Halloween Films - Ranked

Rob Zombie took the Halloween franchise to pretentious and insane ways with his sequel to his remake. I absolutely hated it and I still can't wrap my head around why people let this happen.

This film is so out of touch with everything that it's amazing to think that actual humans put it together. Screw this.

It's just an absolute mess. There's nothing in it that feels remotely cohesive, and it's like they shot several different films at once, and somehow they all got mixed together. It doesn't make any sense at all. I've read that most of the cast and crew behind this film have disowned it and I can totally understand why.

Jamie Lee Curtis. God bless her heart. She's actually giving a solid performance in this film and you can see that she's desperately trying to brink some sort of gravitas and dignity to this film. Unfortunately the same amount of effort haven't been put anywhere else in this film, as it is just boring garbage.

It's mostly just boring. A decent moment here and there, but lacking something to fill the time between those moments. It's also quite possibly the dumbest film in the franchise, which is saying something.

After the failure that was Halloween III: Season of the Witch it was only natural that the studio would attempt to bring Michael Myers back. It brings the franchise back into safe and familiar territories. It's slightly fun for what it is. The cast is disposable of course, but none of them are excruciatingly annoying. The film is dumb as fuck and there are a couple of laugh-out-loud moments due to the silliness of it. It's sloppy filmmaking, but it makes for a somewhat amusing watch.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch is something of an oddity. Being the only film in the Halloween franchise not to revolve around Michael Myers, the producers attempted to take the series in a new direction. Obviously, that's not what people wanted and directly because of the lack of Michael Myers, this film has been massively hated and overlooked. Which is slightly undeserved, in my opinion.

It's not a particularly good film, by any means. For that it's too slow, irritating and slightly monotonous in its rhythm. But it got a lot of clever ideas in it for a horror film. There's a death scene towards the end that is genuinely thrilling and creative. The film does have a lot of unfulfilled potential and I would have loved to see this premise in the hands of a director with a proper grasp on the horror genre.

It's a natural continuation from John Carpenter's Halloween in that it takes place immediately after the ending of Halloween, yet it feels so far away from what Carpenter's Halloween was. It lacks the atmosphere and suspense that made the original so terrifying. It also fails to properly characterize the disposable characters that Michael Myers will kill. In its predecessor the characters felt legitimately annoying and real, this time they just feel like blank slates. The kills themselves are mostly uninspired, Jaime Lee Curtis spend most of the film in bed in a suprisingly empty hospital and Donald Pleasence is insane. It's a big drop in quality for sure.

Rob Zombie's remake of HALLOWEEN is a strange beast with two halves that seems to work against each other. The first half being a slow psychological study of Michael Myers and how he became what he is. It's an attempt to humanize and make us potentially sympathize with him. Then the second half is more-or-less a pure remake of the original with some added blood and carnage to the mix. I can appreciate that Zombie tried to put his own spin on this material. If you're going to do a remake, that's the way to go. I do not necessarily agree with the choice, as I think it completely goes away from what Michael Myers is supposed to be, which is just pure evil. No motivation. No understanding. He's just evil. So when Zombie tries to get behind the mask during the first half, it feels wrong on the basic of the character really is. It's the wrong character to do this with.

But whatever. Zombie did try to make him more than just a killing machine, which is why I feel that the second half of the film slightly goes against everything that was set up during the first half. Because then he is just a monster again. There's not really anything from the first half that seems to have carried on and it feels more like a waste of time than anything else. What's the point of trying to explain why Michael Myers turned out as he did, if that's not going to carry through the entire film?

So I feel like the entire film is slightly misguided from the get-go. However, I can still enjoy huge chunks of it. While the second half doesn't come anywhere to close to matching the atmospheric suspense, horror and precision of John Carpenter's original, Rob Zombie's remake works well-enough as a simple slasher with no shortage of gore and nudity. Which is fine enough sometimes.

Aside from a rather silly twist that mostly only serves the function of moving a certain character from one location to another, Halloween is a wonderful horror film. Completely ignoring everything after John Carpenter's original film, this new entry makes Michael Myers a lot more brutal. He's the evil force of nature that he should be. Aimlessly walking around the streets of Haddonfield and brutally killing random people in their homes. After some slightly silly entries in this franchise, it's great to see Michael Myers being scary again. The suspense is top-notch, the scares work and the score from Carpenter is brilliant. It also delivers some clever nods to the original and it reverses some of the beats from the original in a neat way. I had a blast with this film.

There's a saying in filmmaking that quite often "less is more". John Carpenter's Halloween embodies that rule to perfection. It might not necessarily scare today's audiences in the same way that some other films might do, but Halloween manages to capture a sense of dread and terror that few films are unable to do. It's a film that understands how important it is to build suspense and atmosphere. The scenes with Michael Myers just lurking around to Carpenter's iconic score are masterfully made. Yet, Carpenter also knows that you have to unleash that suspense into actual horror, which he does with a couple of well-made kill and chase scenes.

There are however a few things that bothers me. I don't understand why they felt the need to show Myers face. I think some of the kid acting is on the edge of being unbearable. I think the final few minutes are somewhat anticlimactic. Yet, this is a classic and a horror masterpiece.