Category: Halloween

  • Halloween (2007, Rob Zombie)

    Halloween is very loud. It’s about the only thing director Zombie keeps consistent throughout. It gets loud. It starts kind of quiet–comparatively–then gets loud. Jump scares always have some noise. But once the jump scares are every two seconds, there’s just loud noise. Giant spree killer Tyler Mane destroys a house in the third act,…

  • Halloween (2018, David Gordon Green)

    Halloween never met a MacGuffin it didn’t embrace. Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride, and director Gordon’s script strings together MacGuffins to make the plot. And if it’s not a MacGuffin, it’s something they’re not going to do anything with. With a handful of exceptions, Halloween is usually at least reasonably acted. Sure, everyone lives in a…

  • Halloween (2007, Rob Zombie), the director’s cut

    Halloween is a very bad film. It’s an ambitious film but it fails with everything it’s trying to do. Director Zombie wants to do a revisionist look at the original film (and franchise to some extent). He wants to make it real. He wants to write long monologues for Malcolm McDowell’s psychiatrist, long, ridiculous monologues.…

  • Halloween (1978, John Carpenter), the television version

    The television version of Halloween has an interesting story–the original film ran so short, when the network wanted to run it on TV, there wasn’t enough film after they cut out the violence. Carpenter was producing Halloween II at the time so he came back and filmed some more scenes to pad it out. Most…

  • Halloween: 30 Years of Terror–more specifically, writer Stefan Hutchinson–is going to make me make avery bad pun. It’s not 30 Years of Terror, it’s thirty pages of terrible. I’ll get the art out of the way. Danijel Zezelj is excellent, Jim Daly’s medicare, Brett Weldele’s good, Jeffrey Zornow and Lee Ferguson are medicore, Tim Seeley’s…

  • Halloween (1978, John Carpenter)

    Halloween is a technical masterpiece. It’s absolutely spectacular to watch. Carpenter’s composition is fantastic, but Dean Cundey’s cinematography and the editing–from Tommy Lee Wallace and Charles Bornstein–creates this uneasy, surreal experience. The way Carpenter uses the wind in the film is probably my favorite, since he establishes it early on and keeps it going until…