Making a Halloween sequel is an tricky task indeed.
Back in 1978, John Carpenter gave birth to the low-budget slasher craze with his bare bones tale of an escaped mental patient beset on revisiting the scene of a childhood crime. So cash-strapped were Carpenter and his crew that they cut the eyes out of a William Shatner mask and sprayed it white, fortuitously giving birth to a horror icon […]
What do you miss most about the good old days of home video?
Cover art is something that stands out – it made that oh so joyous experience of choosing your rental all the more joyous. Choice is the second thing that springs to mind. Sometimes you would arrive home on a Saturday evening and be thoroughly disappointed with a movie that promised so much and delivered so little. But that was part of the fun, particularly when you unearthed the kind of gem that you couldn’t wait to rent again […]
John Carpenter’s Halloween was guilty of a great many crimes.
So successful was his low-budget revelation that it spawned an entire decade of sleazy, half-baked imitators, movies so devoid of technical competence that the genre had no other option than to descend into self-parody. Fortunately, for those of us with a taste for the unthinkably inept, lots of those movies have found a special place in our hearts […]
For the most part, Halloween III: Season of the Witch plays out like an episodic horror series, and often to its credit, but before we get to that, let us take a look at how this franchise anomaly came to pass.
It was no courageous act for producers to take the series in another direction in an era when a trilogy of movies was rarely planned from the outset. Myers had put in a decent effort in Halloween II the year prior […]
What better place to begin than with Carpenter’s original cult classic? A bleak ode to Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, Assault of Precinct 13 is a precursor to the dystopian pictures that would follow, the tale of a soon-to-be defunct precinct put under siege by a group of heavily-armed gangbangers in the Wild West of South Central Los Angeles. The movie is very much cowboys at high noon, but also pays due homage to George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead […]
After a seven year hiatus Michael Myers is back – or ten years as the plot of this instalment would have you believe.
In 1982, the scourge of Haddonfield was put on the shelf in favour of Halloween III: Season of the Witch. The plan was to release a new film every year under the guise of the original franchise. Each movie would have a new story and cast of characters, allowing arguably the most iconic killer in horror history to slip into obscurity and retire with the kind of dignity Carpenter’s baby deserved […]
