The film that launched a thousand sequels

Rating: 4/10 (3 November 2006)

John Carpenter is widely acknowledged as the 1970s master of low budget shockers; 'Halloween', a tale of teenagers attacked by an escaped killer, was arguably his most influential film. I quite like some of his other films from this era, but, watching this one, I was mostly amazed at how bad it was. The acting is poor, and there's none of the atmospheric Gothic atmosphere of the equally influential 'Texas Chain Saw Massacre'. Most crucially, the murderer is a man who wears a mask, betrays no expression, and kills for no discernible reason, not even his own pleasure: a less interesting, or plausible, bad-guy, is hard to imagine. Eventually there are some tense (though surprisingly un-graphic) scenes towards the end, but even their impact is reduced by repetition, and by the poorly worked-out zombie-theme that is added onto the end of the film. To me, it's odd that this movie was so widely copied; but as few consider its sequels to be improvements, I doubt that I'll be watching them.