Halloween (2018, David Gordon Green) (Patreon)

25 years ago (egad), a friend of mine made a no-budget indie, on which I served as script supervisor. The film didn't turn out especially well—screened only at our local festival before disappearing forever—but I still really dig the premise. It was set I think ten years after a Narnia-style adventure in which three little kids had been briefly whisked off to some magical land. Nothing remotely magical happens in the present tense, though (and neither are there flashbacks—"determinedly minor," Variety accurately assessed), as the story entirely concerns the adventure's lingering (and in one case corrosive) effect on the three kids, who are now monumentally frustrated young adults struggling to navigate the real world.

That's roughly the degree of commercial suicide that would have made this iteration of Halloween work for me. Never having seen any of the sequels and reboots it ignores, I'd have been the ideal viewer for a serious drama about Laurie Strode, still consumed by fear and paranoia 40 years later—a movie in which Michael Myers remains safely imprisoned, and nobody gets killed (except perhaps by accident). Was never gonna happen, of course, but there's enough PTSD here to keep me moderately engaged even when the obligatory genre elements sputter. Trouble is, I'm not a Danny McBride fan, and there's a lot of Danny McBride's comic aggression in this screenplay. Hard to sustain either drama or horror when the tension's constantly being punctured by glib jokiness. Watching it just a few hours after revisiting the original didn't help, either—ensured that I caught visual callbacks I'd otherwise have missed, but also underscored how much less effective Green's elaborate choreography is compared to Carpenter's brute elegance. Did appreciate that this film genuinely takes advantage of the titular holiday, allowing Michael Myers (I still can't call him "Michael" or "Myers") to roam freely in public in his creepy mask, butcher knife in plain view; I'd always wondered why Haddonfield's streets were so sparsely populated with trick-or-treaters in '78. But for all I know, even that's a rehash of scenes from Return and/or Revenge and/or Curse and/or H20 and/or etc. Surely DGG has better things to do with his time*, but it's not as if I've never had that thought before.

* I've actually gone 70+ on more David Gordon Green films (George Washington, All the Real Girls, Joe) than on Paul Thomas Anderson films (just There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, though I like both of those better than all three of Green's).