I watched this film as I am preparing to shoot a short horror and I was looking for inspiration. Though my film is B quality and intentionally funny at times, I was still looking for ways to bring more horror elements to the film. Since I dont watch slasher films, Halloween is probably the only one I have seen, I didn't really know what to except. To cut the story short, I was a little disappointed in Halloween and Im starting to think slasher films are just not my cup of tea.
The opening is quite good a long shot from Micheal Myers POV as he sneaks into his sister (babysitters) room (after she has her way with her boyfriend) and stabs her (to death?). See this is where one of the problems arises, and there is a chance my friend and I just talked through the explaination (while making fun of the girls in the film, more on this later), but I was never sure who got stabbed at the start. It appeared to be Micheals babysitter, and it kinda seemed like she died (trying to think back to the body count listed on IMDB, I believe it implies she died), but then I didnt get the connection to the Babysitters Micheal Myers is after for the rest of the film. I guess he just has a thing for killing babysitters (John Carpenter specificaly wanted the audience to be unable to connect on any level with Micheal so we cant really know this). For a while I thought that Micheal Myers was back to kill his babysitter (based on the confusing tagline on the back of the DVD case saying something about Myers coming back to kill his babysitter again or maybe because I believe that is the plot of the Rob Zombie remake). But it seems that, that wasnt the case, he just simply picked out a group of 3 teenage girls to kill at random.
For a lot of the film (what appeared to be too large a portion) the film follows these three girls who for some reason are all stuck babysitting on Halloween night for a bunch of parents that I guess the budget couldnt afford us to see. In fact, the budget also couldnt allow for more than about 3 kids to ever be seen trick or treating showing that Halloween in this small town is quite lame. So anyway as I said, my friend and I laughed through quite a bit of this as the girls in true horror movie fashion talked about how they were going to hook up with their boyfriends while babysitting (as they never talked about anything but boys), and in one great incident one of the girls spills something on her clothes and I though it may appear she just had a little spill, she strips down to her underwear, just to be safe (by the way the kid she is babysitting is in the other room comatose as ever watching a movie). So this girl then runs around with an oversized shirt (I forget where she found that) and her underwear for a while.
Throughout most of this interlude with the girls Myers is in the background, drifting in an out, the girls catch sight of him standing ominously in the shadows, then he disappears. It is pretty creepy and well done, though it did seem like Myers was doing more standing around then anything else. I mean at one point you see him standing outside a window looking in at this girl, and then he just walks away, and like 15 - 20 minutes later he comes back for her. I guess he is planning out his actions but come on, I wanted to see this guy gut people with a knife, way does he just stand there all the time?
When Myers does start his attack is it creepy, scary and entertaining, exactly what the audience is looking for, so for that reason this movie does well.
**SPOILERS**
However... now this might be because I dont watch slasher movies (as it seems that this is a common occurance), but why wont Micheal Myers die? Nothing in the film leads the viewer to believe he is anything more than some deeply psychotic man, but psychos were not bullet proof last I checked. Alright so as Myers is trying to finish off the last of the girls, he runs into some problems as she has a bit more of a fight to her. Myers takes a sewing needle to the throat and goes down, all is good... but wait here he comes again, so the struggle continues and Myers gets stabbed (in the chest I think) and goes down again. But this is still childs play apparently because he just gets up like nothing happened. Then the calvery arrive and Myers appears to take a bullet to the head and stubbles into the bedroom, guess it wasnt in the head because when they walk into the bedroom he is standing there like nothing happened. So he gets shot 4 more times, cashes through the bedroom window and falls 2 stories onto the front lawn. At this point I turned to my friend and said, "If Myers isn't lying on the danm ground when they look out that window, I am going to be pissed." You can probably guess how I felt.
