Wow, another re-make of a classic horror film. I’m shocked.

Not.

They did it with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes – and now Halloween.

The original Halloween is one of the most famous horror movies of all time. It was the first of its kind, the Hoosiers of horror movies. Everything else became a carbon copy of it. Without Michael Myers, there would be no Freddy, no Jason.

Could Hollywood really pull this one off?

The answer, actually, is yes.

The new Halloween is actually part re-make, part prequel. While the original film spent about five minutes on Michael Myers’ childhood, the new version spends an hour.

And I knew this going in. At first, I thought that this would destroy of the magic of Michael Myers. In the original, he was just evil, there was no explanation as to why – and there was something powerful about that. I was worried they would take away that magic by giving everything unnecessary exposition.

But it worked.

The true evil of Myers is retained. We start off with a young Michael Myers, who looks about eight years old. From the moment we meet him on screen, we know he’s a troubled child. He kills his pet rat. Then a dead cat in a plastic bag is found in his locker.

Although he clearly has a troubled home, containing an alcoholic, abusive step-father, a wild, rebelling sister, and a stripper mother, we quickly know it’s more than that causing the darkness in Michael. His evil is more by nature than nurture.

And as anyone can guess, he quickly moves from animals to people.

This version is much more intense. The killings are a lot more brutal. There’s a lot more deaths. The original film had only about four or five people die. This new one at the very least triples that. Maybe even quadruples.

I really liked the fact that there wasn’t excessive gore for gore’s sake. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a bloody movie. But it isn’t like the Hostel or Saw movies which were full of gore on top of gore, for the sake of gore.

The film has its weaknesses. Some of the acting is cheesy, and there’s a couple lines of dialogue that made people in the audience laugh out loud when it was certainly an unintended effect.

But for a serial-killer movie, it really wasn’t bad. I found myself engrossed in the movie for most of the time. Sure, it drags a bit here and there, but it still works.

If you like horror movies, I’d suggest checking this one out. Will this version be as classic as John Carpenter’s version? Probably not.

But will you enjoy it? Probably so.