My first issue with this new iteration of the Michael Myers saga is its title.  Really?  Couldn’t’ they have made it something different, seeing as it ignores all the other Myers stories except for the first one?  Naming it simply Halloween will simply confuse it forever with the 1978 original (and the 2007 remake).  My second issue is the body count.  In 1978, Michael Myers’ rampage costs five characters their lives.  This year, he kills 18 or 19 people, many of them completely at random.  The 1978 murders were (comparatively) thoughtful and artistic; this movie’s murders are, by contrast, mindless and grotesque.  Perhaps that is a reflection of how horror has changed through the years.

David Gordon Green’s film takes up forty years after the events of the first film in Haddonfield, Illinois.  Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is considered crazy, still waiting for her own personal nightmare to visit again.  Even her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) is fed up with the survivalist drama.  But Laurie knows that the Shape will escape, and return for her.  It does.

Aside from the surprising mindlessness of much of the violence — Michael uses knives, hammers, whatever is at hand, even killing children who cross his path — I was disappointed by how stupid the characters are under duress.  Cops don’t question when their own colleagues fail to respond; Laurie’s grand-daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) gets lost in the woods running from Michael; the two reporters fail to note Michael killing people at the very gas station where they are filling up.  I had thought that with so much prep time and a legacy of bad movies to overcome that this new version would be clever and smart.  Sometimes it is, but not nearly enough.

The Shape is an enduring persona in American cinema, introduced in a spectacular John Carpenter horror film four decades ago.  His mute, inexpressive countenance, covered by a rubber mask, as he holds a deadly butcher’s knife, is an indelible image.  He is nightmare come to life (especially after he disappears at the end of the first film).  But nothing since then has been worthy of that first film.  And that includes this new adventure, which is light on suspense and heavy on bone-crushing violence.  They’ve got the recipe for a good story backwards.  Again.  ☆ ☆.  22 November 2018.