Halloween Is a 'Killer of a Movie' Thanks to Curtis

She's 'moving' in her return as Laurie Strode
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 19, 2018 9:39 AM CDT

Four decades after she first encountered Michael Myers, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) meets the killer for what is said to be the final time in David Gordon Green's Halloween, a follow-up to John Carpenter's 1978 horror classic that overrides all the other sequels that have come before. According to critics, it's worth the fright.

  • "Halloween, the 2018 version, is the B-movie sequel Halloween, the 1978 version, has always deserved," writes Richard Roeper at the Chicago Sun-Times. "It's one ruthlessly efficient killer of a movie." Actors Nick Castle, Judy Greer, and Will Patton earn his praise, while Curtis is "badass terrific," to boot, he writes.
  • Though the film "may not accomplish everything it sets out to do," Monica Castillo appreciated that it embraced trauma and survivor's guilt as an "explicit subject" as opposed to ignoring such real-life struggles. Aiding this story line, Curtis delivers a "moving" performance, her character's instability "palpable," Castillo writes at NPR.

  • Rex Reed was not impressed. Green "is not an imaginative director, so the result is a disappointing collection of the usual familiar cliches," he writes at the Observer. "There are a few gory scares" but the film is missing "any new ideas or fresh suspense," he adds. "It just lays there, like leftover pumpkin."
  • Green's "best tricks are borrowed from Carpenter," but the director jets out on his own for an "excellent final act," in David Sims' view at the Atlantic. "This is a revenge tale for each character, and once Green starts telling it from both sides, the film sings with purpose," he writes, also applauding "fantastic work" from Curtis.
Prefer movies that are scary bad? Browse this list. (More movie review stories.)

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