Hi, I'm fairly new to Ciao, and hope that I can be of help. I aim to be as honest as i can be, and ...
Hi, I'm fairly new to Ciao, and hope that I can be of help. I aim to be as honest as i can be, and to write something that might be somewhat informative beyond simple "I Like / I Hate". I post on dooyoo.co.uk also.
Member since:20.08.2008
Reviews:27
Members who trust:1
Halloween is one of my favourite times of the year, mostly on account of a lifelong love of horror cinema. Each year, I'll go out of my way to amass a selection of films about me, some of which I'll have seen - for one must be sure of being scared somewhere along the line, and that certainty is not always there with new acquisitions - and some of which will be new to me.
In this spirit, I'm going to be posting a series of reviews of pictures you might want to check out for the same reason, pictures that are, in my opinion, fairly certain to set the nerves a-jangling of an hour or two come the 31st.
First up, the ultimate Halloween picture - John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween.
Halloween's plot, basically, boils down to this - Man escapes from mental hospital, picks up a blank, white face-mask (a William Shatner mask turned inside-out, as it happens), returns to the town where he
was raised and sets about slaughtering various teenagers who, with their sex and their drinking and their carrying-on, remind him, one assumes, of his own sister, whom he kills in the films opening prologue.
The bulk of the narrative concerns his sustained terrorisation of Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode, whilst Dr Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) tries desperately to track down the killer before it's too late.
It's difficult now, perhaps, to appreciate just how important Carpenter's film is not just to American horror cinema, but to American cinema in general. Certainly, since at least Psycho, there have been films that have followed the same basic template (and both The Toolbox Murders and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre pre-date Halloween), but Halloween assembled those elements in a manner rarely encountered hitherto.
Its small-town suburban setting sets it up as a child of the sci-fi horror pictures of the 1950's and 1960's, with which it has more in common than it does with the bleak, gritty horrors of the 1970s. It shares little with, for example, Wes Craven's near-contemporaneous The Hills Have Eyes or Last House On The Left. Closer ties might be found with the likes of Don Siegel's 1956 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers - suburban America under threat from the unstoppable evil it has inadvertently birthed.
As with the myriad of slasher films that followed in its wake, accusations of any reactionary, right-wing agenda that might be at work here are difficult to ignore. What better way to scare the nation's youth from their rock n' roll and their alcohol and their drugs, from their sexuality, from their personalities, than by suggesting one slip of a bra-strap leads to a blade in the back?
To counter that, though, one can consider also the slight satirical edge to proceedings - this is the perfect American town after all. And yet, something is very wrong. It's not quite as pure as we might be led to believe (although that idea could just as easily bring it under the Right Wing Agenda! radar anew...).
Plus, there is the fact that Michael Myers, the masked maniac, is pure evil, and the film never treats him as anything less (not a very progressive notion, admittedly). He is a conglomeration of all the forces of oppression, all the noxious elements playing on the nation's youth, keeping them from finding themselves, from finding each other.
Plenty meat on the bone, in other words, whatever way you approach it, and that's without mentioning how scary the damn thing is.
Certain scenes in Halloween will, I dare say, hang around in the mind for as long as I'm fit to remember anything. The ghostly face of Myers rising out the black of a darkened back-seat is one such moment. Much of this has to do with John Carpenter's oft-praised use of widescreen photography. No inch of screen-space is wasted. Myers haunts the furthest edges of the frame, appearing by this or that hedgerow or gatepost, stalking the periphery of the image. Needless to say - it's a Widescreen purchase. Avoid any panned and scanned variants like the plague.
Halloween has been issued on DVD more times than just about any other film I can think of, and the most recent 25th anniversary 2-disc set (or 3, I believe, if you pick it up from HMV), is the best one to go for, complete as it is with an array of deleted scenes, documentaries and what not else.
A final word on Rob Zombie's remake - Just don't. At least not until you've seen this. About twenty times.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Production Year: 1998 - Horror - Director: Steve Miner - Original Language: English - Classification: 18 years and over - Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Michelle Williams, Adam Arkin, Adam Hann-Byrd, Janet Leigh, L.L. Cool J.
Production Year: 1980 - Horror - Director: Paul Lynch - Original Language: English - Classification: 18 years and over - Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Leslie Nielsen, Casey Stevens, Anne-Marie Martin, Antoinette Bower
Excellent review of the film and I'm sorry for the H, but for this to be a full DVD review, I would prefer to see a review of the extras in the same detail as your review of the film, not just a passing mention of them.
The Night He Came Home Perhaps the most influential and successful independent film ever ... more
made Halloween is the movie that put director John Carpenter on the map as a viable filmmaker. An exercise in simple pure horror Halloween takes us into the wo...
Postage & Packaging: £0.00 Availability: 3-5 working days
Advantages: Score, FX, Acting, Not A Straight-forward Re-Make... Disadvantages: Acting, Repetitive Obscenities, It Will Always Remain Inferior To The Original...
iGayParis 29.04.2008 (29.04.2008)
·
Read review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Halloween (DVD)
![Halloween [1978] [DVD]](http://picnica.ciao.com/uk/78486290.jpg "Halloween [1978] [DVD]")
Oct 17th, 2008
very helpful by (89%):
helpful by (11%):
