“Michael Myers loose in Haddonfield with a bunch of lunatics on Halloween night!” is probably the most apt plot summary you could give this film, and hearing the character Sherriff Baker (Olmar J. Dorsey) put it so succinctly really made my job easier. If that alone sounds good to you, then you should probably just buy your ticket now, but if you’re worried that’s all there will be, don’t. There’s more.
            I had the unique experience of seeing David Gordon Green’s new slasher flick “Halloween” (2018) before seeing John Carpenter’s 1978 original, so I can’t really tell you how well it compares, how faithful it is, or whether it’s a worthy sequel. What I can tell you is, if you haven’t seen the original, and are currently apprehensive watching a movie so blatantly riding another’s coattails, this one can absolutely be enjoyed in a vacuum.
            It’s a paradoxically fast-paced, slow-burn of a movie. The premise is simple enough, requiring little introduction: 40 years ago Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) survived an attempted murder, and now she’s been waiting to get her revenge, in the process estranging herself from her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). The first half hour is spent introducing us to major and minor characters, but also subtly rigging a Rube Goldberg contraption of unfortunate coincidences, ensuring that everyone is in perfectly poor conditions when darkness falls on Halloween night. And boy oh boy does darkness fall.
            Once everything goes bad, it goes bad fast. Free at last, Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney, Nick Castle) wastes no time – except for the time he spends walking slowly – in finding new victims to pray upon, bounding from house to house, stabbing and strangling with 40 years of pent-up energy. Meanwhile, everyone else in the town must find some way to deal with the horrors facing their town. Allyson runs in fear from the Shape, while Strode  grabs a gun and runs right into the fire.
            As the story progresses, circumstances gradually bring everyone closer and closer, building up to an intensely entertaining and gratifying third act, where Laurie, Karen, and Allyson stand united as three generations of Strode women, fighting with and protecting each other from Michael Myers, as he steps into the house where Laurie has spent her life constructing traps for the Shape. It is everything that you could ever want in a showdown against these characters, and even with little knowledge of past movies, you’ll still feel the intense emotion behind the sequence.
            But even for all its high points, “Halloween” (2018) does have its fair share of flaws. The story can get pretty plotty at points, and as great as the final showdown may be, the turns the story takes to get us to that point sometimes feel quite contrived. Not all of the characters are as fleshed out as they could be, some comedic bits work in isolation but create tonal problems for the whole picture, and the very last scene is likely to piss off just as many fans as it satisfies.
            Over the years, we’ve seen a long tradition of awkward sequels to “Halloween” movies that were clearly meant to end the franchise, so no matter how “final” this entry may seem, there’s likely no escaping a “final-final” film to follow. And as much as I did like this one, I can’t say I’d appreciate another. It works as an ending. It feels like an ending. And regardless of what they do next, for this little moment in time, we have an ending that works.