Halloween (2018)
Loveseat
(Editor’s note: The tepid unseen 2018 remake of Halloween? Who cares? No one, but this poured out of me in twenty minutes, so I spent the three hours fancy-ing it up for the website. Enjoy.)
Not good, and made by someone who was high and stupid (Mr. Danny McBride) and someone who was high and full of themselves (Mr. David Gordon Greer). I saw it based on the idea that artsy filmmaking making a horror film might bring something new to genre. Instead, it barely surpasses Halloween 3, let alone H20, let alone the original let alone The Babadook, which was another horror film made with artistic intensions.
Why do I listen to myself? I should just trust the critics.
Barely worth writing about, I’m just going to mention the one scene: the killing of reporters at the gas station. Doesn’t sound very interesting, does it? Well, it’s not, and the murders, as they are throughout, are done with a kind of tired this-is-the-best-we-could-think-of-let’s-hope-the-audience-projects-some-kind-of-‘they’re-making-it-real’-vibe-onto-its-non-panache.
I’m singling out this scene because the meeting of Jason and the characters happens by coincidence. This is par for the course in horror. But it’s just these are the characters making a documentary about a serial killer…
…sorry, just suppressing the yawn reflex.
Unsuccessful. Anyway…
…the characters are making a documentary and so, would be likely, nay, certainly, near some locations in Jason’s past life. The gas station could have even been a place where he selfied with a piece of beef jerky. Instead, they had the idea ‘she gets killed…in a bathroom, and she says stuff!’ ‘It’s brilliant, and never been done in the two horror movies I heard about but haven’t actually seen’, etc.
In other words, they had to go out of their way to make it nonsensical. It’s an accomplishment of sorts, in a film that is distinguished only be its lack of knowledge of cliché, as evidenced by their embarrassing tendency to show everything that has been done better, worse and indifferently in hundreds of movies before it as their own idea. And not being third-wall about horror is so…Scream.
Wait, you didn’t see Scream?
The Take
-$4.00