Movie/DVD Review: Halloween (1999 Limited Edition)

This is one of the first DVD releases (if not the first) of the iconic 1978 low-budget horror film starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance. It tells the story of a boy named Michael Myers who, on Halloween night in 1968 kills his sister. He is committed to a mental institution where he is under the care of Dr. Sam Loomis (played by Pleasance), ends up breaking out a decade later only to return to his hometown of Haddonfield Illinois to go on a killing spree. 

Halloween was more of a thriller than a horror movie. Although it falls in the horror genre, it relies far more on jump scares than it does gore. There is actually very little blood in the movie, and the goriest shot is probably when Myers attacks the boyfriend of one of the teenagers and hangs him to a wall with a butcher knife. Even in that scene, there is not really any blood. So, it is not a horror movie in the "slasher porn" genre that just tries to be as gory as possible. 

Even though it was a low-budget, independent movie, it was well-written and acted. Pleasance really carried the movie as the very intense Loomis who was hell-bent on stopping Myers and was the only one who saw him as the threat he really was. Curtis was still very green as an actress (this was one of her first acting roles, if not the first, and certainly her first major role), but still did a good job playing Laurie Strode, the goody-two-shoes babysitter. While the dialogue (especially that written for the teenagers) is now out of date and cheesy, the movie, overall, holds up now over 40-years later.

The DVD set includes both the theatrical version of the movie as well as a version that added in scenes (and introduced the controversial Michael-Laurie connection) that were added for the TV version of the movie to make up for the material (like the nude scenes) that had to be edited out. But, on the DVD they were just added to the theatrical version of the movie to make a longer cut. The extras include a behind-the-scenes featurette and a great commentary track with director John Carpenter, screenwriter Debra Hill, and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Halloween is a bit of a cult classic movie, that has a large devoted following, but still probably does not appeal to the masses. To the extent that any horror movie does that, Halloween is probably the one that does. It was a far more successful movie than anyone, including Carpenter, ever thought it would be, and of course, became a pretty huge movie franchise spawning many sequels of varying quality (over Carpenter's objection). Chances are, most people already know if they love or hate the movie, but if you have not upgraded to blu-ray and do not want to shell out for the Halloween collection (which has every movie up to the Bloomhouse reboot of the franchise), this is a great edition to get.