Halloween, the 1978 slasher classic, is John Carpenter's most famous movie. Whether it's his best is debatable, but it's definately up there with The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape From New York as THE Carpenter movie to take to the desert island with you. And since Halloween has rolled round again, it's the law that this groundbreaking horror be relived again this year.
After just raving about the magnificence of Carpenter's work in other blogs this month, I won't go on about it again here...except to quote frequent collaborator Kurt Russell who observes that "you only have to watch one of his movies for 30 seconds to determine it's a John Carpenter film"....and this is so very true here.
Two observations though. When I was growing up in the early 80's, the masked killer of the Halloween films was always refered to in the media as 'The Shape' and not the character's name, Michael Myers. It's how he's refered to in the end credits and this is very, very cool. Unfortunately, The Shape moniker has vanished leaving just the name. Shame because, even though it's not going to happen, a Freddy Vs Jason Vs The Shape movie would rock!!!
Disturbingly Halloween also reminds me of First Blood and the Rambo movies. In both cases, the movies are stripped down to basics with an escalating series of set-pieces leading to a final confrontation. I realised though that Donald Pleasence's Dr Sam Loomis has esentially the same role as Richard Crenna's Sam Trautman in Rambo. That is they both talk up the escaped killer to mythic proportions. With serious expression and expertly crafted lines of hyperbole they preach about the maniac's unstoppable nature. And good thing too as both are relentless masterpieces with a larger than life central character that's interwoven into pop culture forever.
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