JDR: Halloween 1&2 review

Hello soldiers! Its your Emperor, Johnos Firewalker. Today I thought I'd do a review for my first real rant on this site. Also keep in mind that my Godzilla related stuff will be posted on my blog on Wikizilla, so stop in there if and when you want to read about Godzilla. Anyway lets get to the task at hand. In this rant I'll be talking about both the original two films and the Rob Zombie remakes. They are all good movies and I enjoyed them a lot. This rant will feature MASSIVE SPOILERS!!! Now lets take a close look at each one, shall we?

## Halloween (1978)

This is a true masterpiece of horror. John Carpenter truly proved his abilities with it. He took a shoestring budget of only a few thousand dollars to make one of the most suspenseful and thrilling stories ever told through film. The film revolves around suspense and genuine fear rather than gore and jump-scares like modern films. It took place not in a secluded part of the world where nobody else could be in harms way and nobody could interfere, it took place in a normal suburban town where there are thousands of innocents and dozens of police officers ready to, and trying to, interfere. The villain wasn't a supernatural monster, he was simply a mentally unstable and completely remorseless man with a mission, which happened to be to murder everyone who made the mistake of being alone and nearby. The protagonists? A simple high school student named Laurie just trying to get by and the killer's psychiatrist, Dr, Loomis helping to catch him. The premise is so realistic that people would rethink the feeling safety in numbers that comes with living in a suburb, and to never trick-or-treat alone. One of the few slasher films both my father and I say are actually a good movie. 9/10. Phenomenal.

## Halloween II (1981)

Fans had to wait three years for the epic continuation of the original, which ended in a cliffhanger. Our heroine Laurie is taken to a hospital, which is where almost half the movie takes place. Dr. Loomis continues the search for our killer Michael Myers, who walked away from six bullets and a fall off a balcony, with the sheriff. Laurie is then revealed (SPOILER ALERT!!!) to be Michael's little sister. Eventually Michael tracks Laurie down and the epic final showdown ensues. Simple enough. But there are a few things that bothered me about this one, unlike the first one. First off, what happened to the character Jimmy? Did he die? If so that's a stupid ass way to go. He slipped in some blood and fell and hit his head. He shows up later and tries to start his car to no avail and passed out on the steering wheel. We don't see him after that. What the hell happened there? Also, how did Michael know the Laurie was his sister? Its not like he had a recent image in his head of what she looked like. Is Michael psychic? And one last thing is the scene where the police officer rams into the guy wearing Michael's mask. What happened there? Why didn't he stop? Why was he driving so fast in the first place? Why didn't the poor dude hear him coming and run away? Did that cop get away with that? And why did the van FUCKING EXPLODE? That scene was just so weird. Other than that the movie was a slightly bigger budget version of the original. Still great and suspenseful as hell. Make sure to watch it back-to-back with the first one. 8.5/10. A worthy sequel and What should have been the end.
One last thing with MAJOR SPOILERS! Dr. Loomis dies at the end but i saw Donald Pleasance, the actor who plays him, appear in trailers for other sequels. How the hell is that even possible? I hjate it when actor whose character dies plays a different character in the sequel. I hope he didn't play the same character though. That'd be awkward for everyone.

## Halloween (2007)

I'll start this one by saying that I liked Rob Zombie's other films. I know i may be alone on that one, but I appreciate filmmakers who have the balls to make disturbing films without caring what other people think. That attitude transfers over to his remake of Halloween. This grisly re-imagining of the classic is much more in-depth about the origins of Michael Myers. He comes from a broken home. An abusive stepfather, a stripper-with-a-heart mother, and an unbelievable bitch for a sister. No wonder he becomes a psychopath. So he has bully at school and we find out that his family was not his first killing, the bully was. He brutally beats him to death with a stick in the woods. What else do you expect. This is Rob Zombie we're talking about here. So, that night on Halloween we get the re-envisioning of the first movie's opening scene: his childhood killing spree. This time he not only kills his sister, but his sister's boyfriend and his stepfather. He then takes his little sister out on the curd and waits with her until their mother arrives along with the police. Then we get a more in-depth look at what Michael was like in the mental hospital. He starts off normal, but as time passes he gets more and more unstable, showing the monster he had hidden since that fateful Halloween. Eventually he starts obsessing over his papermache masks and goes mute for the remainder of the film. He then kills a nurse after she insults him and his mother sees him for what he really is. His mother commits suicide afterwards. Then we jump cut to fifteen tears later. Dr. Loomis is retiring from being Michael's shrink and is now a best-selling author and a very psychiatrist famous for his involvement in the now famous Myers massacre. Laurie, all grown up, knows nothing of her original family and begins her day like a normal person would. That night, Michael escapes. In the Directors cut of the film, his escape is caused by two rednecks that work at the hospital attempting to rape a patient in Michael's room. They get whats coming to them, don't worry. Then he goes to a nearby truck stop. he kills a trucker and takes his clothes and I'm guessing his wheels and heads back home to Haddonfield, where he goes to his old house and gets his mask and knife back. After that, we get a pretty accurate retelling of the first movie, with a higher body count and a much grittier feel. This time, instead of trying to kill Laurie, he simply wants to reunite the family. And the ending is different. Loomis shoots him in the back yard of the Myers house and he falls over. Loomis and Laurie then go back to his car but Michael comes back and takes her again. Then we get a good ten minute battle in the house. Laurie tries to run and hide while Loomis uses what little strength he has left to try and delay Michael. It all ends with Laurie and Michael both going over the balcony. It ends with Laurie shoot ing Michael with Loomis's gun point-blank. This movie is great. I love it. It uses music from both the original and Rob Zombie's movie The Devil's Rejects. The same goes for the cast. A lot of the people in this movie were in The Devil's Rejects as well. The location the film was shot in was the same as that from the original, though they had to find a new Myers house because people actually live in the old one now, but it still is in the movie in the background. 8.5/10. Good job Rob!

## Halloween II (2009)

This movie is pretty interesting, though it got some really negative reviews. It picks up right where the first one left off, just like the original. Laurie is carted off to the hospital. But then the similarities pretty much end. Michael is picked up by an ambulance to be taken to the morgue, but it crashes en-route. Michael wakes up and kills the surviving driver. He then walks away towards an otherworldly vision in the distance. We'll get to what that is later. Laurie has numerous major injuries such as broken bones and stab wounds. The doctors patch her up and she passes out. What follows is a dream: She wakes up to find only one nurse still there. Before the nurse can help, Michael comes out of nowhere and stabs her violently. A chase through the hospital ensues, very reminiscent of the original sequel(if that makes any sense). But it all turns out to be a dream, though that was not very apparent when I watched it. But it was and we then go to a few years later. Laurie now lives with her friend Annie, who also survived the Halloween massacre. Annie's father is the sheriff that helped track Michael down. Laurie has become rebellious, mean, short tempered, and now has panic attacks regularly. She lives in fear of Halloween. Meanwhile, Michael has become a wandering nomad hobo. He wanders around the outskirts of town living on his own wits. Still wanna know what that vision was? Too bad I'm telling you anyway. It was what drives Michael. It is a vision of his mother, dressed in all white telling him to get revenge and reunite the family. On Hallow's eve, some rednecks confront Michael for trespassing. It doesn't go too well for them after he puts on the mask and pulls out the knife. As for Loomis? He became even richer and more famous over the whole thing. He doesn't really matter until the end. Moving on. Laurie finds out about Loomis's books and finds out about the fact that she is Michael's sister. She decides to get over it by going to a Halloween party. Meanwhile Michael is killing people. Good for him. He ends up near the Halloween party and kills one of Laurie's friends. He then follows Laurie and her remaining friends back to her house. He kills them all and kidnaps Laurie. The sheriff is furious and quickly goes after him. After a decent chase through the woods that ended with Michael lifting a car and rolling it into the ditch where it exploded, Laurie ends up in Michael's lair. The police quickly surround the place, and Loomis shows uo. There is then a very trippy sequence where Laurie and Michael share hallucinations of their mother. Michael then confronts the police. Loomis tries to reason with him, but Michael unmasks, showing us his face(omg!) and says his first word in almost two decades: "Die!", and promptly stabs Loomis, killing him. The police open fire and kill Michael. Laurie stumbles out afterward. she picks up her brother's knife and tries to continue the rampage, but she is also gunned down and killed. This movie was Rob Doing his own thing, which he seemed to want to do during the first one. It was cool to see what goes on in his head and the complete shock of the ending caught me off guard. 8/10. This is why Rob should do more slasher.

## Afterward

Whew! what a rant! It took me four hours to get all that down! It didn't help that my computer crashed and i had to retype half the thing. this was by far the longest rant I've ever made and it sets a good example for rants in the future. Too bad my fanbase is pretty small at this point, so not many will see it. That's okay though, there'll be some more good rants in the future. So any way, did you guys like these movies? Do you also like Rob Zombie's movies? Leave lots of nice comments below. Keep a fire in that walk! Good day!