displayed from the very beginning. Let's take the opening scene when we are introduced to the child murderer. Little details go wrong like why do you pick up a knife and automatically raise it above your head when you know that your victim is upstairs. In this real-time scene when you (quite originally at that time) see the world through the eyes of the murderer, things simply moves too fast. The young couple goes fully clothed upstairs to have sex. The killer then moves into the house and pick up the knife he lift like a zombie and moves toward the stairs just in time to see the boy come down the stairs while buttoning his shirt. If you withdraw the time of undressing and redressing - the young couple MIGHT have had sex for 10 seconds...logics fail already. Then the murderer proceeds upstairs to kill his sister with this big knife that he stabs her with. The sounds she makes are undescribable. It sounds more like she's having sex than being killed...this happens again later in the movie. OK - that was only the opening scene...it goes on and on. A major glip is how the autumn leaves always falls down right in front of the camera when there is basically no movement or even leaves anywhere else in the town...or how the knife logically must have turned into a sword to be able to hold a grown man stabbed, hanging from the wall...
Apart from these glitches there are other things to consider. The constant appearances of the murderer through a window, down the street, inside a house, outside a house - and always simultaneously with an overdramatic musical boom sound - was interesting at first but grew old really fast. It becomes like "yeah - we know he's scary by now, let's get down to business!" Boring. And then in the final scene when the murderer FINALLY encounters Jamie Lee Curtis - she stabs him twice - both times leaving him there with the knife. How stupid can a person get? Not that stupid. One good thing about the movie was the absence of explanation. The psychiatrist played the best part, and his describing of the murderer are quite thrilling. Also the fact that the killer disappears in the end when he really should be dead and the lack of explanation for this is quite intriguing. WAS he some sort of devil in the flesh? I don't know, and I can assure you that I won't see any of the seven (?) sequels to find out. This movie grew old after twenty minutes. A 4/10, rescued by the importance of the movie in displaying certain exciting movements which later movie makers used without using them up the way Carpenter did with this one. The movie is now a historical curiosity. Nothing more.