Movie Review - Halloween
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1978 / 101 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz
The movie begins with a chilling scene. A young woman is screwing her boyfriend when she really should be babysitting her little brother. Suddenly, an unseen man in a mask stalks her and her boyfriend. He walks around the house, picks up a knife, and finds them. The boyfriend, uh, comes a little early and then leaves. The young woman angrily puts on her shirt…and is then stabbed by a maniac, from that maniac’s masked point of view. The maniac walks downstairs, holding the bloody knife…just as his parents get home and pull off his mask to reveal…a seven-year-old boy.
Now that I have your attention, let me add that this is the creepiest moment of the entire movie. In fact, I feel bad for revealing it to you. I’m sorry. If you see me on the street you can punch me in the gut. But I just name that off so that I can warn you, as creepy as that is, there really isn’t much that achieves that level of fright throughout the course of this movie.
The movie then cuts to about ten years or so later, you see, and we follow several young women as they smoke pot and babysit and drive around town. One of them is the very young, and very beautiful, Jamie Lee Curtis. She is our protaganist. Anyone who has even looked at the back of the “Halloween” box knows that much. She’s pretty and she’s smart and she seems to care about the little kids she is babysitting.
And then the young boy from the beginning of the movie (Michael Myers, as if you didn’t know already) escapes from a mental institution in the middle of a rainstorm and everything goes straight to hell. He comes back to his home town on the anniversary of his slaying, hoping to kill off a few more inattentive babysitters. After all, everyone has to have a hobby. Donald Pleasance plays Dr. Loomis, the fearless doctor who either wants to get Mike back and rehabilitate him, or just pump a couple rounds into him and be done with it.
Naturally, Jamie Lee and Mike Myers (not Austin Powers, you idiot, but, well, now that would be pretty scary too, judging from the shitheap that was “Austin Powers 2″) cross paths. Horny babysitters, high on weed and too dumb to realize that they should be running out of the house, start dying left and right. Pretty standard, really. Sure, this is the movie that started the whole slasher movie trend, and it was trend-setting, to be sure, but that doesn’t make the stupid situations that these people get into any better. It doesn’t make the scene where Jamie Lee bangs on the door of a house to be let in and escape the killer (only to have the old lady inside turn out the lights and forget she ever saw Jamie) any less unconvincing and stupid. And it doesn’t make a person groan any less when the killer who is supposed to be dead pops up again and again and etc.
It may have started these horror movie conventions, but that doesn’t make those conventions look any fresher here than they do in a movie like “Nightmare on Elm Street” sequel. The only reason I rate it as highly as I do is that Jamie Lee is a pretty decent actress and because it creates an air of genuine eerieness with use of spare, haunting music, creepy fog effects, and a creepy mask for the killer. But it’s still no “Exorcist”.
Incidentally, trivia has it that the killer’s eerie mask is nothing more than a William Shatner mask painted white. Now that IS scary.
