Halloween (2018)

"Better than nearly all the others"

The exception being John Carpenter's 1978 original (of course). David Gordon Green's sequel (and the third film now to boast that title) gets a disc release from Universal.

Oh yes, it's time to forget all about the antics of HALLOWEEN II (1981) and HALLOWEENs IV, V, VI, H20 and VIII and ignore those Rob Zombie remakes (which most people have already been doing for years anyway). HALLOWEEN 2018 is a direct follow-on from the events that finished with Dr Sam Loomis looking both pensive and fed up that Michael Myers had somehow eluded him despite falling off a balcony after taking enough damage to floor The Rock.

It turns out they did catch Mr Myers, though, and now, forty years later, he's still banged up in the best asylum for the criminally insane this side of a 1970s Italian giallo. And in true daft giallo style two reporters turn up, get permission to speak to him and wave his old mask in his face (an endorsement of the long lasting quality of the Don Post Studios product if nothing else). 

Michael is being transferred and the powers that be have deemed that the safest and most sensible date to stick him on a bus with a bunch of other patients is Halloween. The bus crashes and Michael is free. By the delicious coincidences of this kind of film he finds the very car with the very boot that has his very old mask in it, bumps a few people off after acquiring a nifty new boiler suit and then it's hi-ho for his old stomping ground!

Meanwhile, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), instead of being chased through a hospital, getting a job as a teacher at a private school and other things that were in the sequels that no longer exist in this timeline, has instead been turning herself into a poster girl for Guns 'n' Even Bigger Guns magazine in preparation for Michael's inevitable return. Will the two meet in a climactic face-off? 

HALLOWEEN 2018 isn't at all bad, and HALLOWEEN fans know bad if they've stuck with all those sequels. It's not up to Carpenter's original but then what is? Rather than emulate the prowling sense of threat of the 1978 film, director Green's approach swings from the melodramatic (that great opening) through the suspenseful (the sequence in the toilets, for example) while imbuing the picture with a sense of gloom and melancholy that's entirely appropriate. HALLOWEEN 2018 was never going to be HALLOWEEN 1978 and that's exactly the way it should be.

Universal's disc comes with 30 minutes of featurettes, including a piece on the composition of the film's score with John Carpenter, his son Cody and Daniel Davies. There's also a short making of, a piece on Jamie Lee Curtis, the Journey of the Mask & the Legacy of Halloween. Finally you get eight deleted or extended scenes. 

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment are releasing David Gordon Green's HALLOWEEN on digital on Monday 11th February 2019 DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD on Monday 25th February 2019