Joy Ride (2001)

Way back in 1971, a then-unknown Steven Spielberg made a TV-movie called Duel. The tale of a sadistic trucker hunting a man on a cross-country road trip, it became a cult classic (at least among my circle of friends in college) and was one of the more well-known films in the unheralded "automotive vengeance" genre. In 2001, another film came along bearing a strong resemblance to Duel, titled Joy Ride.

Our story starts with Lewis Thomas (Paul Walker), who's about to get out of college for summer break. He begins a journey across the country to his New Jersey home, stopping to bail his brother Fuller (Steve Zahn) out of jail. Fuller decides to accompany his brother home, and the two hit the road. During a random pit stop, Fuller gets a mechanic to install a CB radio on the car, and the two start messing around, joking with truckers over the radio. They proceed to play a practical joke on a trucker calling himself "Rusty Nail" (the voice of Ted Levine), pretending that Lewis is a woman named "Candy Cane."

Lewis talks Rusty Nail into meeting the non-existent Candy Cane at a roadside motel, telling him that Candy Cane will be waiting in a particular room (one occupied by a man who picked a fight with Fuller in the motel lobby). Rusty Nail eventually arrives at the room, but lacking a sense of humor, Rusty Nail proceeds to brutally murder the man.

Lewis and Fuller flee the next morning, only to be continually taunted by Rusty Nail's voice over the radio and on the highway. The duo encounters their foe at a gas station, and he proceeds to chase them into the woods, almost destroying their car in the process. When they hastily apologize, Rusty Nail backs off, seemingly forgiving them. Stopping only to pick up Lewis's long-distance girlfriend Venna (Leelee Sobieski), they soon discover that Rusty Nail is still watching them, never letting them get a moment's rest. The demented trucker follows them across the country, playing his own sick joke on the trio.

Having never seen Duel, I can't really compare it to Joy Ride, but I will say that Joy Ride is a better film than you'd think. It's got good acting, fun dialogue (thanks to a well-written script by Clay Tarver and J.J. Abrams), and plenty of scares. As one would suspect, most of the movie takes place in the trio's car, and the interaction between Walker, Zahn, and Sobieski is very entertaining, to say the least. All three put on fantastic performances. Even when things take a turn for the worst, they do a great job in making you feel bad for them, even if its their fault that Rusty Nail is after them.

And one also feels sorry for Rusty Nail, who was the butt of a joke and now wants retribution. Just hearing Ted Levine's voice is enough to make you simultaneously pity and fear him, and I think that makes him come across as a more intimidating villain because he's got nothing to lose. I also commend John Dahl's direction and Jeffrey Juhr's cinematography, as the movie is visually great, with many great camera angles and colors highlighting and downplaying the action onscreen. Marco Beltrami's score is also astounding, lending a haunting "bump in the night" feel to the movie that is much welcomed.

Overall, I'm gonna give Joy Ride three stars. Despite a lackluster, almost unsatisfactory ending, and a weird "been there, done that" feeling, I recommend the movie. It's not perfect, but it's got enough to make it a great thriller. Plenty of fun car chases, good cheap scares, well done action scenes, and good acting puts Joy Ride on my list of movies that would make a fine rental from your local video store.

Final Rating: ***

Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003)

So you have a horror film that becomes an unexpected sleeper hit, but can't think of any way to do a sequel? Just set it a few days later and let 'er rip, of course. That's what Victor Salva's done with Jeepers Creepers 2.

We begin in a cornfield, with young Billy Taggart (Shaun Flemming) putting up scarecrows. Turns out one of them isn't what it appears to be; it's actually the demonic Creeper (Jonathan Breck). He snatches up the boy and flies into the sunset, with his father Jack (Ray Wise) and brother Jack Jr. (Luke Edwards). The next day, we meet a school bus on a road in the middle of nowhere. Get used to seeing the bus, because a good 90 percent of the movie takes place in and around it.

We discover that it's four days after the events of the original Jeepers Creepers, and it's the final day of the Creeper's 23-day feeding frenzy. If you'll remember the detail from the prior movie, the Creeper gets to eat for 23 days following a 23-year hibernation. Why he has to follow such a strict schedule, I have no clue. One would assume a flesh-eating monster from the bowels of Hell would have a little bit more in his itinerary. He only gets out for a month every two decades, so you'd think he'd wanna see the sights between meals.

Anyway, the bus is loaded with a bunch of teenagers returning home from a victory in the state's championship basketball games. We're introduced to some of our stereotypical main characters, which include Scott (Eric Nenninger), the racist; Deaundre (Garikayi Mutambirwa), the token black guy; Bucky (Billy Aaron Brown), the geek; Izzy (Travis Schiffner), who may or may not be a closeted homosexual; and Minxie, the goody-two-shoes cheerleader (Nicki Aycox). The guys are celebrating their victory, when bam! A tire blows. The driver and the coaches get out to check out the problem, and discover a ninja throwing star made out of bone embedded in the wheel.

The driver decides to limp along the road, until bam! Another throwing star pops a tire. It's worth noting that these stars are some hardcore stuff. The first one had a tooth stuck in it; the second had the belly button of the Creeper's prey in the first movie (which is evidenced by the tattoo). So we've had bone throwing stars with body parts stuck in them. I wonder what the third one would be made out of. A nose? An eyeball, maybe? I don't know, but they're pretty cool weapons.

By this point, everybody decides that the bus isn't going anywhere. Their repeated cries for help over the CB radio go unanswered as the Creeper picks off random people on the bus, one by one. He starts with the driver and the coaches, then starts terrorizing the students. Pretend that you're an immortal demon with one day before you go into hibernation, and you've got a buffet of stupid, scared teenagers right there for the taking. You've got two options: A.) Climb on board and start eating, or B.) jam the door, make goo-goo eyes at them, and lick the windows. If you picked Option B, then congratulations! You too can star in a Jeepers Creepers sequel!

While the Creeper decides to freak out the kids by looking at them funny, Minxie starts having weird nightmares about Darry Jenner (Justin Long, reprising his role from the original Jeepers Creepers) warning them about the Creeper, and the two remaining Taggarts craft a giant harpoon gun out of some farm equipment before declaring hunting season on man-eating monsters with wings.

The rest of the movie flies by in an endless blur of empty scares. None of the characters on the bus are very redeeming at all, and some of them aren't even given names or introduced or anything. Why should I worry about them getting eaten when I don't give a damn about any of them? While I enjoyed the original Jeepers Creepers, the sequel just comes across as being a lot less. More characters means a bigger menu for the Creeper, but it also means that we don't get to know the characters as well as we did in the original. It's also too bad that Gina Phillips refused to come back for this one, because her character's strength was something that the characters lacked here. The only characters that I didn't want to see get eaten at one point or the other were the Taggarts.

On the subject of the Taggarts, the lack of screen time they got bugged me to no end. They're the ones that had the personal vendetta against the Creeper, yet we spend more time with the paper-thin losers on the bus than with them. If they're on a huge Ahab-esque quest, isn't that worth following? And what was the point of having sexually-confused characters and racial tension in the movie if they were barely gonna touch on that at all? Both subplots felt horrendously tacked on and unnecessary, and I just didn't get the purpose. It didn't bring anything to the movie at all.

What I also didn't like was the repetitive action sequences. Even though they started off being cool, they just started to seem like the same thing over and over. Why not spice things up a bit? Maybe let the Creeper go crazy with that huge battle-axe he had in the first movie. Another thing I seriously missed was the Creepermobile. That was one mean truck, but they just totally left it out here. It would have been cool to see the Creeper ram into the bus with his truck instead of swooping down on it a million times.

The movie isn't all bad, though. There's plenty of cool effects. The Creeper looks much more horrific and monstrous (not to mention slimy and disgusting) than in the prior movie, and there are some neat moments (such as the Creeper growing a new head after getting stabbed in the face with a javelin). Nicky Aycox and Ray Wise turn in watchable performances (which is more than I can say for the rest of the cast), and Jonathan Breck's portrayal of the Creeper, while not as menacing as in the prior movie, is really... well, creepy. I didn't wanna say "creepy," due to the obvious pun, but sometimes you just can't avoid things. I also liked Bennett Salvay's extremely tense score, which I found to be really similar (but in a good way) to his score for the first movie.

Overall, I found Jeepers Creepers 2 to be a disappointment. I liked the first Jeepers Creepers, but found this one to be lacking the depth of its predecessor. Sure, the first movie had its bad moments, but the sequel was just "blah" almost all the way through. That's why I'm going to give Jeepers Creepers 2 two stars. No more, no less. If there's ever a third Jeepers Creepers, maybe it won't be as big of a letdown as this one.

Final Rating: **

Ginger Snaps (2000)

How many really good werewolf movies can you name? You'd probably be able to count them on one hand and have fingers left over. At one time, I could only think of two: The Wolf Man and An American Werewolf in London. However, the pair became a trio when I saw Ginger Snaps, a little-known Canadian movie that's managed to find life in America as a modern cult film.

I'd heard about it through numerous favorable reviews I'd read online, but I'd never found the opportunity to see it. But the stars were in alignment while I was watching Cinemax during a late, sleepless night. I finally got a chance to see the film I'd been coveting, and all the good reviews in the world couldn't have prepared me for what I saw. What I watched one of the most wickedly entertaining horror movies I've ever seen. And dear readers, I've seen a lot of horror movies.

Mousy teenager Brigitte Fitzgerald (Emily Perkins) and her older sister Ginger (Katherine Isabelle) are a team. Obsessed with death and bound by a morbid childhood pact ("out by sixteen or dead in this scene, but together forever"), the pair of social misfits loathe their existence in the Canadian suburb of Bailey Downs. On the night of Ginger's first period, the duo wanders into the woods on the edge of town to pull a prank on an abusive classmate. Before they can arrive at their destination, Ginger is brutally mauled by a wild creature known as "The Beast of Bailey Downs."

Ginger survives as her horrible wounds miraculously heal, but something is different about her. She becomes irritable and denies that anything is wrong, but Brigitte sees something deep inside her sister has taken hold of her. The hair growing from Ginger's scars and the tail emerging from the base of her spine convinces Brigitte of only one thing: Ginger is becoming a werewolf. Driven by the insatiable bloodlust growing inside her, Ginger slowly transforms from a disdainful outsider to an aggressive, sex-crazed young woman on the prowl.

Afraid to tell anyone but desperate to save her sister from the lycanthropy overtaking her, Brigitte has no one to turn to but Sam (Kris Lemche), an amateur botanist and local drug dealer that accidentally ran over the Beast of Bailey Downs following Ginger's attack. They work together, searching for a way to save Ginger from the infection that threatens her sanity and strains the tightly forged bond between the two sisters.

Borrowing elements of the 1984 movie The Company of Wolves, Ginger Snaps serves notice that not only can werewolf movies be good, but that girls in horror movies can be much more than ditzy, big-breasted bimbos that serve only as fodder for a knife-wielding psychopath. The movie not only works as a horror movie, but it also works as a metaphor for a girl's entry into womanhood. It's got awkwardness, mood swings, physical changes, a need to be accepted, a hunger for sex. It's one of the very few "girl power" horror movies, of which there are a scant number.

See, I thought I'd have a hard time getting into the movie. I mean, why would I want to hear a graphic description of the menstrual cycle? Being a single male, I don't necessarily have to worry about that sort of thing, nor am I absolutely dying to know about it. I like to block that sort of thing out of my head whenever I can. But fortunately, the movie becomes much more than a feminist horror movie. It brings up many themes that I wouldn't expect a horror movie to tackle, like family loyalty, love, and loss. However, the movie is not without its imperfections. Having the lycanthropy virus be sexually transmitted gives us a subplot involving a character played by Jesse Moss. While it's not a bad idea in theory, it wasn't fleshed out enough to justify actually being there. It's like they just added it to make the movie longer.

Karen Walton's screenplay gives the characters a lot of depth, and the cast makes it seem real, though a little on the overstated side. Mimi Rogers is great as Ginger and Brigitte's clueless-yet-loving mother, and both Emily Perkins and Katherine Isabelle are absolutely wonderful as the pseudo-Goth sisters. Perkins and Isabelle are the movie's heart and soul, and without them, the movie wouldn't have the same emotional "oomph." Also superb are the outstanding makeup effects. When Ginger starts to transform, the facial makeup and fangs makes her look both sexy and scary, while the "Gingerwolf" in its full glory is quite a sight to behold. The understated, melancholy score by Michael Shields is excellent as well, especially once Ginger starts to lose her mind near the end of the movie. The quiet, subdued string instruments in the score work to make the movie much more sad and depressing.

Ginger Snaps is absolutely not a happy movie at all. If you're used to your horror movies having lots of comic relief or happy endings, you're not gonna get it with Ginger Snaps. The atmosphere is gloomy, most of the main characters aren't anybody you'd wanna hang out with, and the ending isn't very happy at all. If you enjoy commercial movies that substitute blood for brains, you might be let down. But after seeing it two or three times, it becomes obvious what the movie is: a very original and intelligent look at two teenage girls going through the hardest days of their lives... and one of them is a werewolf. If you're looking for a fun roller-coaster ride of a horror movie that wraps everything up with a cute little bow, Ginger Snaps is not for you. If you want something original with lots of brains, heart, and some scares and dark humor along the way, Ginger Snaps is definitely a movie you should check out.

Final Rating: ****½

The Thing (1982)

If you went to the movies in 1982, you probably heard of a little flick called E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. But around that same time, you might have overlooked another movie featuring an alien that's gone on to become a cult classic: John Carpenter's The Thing. A remake of the 1951 sci-fi movie The Thing From Another World (which itself was based on John W. Campbell's short story "Who Goes There?"), the movie was a box office failure, thanks to both the E.T. phenomenon and a series of unfortunately bad reviews. However, time has been kind to The Thing, as it has been hailed by fans of both the sci-fi and horror genres as an underrated classic.

Our film begins in the winter of 1982, in the middle of the frozen wasteland of Antarctica. Alone and cut off from the rest of the world, the lives of an American science expedition are interrupted by gunfire, coming from a group of Norwegians with cabin fever shooting at a dog. Unfortunately, none of the Americans have any idea what's going on, as the Norwegians accidentally blow up their helicopter and are shot dead by Garry (Donald Moffat), the station commander. The dog becomes friendly with Clark (Richard Masur), the group's animal handler, but strange things are afoot at the Circle K. (Hooray for Bill & Ted references!)

Confused, helicopter pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell) and Dr. Copper (Richard A. Sysart) decide to check out the Norwegian camp. With a snowstorm beginning to close in, MacReady and Cooper find the camp destroyed, everything apparently dead. They gather anything they can salvage, and head back to their home base. As the temperature begins to fall, the team is surprised by an unwanted visitor, as the Norwegians dog begins to mutate before finally being killed. A second expedition to the Norwegian camp reveals something similar to a flying saucer, buried under the ice for an estimated 100,000 years. The group determines that the dog was not of this world, and that their shape-shifting visitor has the ability to infect any living thing it comes into contact with. Paranoia rips through the station, as each man questions the actions of those around him. Who is human, and who is The Thing? And just who will survive?

The Thing is great, no bones about it. The first installment in what director Carpenter calls his "Apocalypse Trilogy" (the other two installments being 1987's Prince of Darkness and 1995's In the Mouth of Madness), The Thing is a study in contrasts. Long periods of unnerving silence are punctuated by brief flashes of grotesque horror. With The Thing, Carpenter shows exactly how to illicit primal terror from a viewer. He draws things out for what seems like forever, only to have all hell break loose for just a few moments before returning to that quiet suspense.

Personally, I found The Thing be just as good as its closest contemporary, the original Alien. (Your mileage may vary, of course.) Bill Lancaster's great screenplay is brilliantly humorless, making itself seem like the darkest dark humor ever, with the unexpected moments of violence, and the bickering scientists never managing to actually accomplish anything. The large ensemble cast are all great, with notable highlights coming from Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley (yes, that Wilford Brimley), and Keith David, and Ennio Morricone's minimalist score is reminiscent of many of Carpenter's scores in being bizarre, creepy, and very understated.

Rob Bottin's special effects also stand up and demand to be noticed. Simultaneously mesmerizing and disgusting, the practical effects hold up quite well in today's CGI-dependent Hollywood. They only appear a few times, but his gory creations are some of the film's most memorable moments. From a body opening up and biting off a doctor's arms, to a head ripping itself from its body before growing spider-like legs and running away, the gruesome effects are still repulsive and shocking, even by today's standards.

Even if the movie doesn't have much in the department of social commentary like other Carpenter movies (They Live, for example), it still works as an effectively scary movie. Great special effects, good actors, and several memorable moments abound, so I'll give The Thing a much-deserved four stars. If you get in the mood for an alien splatter movie or a great cult classic, I recommend The Thing; I think you'll enjoy it.

Final Rating: ****

Halloween (1978)

If you're both a fan of the horror genre and a self-professed "child of the '80s" like yours truly, then you probably remember the innumerable slasher films released during the decade of excess. From classics like the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises to lesser-known gems like April Fool's Day and Prom Night, it seems like there were hundreds of these flicks released during the '80s.

But while the "golden age of slashers" was kick-started by the original Friday the 13th in 1980, the sub-genre's basic formula was truly defined by John Carpenter's 1978 opus Halloween. Often credited as the father of all slasher movies, Halloween's legacy as one of the true genre classics has been tarnished somewhat by the seven inferior sequels that have followed it between 1981 and 2002. But no matter, because Halloween is a damn fine horror movie.

Our tale of terror takes us to the sleepy Illinois town of Haddonfield, circa Halloween 1978. A young man named Michael Myers (Nick Castle) has escaped from Smith's Grove Sanitarium, where he had been incarcerated for murdering his sister as a six-year-old. Returning to Haddonfield after spending fifteen years in Smith's Grove, he acquires a mask and set of knives from the local hardware store, before hunting down a quarry to satisfy his bloodlust.

He soon discovers the perfect prey in a trio of friends: socially awkward babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), horny cheerleader Lynda Vanderklok (P.J. Soles), and the equally horny smart-aleck tomboy Annie Brackett (Nancy Loomis). Hot on Michael's trail is his psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), who is the only one who understands how truly evil his patient is. Dr. Loomis seeks to prevent Michael's rampage, and with the help of the local sheriff (Charles Cyphers), he attempts to find and stop Michael before he can kill again.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not the biggest devotee of the Halloween franchise. It's not that I dislike the franchise or anything, but I'm just more of a Freddy and Jason person. However, I can appreciate a good movie when I see it, and Halloween is awesome. Moviegoers back in the '70s must have realized that too, because the movie racked up 47 million dollars and a spot as one of the highest-grossing independent films ever. Thanks to the movie's small budget, somewhere in the neighborhood of 325,000 dollars, Halloween is a minimalist affair. But this actually works in the movie's favor, allowing the crew to get a little more inventive with how the movie is made instead of relying upon special effects to handle it for them.

Director John Carpenter doesn't let the meager budget get in his way, as he manages to do a fantastic job. Take the film's prologue, for example. Carpenter opens the film with an amazing five-minute Steadicam sequence, actually three shots carefully edited together to create one long one. It serves as a long point-of-view shot, as we see through someone's mask-covered eyes as he enters sneaks into a house and hacks a young woman to death with a butcher knife, before running into the front yard and having the mask pulled off. The camera spins around to show us that the murderer is none other than a six-year-old boy in a clown costume. I thought it was a perfect opening scene, because it exemplifies the movie's entire attitude. You know something is going to happen, but you don't know how and you don't know when. You just know that when it does happen, somebody's gonna end up in a world of pain and we're gonna be privy to every second of it. The movie's concluding seconds are also show this, as we get a montage of all the important locations we've seen during the movie. These don't show where Michael could be, but where he has been. Michael was pretty much everywhere, like an evil that simply could not be escaped.

There are also two very excellent moments with Michael near the end of the movie. Both of them are simple, but both of them are truly frightening. In one, the Laurie character has discovered all of her friends dead, and in her hysteria, she begins sobbing with her back to an open door, the darkened room it leads to completely devoid of light. And ever so slowly, the lifeless features of Michael's mask slowly take form in the shadows behind Laurie, almost as if Michael was appearing out of thin air. We see, ten minutes after this, the second scene I'm referring to. Laurie believes she's gotten the better of Michael, quietly trying to catch her breath and compose herself in the camera's foreground. Michael lies motionless in the background for a few moments before quickly, unexpectedly sitting up and staring at Laurie with those black, soulless eyes. If Michael Myers were a shark, those two moments would be where they cued up the theme song from Jaws.

And on the topic of music, how about Carpenter's score? If one thing can be agreed upon in regards to Halloween, it's that the music composed by Carpenter (who listed the fictitious Bowling Green Philharmonic Orchestra in the credits as the music's "performers") is one of the movie's strongest assets. Using only a piano and a synthesizer, Carpenter has created the genre's most iconic, enduring scores. The music is just as simplistic as the rest of the movie, but it is nothing short of haunting, taking what would be mundane scenes and making them terrifying. Seriously, the movie would only be half as scary, if that, without the music. Go rent the movie and watch it with the volume turned down if you don't believe me.

Carpenter's fingerprints are all over this bad boy, as he and frequent collaborator Debra Hill co-wrote the screenplay too. I don't believe anyone is ever going to argue that the script for Halloween deserved any awards, but it does have some great dialogue and some great scenes, as well as two great horror movie characters in Michael Myers and Dr. Sam Loomis. Their story is very much a Van Helsing tale set in 1970s suburbia. But unlike the fearless Van Helsing, who is sure of himself and knows exactly how to defeat the vampire menace, Dr. Loomis is unsure of just how to stop Michael. And never let it be said that Dr. Loomis does not know fear, because it sure looks to me like he does. While the good doctor doesn't fear for his own life, he instead fears for the lives Michael might take instead. And if he can't stop Michael, he's going to at least try to make sure Michael is slowed down. And that's a pretty good hero, if you ask me.

Michael, on the other hand, is pure evil. He is listed as "The Shape" in the credits and is referred to as the boogeyman throughout the actual movie, both fair assessments of the character. Michael might have the shape of a man, but inside, he's completely soulless. His plain white mask is emotionless, with deep black eyes that have no life inside them. He's just a heartless, soulless killing machine. While the character's motivations have been brought up in the sequels, Michael's a million times scarier when he has no motivation. A killer that murders his victims just for the sake of it is, to me, much more frightening than one that has some sort of lame excuse. If Donald Pleasence ran up to me one day and said, "Look, there's this whackjob that killed his sister for no reason when he was a kid, and he busted out of the loony bin last night and he's gonna kill half the town and I don't know why, and we're all pretty screwed if we don't find him and stop him right the hell now," I'd be on the first plane to Timbuktu until the whole thing blew over.

The other characters, meanwhile, are typical slasher movie characters. Laurie is your standard "Final Girl," the intelligent stick in the mud that is the complete opposite of her friends. She isn't a sex-addicted drunk like the others, and unlike her friends, she actually gets to defend herself instead of getting killed due to making stupid decisions. Annie and Lynda, on the other hand, are our comic relief for the evening. Neither of them are all that bright; Lynda would rather drink beer, have sex with her super-annoying boyfriend Bob (played by John Michael Graham), and use the word "totally" in every sentence whether she needs to or not, while Annie has no problem pawning the child she's babysitting off on Laurie so she can go get laid. Not only that, but at one point, she feels the need to strip down to nothing but her skivvies because she spilled a little something on her shirt. Who does that?

Last but not least is the cast. Jamie Lee Curtis does a wonderful job as Laurie, despite not having a whole lot demanded of her outside of acting nerdy before acting scared out of her mind. You'd never notice that this was only her first movie by the way she holds the screen, and she proves to be deserving of the "Scream Queen" title that was bestowed upon her. Nancy Loomis and P.J. Soles, meanwhile, play characters that are a little annoying and kinda stupid, but are still likable and entertaining in their own ways. Loomis and Soles look like they're having a lot of fun playing a pair of airheads, so I won't so I won't fault them for that.

But I believe it goes without saying that the true stars of the movie are Donald Pleasence and Nick Castle. This is their movie, and both of them are excellent. Castle stays mostly in the background and in the shadows for the majority of the movie, but when he gets to stand front and center, he has an intimidating, almost inhuman presence that really fits the character. Pleasence, the movie's most accomplished actor, is pitch perfect as Dr. Loomis. His dialogue would probably sound pretentious if delivered by anyone else, but Pleasence delivers them with a dramatic sense of urgency, as if every second that passes while Michael is loose is a second that moves us closer to the end of the world.

Halloween has earned a reputation as being one of the horror genre's most enduring modern classics. A remake and bunch of grossly inferior sequels are never going to change that. It's a brilliant movie, and an important benchmark in the horror genre. And thirty years after its initial release, it still holds up. That's why I'm so bummed that newer generations of horror fans that have yet to see it only know of the most recent entries in the franchise. So yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that if you haven't seen Halloween, what's the deal? Why not? Halloween isn't flawless, but it's very, very close. So I'm giving it four and a half stars and a hearty seal of approval. Go check it out, and don't let the boogeyman get you while you're out trick or treating.

Final Rating: ****½