<Review by: Sailesh Ghelani>

Directed by David Gordon Green. Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Nick Castle, Andi Matichak, Virginia Gardner, Will Patton, Miles Robbins, Toby Huss

Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes

A direct sequel to the 1978 movie Halloween, this one seems like its stuck in the past and doesn’t really tell you anything new. Also, it’s only mildly scary.

A character in Halloween actually makes a statement along the lines of, “He was a guy with a knife and he stabbed five people, by today’s standards, that’s not really the worst thing you’ve heard.” And he is so right. Today, stabbings take place every month in countless European cities and it’s yesterday’s news.

After 40 years locked up in a loony prison, Michael Myers (Nick Castle/ James Jude Courtney) manages to escape, answering the prayers of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) who wants revenge on the ‘evil man’ that terrorised her four decades ago. She’s been preparing for this all her life, even teaching her daughter (Judy Greer) survival tactics until she’s taken away from her by social services.

Now, one would think that for 40 years, Laurie would have seen to it that her front door to the rickety old house in the middle of nowhere would at least not have glass panels on it! It has 20 different bolts and a piece of wood across it to lock it, but the pretty stained glass panels are still there. Doesn’t make sense. One would think she’d get a more modern place that had a panic room but she’d rather stay in a house full of creaking floorboards away from any kind of help.

Anyway, so this guy’s so old now they don’t show his face until he puts the mask on. And since the actor is so old, they have a stuntman perform all the other stuff while the mask is on. There are some relatively hideous random kills that he undertakes. Actually, most of it is random. If he single-mindedly were after Laurie, that would be menacing. But he’s just walking about town, killing everyone. I guess he didn’t have Google or something to get to her quicker. This attempt at trying to bring back the nostalgia of the time doesn’t really work here. It seems forced and at odds with the fact that it’s 40 years from the ‘good ol days’.

The only scary part of this is the invincibility of Michael Myers; the fact that he reanimates every time he’s shot or stabbed or run over. But how do you kill him then? That’s never really explained or tackled in the movie. One would think they’d realise he’s just not dying. So why are they sure he’s dead or that they can kill him by regular means? I don’t know, I don’t really care. Lots of scary movies with killers in masks wielding knives have been made over the last decades. They’ve had better characters, better stories and frankly better actors than the ones in this film.