Nice one Centurion.

It's been quite the year; without wishing to sound like a braggard, we hit some milestones in 2018; first post to break 300 views, 10,000 total views and today two more. It's not exactly to the the day, but Anger in a Man Suit has all but made it to the ripe old age of two years old and this post represents the Centurion status I fell agonisingly short of in my American Football career thanks to a pair of partially torn tendons and a broken thumb. And a bum knee. And shitty lungs. OK, a whole host of things, lets not get carried away. The important thing is that this post is post 100. I haven't had a chance to count exactly, but that's somewhere in the region of 110,000 bile-drenched words spat forth in the name of entertainment. I'm not going to make a big deal out of it, but it's been a pleasure, thanks for sticking with it.

On to the business at hand.

It is, for all intents and purposes Halloween once more and following on from the sheer an utter disappointment that was 10 hours of the Family Therapy at Hill House it seems appropriate to get some actual proper horror on the go. Sadly, Mandy having a limited theatrical release means I'm not watching that till Friday (even though it randomly appeared on DVD today, goddammit!) so you're just going to have to wait to see just how absolutely bat shit insane it really is. With the Saw franchise actually finally dying a pointlessly elaborate death at the hands of a series of kitchen utensils gaffer-taped to power drills (or whatever), what better to do than go and find out if after all these years somebody actually managed to make a Halloween sequel worth watching. There's good news and bad news. Predominantly good news though in fairness.

First things first, forget everything from Halloween 2 onwards; literally everything, including Halloween 3 which didn't even have Michael Myers in it, the very 90s, self-referential H20 and both the controversial Rob Zombie efforts is slung remorsely into the bin marked "non-canon" with barely even a second thought. Ret-conning this ferocious hasn't been seen outside of the Star Wars franchise, but I reckon it's going to get much more frequent from here on out.

Halloween (2018) is an interesting movie. It's very much a product of its time; it's all too aware that audiences are much more savvy and less forgiving than they used to be. We know the tropes, we know the beats, we know the stereotypes so smart film makers have to use that knowledge against us. So it is with Halloween; this is a sequel, reboot and oddly almost a remake rolled into one. We catapult forward 40 years to a world where Laurie Strode has not really fared too well following her admittedly traumatic adventures in babysitting and is more Sarah Connor than screeching victim because while Micheal Myers is still locked up and pushing 65, he's still every bit the terror he was in the seventies, despite developing a bald spot (presumably from all that mask-wearing). The set-up is a little bit contrived: two very British podcast journalists rock up to the asylum having somehow acquired one very battered and now iconic William Shatner mask in the wildly optimistic hopes that it will inspire Myers to utter his first words in four decades. Because of course it would. Fortunately it isn't long before the inmate transfer bus crashes spilling it's criminally insane contents all over the road and the body count starts racking up as Michael heads home to terrorise the youngest generation of the Family Strode.

The reason it's interesting is because it's clear from the start that the intent is to turn everything you think you know about scary movies on its head, but it also takes most of its beats from the original. It isn't quite shot for shot, like Psycho or shot from the same script (and the Oscar for Most Pointless Piece of Cinematic Idiocy goes to...) Cabin Fever from a couple of years back, but it is really, really close. There's a nice shot of Laurie through the school classroom window, mimicking The Shape and foreshadowing the ominous events to come. There are of course, obligatory over the shoulder shots, obscure "hide Michael's face behind a plant pot" type shots and some decent murdering along the way. The whole thing is handled very respectfully and when all's said and done it was a decent watch. They succeed where Rob Zombie failed in making Myers more human without dragging his back story out over what felt like eight weeks or lessening his impact as the bogeyman. There's a twist in the tale which I won't spoil, but the inevitable final showdown is super tense and actually not as inevitable as you might have thought, which is not such a bad thing. However...

There's a couple of bits which don't quite add up. I'm not wholly convinced a 65 year old who's been incarcerated in solitary for 40 is going to retain the sort of musculature that allows him to stomp a guys head into a splatty mess. I'm also not entirely sure why Myers ignores a clear opportunity to murder the ever living shit out of Strode Jr when he's not hesitated in a similar situation earlier on. I'm not sure why the new Loomis as he's called with a massive nudge and wink makes that one particular decision other than to get out of a bit of a script hole. I'm also not entirely sure why they made the very good decision to keep John Carpenter's score, but then modernise it by using the whole Retro New Wave sound which is all just a pastiche of the type of music originated in the late seventies/eighties. This isn't Deadpool, you can't go that meta. Leave the fourth wall as it is.

Overall, there isn't a lot wrong with Halloween and not much to grumble about. My biggest concern is now whether they intend to spin it out into another raft of dumb sequels which given the fairly terminal feel to the ending of this movie might be a stretch too far, even for Michael.