Small things entertain small minds

Rating: 1/10 (24 June 2008)

I can't believe that this film could be viewed as terrifying, what's the matter with you all, it is at the most ever so slightly tense on occasions. I can't help thinking that anyone who thinks this film is scary was either a young sheltered teenager in the 70's when the film first came out or was of primary school age with this being the first horror they had ever watched. Not that John Carpenters Halloween really deserves to be described as a horror, more like watching paint dry. The plot is not remotely intriguing or creative, there is virtually no story to this film other than Michael Myers going around killing people. Most of the scenes in the film just seem if they were chucked in to fill the massive gaps in the film when Michael is not killing anyone rather than tying the story together nicely.
The film doesn't feel as if it gets going until about half an hour before the end, before then Michael is just watching Laurie Strode from distances and then disappearing now and then, and this is meant to be a tense build up? Give me a break. In all honesty it doesn't really feel as if it ever gets going properly and as for the killing at the beginning when he kills his sister, it looks so fake and I can't believe that she is in pain at all. Her scream is so unconvincing and it doesn't even look as if he is stabbing her at all but completely missing and to think, the mask is covering most of our view making it much easier for Carpenter to play with illusion of depth with the knife but he still fails. The following scene is laughable when his parents come back and see Michael out side the front of the house, it's as if the three of them just freeze for a photo to be taken with Michael's mum and dad just watching him looking gormless as the camera zooms out.
The music is so ineffective and repetitive, the theme sounds more like music for an action thriller and not a horror, plus throughout the film the music is very basic with little atmosphere. For a slasher this film has a very small body count, something like 3 or 4 murders and when most of the corpses are revealed as we approach the alleged climax of the film it looks like something from a comical haunted house theme park attraction. I'm talking about the parts when we see a young lady dead on a bed with her arms spread out and a grave stone behind her and when a body falls down and hangs from the ceiling conveniently as Laurie is close to it. I can almost imagine someone hiding in the room and pressing a button to release the corpse from the ceiling and when a door mysteriously opens to reveal another dead body of a lady again like theme park style, it looks is if it was pulled open by a piece of fishing wire from below deliberately so that Laurie would see the body and be scared. I remember thinking that the only good technical aspect of the film was the lighting in some places but otherwise it's one of the most boring films I've ever seen and it's such a joke that it's considered to be one of the scariest films of all time. I'm sure there is more that I could complain about but I've not seen the film many times and I'm not planning on boring my self to death with it again just so that I can criticise it more thoroughly, it's just not worth it.