November 5th, 2023 around 8:48pm
ranking all movies in the halloween franchise
despite being a jamie lee curtis fan, i’ve never managed to watch any of the halloween movies so i thought i’d rectify that this spooky season. ratings taken from the letterboxd system just bc it’s easier, and general disclaimer that these are just my own personal opinions, posted here just for posterity, y'all will like what u like and i will do the same.
HALLOWEEN I (1978) 2.5/5 STARS
look, i understand why it’s a cult classic but it was a bit too slow for me and very painfully 70s. michael wasn’t terrifying so much as he was a creepy stalker. really only liked laurie and dr. loomis out of all the characters.
HALLOWEEN II (1981) 3.5/5 STARS
this, i liked much better than H1, which i know is sacrilegious but it was def. more my speed in term of slashers. i didn’t like the family connection that this movie forced on us, but it is what it is.
HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982) 1/5 STARS
i get what they were trying to do, and i respect the vision of trying to make a horror anthology around the halloween holiday but…this was such a bad movie. it didn’t make sense most of the time; i’m still salty about the ending; i didn’t like any of the characters and for some reason they had to include ROBOTS. like WHYYYY and it wasn’t terminator robots, the coolest of the robots in media, it was robots made of papier-mâché who folded as soon as u looked at them wrong. overall, such a hot mess of garbage. (but i love the title, i guess?? and the Irish villain brought a certain gravitas to this movie that was both jarring and fun.)
HALLOWEEN IV: RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS (1988) 4.5/5 STARS
genuinely the first entry in this franchise to scare me (maybe because the protagonist was a young child??) i did like that we got dr. loomis back tho. loved rachel’s character and her and jamie’s interactions. but this was so trauma-filled and again more horrifying for me than all three of the previous movies. very exciting slasher.
HALLOWEEN V: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS (1989) 2.5/5 STARS
another garbage entry mostly for how horribly they treat poor jamie for the vast majority of this film, assassinated dr. loomis’ character, and then killed off rachel, only to replace her with her friend, tina. i also hated the whole cult plot line, which starts here, and is as dumb as making michael and laurie brother and sister. and the vast majority of these characters are so dumb, and i’m so dumbfounded that they’ve lasted as long as they have in a horror film. this movie asks u to suspend your disbelief to the breaking point.
HALLOWEEN VI: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS (1995) 1.5/5 STARS
this movie, i swear i thought i couldn’t hate a movie as much as i hated H3 and H5, but then this movie came along and PROVED ME WRONG. like, noooope, we’re here to make an even worse movie!! i gave this one a whole 1.5 rating simply for paul rudd (yes, that paul rudd, he was the only thing keeping me sane while watching this shit show.) WHY DID JAMIE HAVE TO BE PREGNANT???!! WHY DID THE CULT HAVE TO HAVE HER AND HER CHILD???!! HAS THIS CHILD NOT SUFFERED ENOUGH??? the cult of thorn plot line is meh, whatever for me, i can take it or leave it, but i’m just so mad at jamie’s death and subsequent trauma from everything she had to go through. every single character annoyed me (except for paul rudd and donald pleasence, who prove that good actors can polish a turd only so far…)
everyone was dumb, the whole town of haddonfield was dumb, and i was dumb for watching this…
(i know there’s a producers’ cut too, but i cannot find it and at this point i don’t even care to bc i just want to burn watching this movie from my memory…)
HALLOWEEN VII: H20 TWENTY YEARS LATER (1998) 4.5/5 STARS
(i know they don’t title this as H7, but i do just bc i want to and it is technically the seventh film so i’m gonna do what i want)
i appreciate the blank slate this movie starts out with (no cult of thorn, no jamie lloyd, but no dr. loomis either unfortunately).
is this a masterpiece?? no, but i had fun, and it made me terrified during certain scenes so i thought the tension was great. and the laurie/michael standoff at the end was superb. i do think this movie has some deep things to say about trauma, so i liked that too. no one annoyed me too greatly, and i am def. mad they didn’t end this whole franchise with this movie since i think it was a pretty satisfying ending overall.
HALLOWEEN VIII: RESURRECTION (2002) 0.5/5 stars
JUST WHYYYYY. another garbage movie. this movie irked me so much. it tried to say some deep stuff about fiction and reality, but the writing was so bad, i couldn’t take it seriously. not one of the characters were worth rooting for; they were vapid and shallow (even our final girl ends up being saved at the last minute by the greedy capitalist who put her in this situation in the first place). laurie’s death was so dumb, there was no connection to H20 (i know i would’ve still hated this movie even if they did connect the two films beyond just recapping that laurie killed the wrong guy in H20 and that she was headmistress of a private academy).
HALLOWEEN IX (2007) AKA ROB ZOMBIE’S HALLOWEEN 0.5/5 STARS
is this the worst movie in the franchise?? not by a long shot. is it also the worst remake in the history of remakes? no, but it should be in the top twenty at least. this remake was very much not for me. rob zombie is beloved, and i can understand if this becomes a cult classic (if it hasn’t already just because of the originality), but it was just very meh to me.
humanizing michael ain’t it either. (i will say the mask in this was way more terrifying than any of the previous ones so points for that.)
i tried going in with an open mind, i really did, but i hated malcolm mcdowell’s dr. loomis. i am and shall forever be a donald pleasence fangirl. dr. loomis is supposed to be michael’s foil, and a character that you can root for. but mcdowell’s loomis went far past the rooting for & liking stage, and well into narcissistic ahole stage.
it’s def. the anti-Carpenter Halloween in terms of pacing, profanity, violence, and brutality, and, again some might like that, but i found it’s definitely not for me. and am firmly in the camp that this movie is waaaayyy too over-the-top in terms of everything.
HALLOWEEN X (2009 AKA ROB ZOMBIE’S HALLOWEEN II) 1.5/5 STARS
i will admit i like this one far better than the ‘07 version just bc of the way the whole film handles trauma, PTSD, healing, and all those aspects, but rob zombie and i still do not vibe. and that’s okay.
i…i do not know what they did with dr. loomis character, and am baffled he suddenly did a 180 and became a narcissistic asshole for no reason at all (well, there were traces of it in H1 where malcolm mcdowell played him as this hipster wanna-be doctor who wanted to be michael’s friend more than he wanted to be his doctor). it honestly felt like Hollywood’s interpretation of what a psychiatrist was, if they had never met a psychiatrist in their life and just based it on businesspeople they had *actually* met in Hollywood and were like “well, close enough.”
my biggest gripe with this movie is that it felt like it was all over the place; michael wasn’t really michael so much as he was a mentally ill dude who knew how to eviscerate people in an efficient manner. it was jut really bleak, traumatic, brutal, and gory. laurie survived, but mostly physically, not really emotionally. she wasn’t really laurie any more, so it’s debatable to what extent she “survived”.
HALLOWEEN XI (2018) 5/5 STARS
I FUCKING LOVED THIS i just did. i’m not sorry. this??? so fucking fantastic.
i still maintain jamie lee curtis is the best thing about these movies (and…i guess michael myers too. but, again, i’m a scaredy-cat, so the less thought about that asshole the better.) and i love when they have her be a powerful badass. i am firmly Team Laurie and always will be (and now Team Karen/Allyson/Laurie too).
(the kills here were also brutal and gory, and gahhh, i am not a fan of gore, but the story kept me interested and on the edge of my seat.)
HALLOWEEN KILLS (AKA HALLOWEEN XII) (2021) 3/5 STARS
…meh. i didn’t love this, but i didn’t hate it either. it’s just very underwhelming after the brilliance that was the 2018 remake.
is this technically a good film?? yeah, it was filmed fine, nothing too spectacular tho. but the writing is a mess, felt like the writers couldn’t write themselves out of the awesome ending they produced in 2018. but really. they should’ve ended this whole franchise with the 2018 remake, so that way at least the franchise would’ve ended with a bang (i know i have halloween ends to watch too, but am not hopeful about that entry either…)
the nicest thing i can say about this sequel is it’s not a stinkin’ pile of garbage as some other movies in this franchise. too silly and cringe in certain parts, and the pacing was off (certain characters whom i thought would’ve been killed off as soon as we saw them on-screen weren’t killed off until scenes later, which i thought didn’t work for a slasher film like Halloween).
we also focus way too much on supporting characters that were introduced just last film, and while i like what others are calling the “fan-service-y” parts, like all the callbacks to previous Halloween films, and having a focus on tommy, marion, and lindsey, the film was trying to do too much by focusing both on legacy characters AND the new characters. also, imho, laurie is sidelined for most of the action, and while that meant that the other two strode women were being badass by themselves, i think the halloween movies work much better when it’s just laurie vs. michael, instead of haddonfield vs. michael bc most of the characters of haddonfield and haddonfield itself aren’t developed as much as laurie, so we don’t care as much, or at least i don’t bc i know michael is going to murder them eventually, if not right away, but with laurie, there’s some hope that she will emerge victorious.
HALLOWEEN ENDS (AKA HALLOWEEN XIII) (2022) 2.5/5 STARS
i’ll be honest: i don’t actually hate the whole corey storyline. i went into this not expecting much because i knew nothing could surpass the 2018 remake for me, and i think that mindset helped a lot. was the corey character and storyline stupid?? sure, but not as dumb as the Cult of Thorn storyline they tried to foist on us. anyway, at the end of the day i’m just here to stan laurie strode, and be her hype girl.
again, just…meh for me. there was so much melodrama in this movie when this should’ve just been a fun slasher movie, but i guess the film felt it had to explore how much trauma all these characters had and never actually properly dealt with it (seriously, all these characters were so mean and bitter to each other, and i get it when u had a crazed psychopath stalking a town for years, no one will feel all that warm and fuzzy to begin with).
also, still very salty about karen’s death from the last film. #justiceforkaren
