Please note: This edition is a reissue of the 35th anniversary edition and features the following special features: On a black and unholy Halloween night years ago, little Michael Myers brutally slaughtered his sister in cold bold. But for the last fifteen years, town residents have rested easy, knowing that he was safely locked away in a mental hospital until tonight. Tonight, Michael returns to the same quiet neighbourhood to relive his grisly murder again and again and again. For this is a night of evil. Tonight is Halloween! Features: Commentary track with writer/director John Carpenter and star Jamie Lee Curtis 'The Night She Came Home' featurette with Jamie Lee Curtis (HD) On Location Trailers TV and Radio Spots Additional Scenes from TV Version
John Carpenter's highly influential modern horror/suspense film set the trend for two decades of re-makes and sequels. Six-year-old Michael Myers is confined to an insane asylum after stabbing his sexually active teenage sister to death on Halloween night 1963. Exactly fifteen years later Michael escapes, returning to his home town of Haddonfield with psychiatrist Doctor Loomis (Donald Pleasence) in hot pursuit. Bookish babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), all alone in the house on Halloween night, soon discovers that she is Michael's next target.
It was a cold Halloween night in 1963 when six year old Michael Myers brutally murdered his 17-year-old sister. Fifteen years later he escapes from prison and returns home...
A group of teens win a contest to spend a night in Michael Myers' childhood home to be broadcast live on the internet. But things go frightfully wrong and the game turns into a struggle to make it out of the house alive.
John Carpenter's Assault On Precinct 13 is a riveting low-budget thriller from 1976, in which a nearly abandoned police station is held under siege by a heavily armed gang called Street Thunder. Inside the station, cut off from contact and isolated, convicts heading for death row and the cops must now join forces or die. That's the basic plot, but what Carpenter does with it is remarkable. Drawing specific inspiration from the classic Howard Hawks Western Rio Bravo (which included a similar siege on disadvantaged heroes), Carpenter used his simple setting for a tense, tightly constructed series of action sequences, emphasising low-key character development and escalating tension. Few who've seen the film can forget the "ice cream cone" scene in which a young girl is caught up in the action by patronising a seemingly harmless ice cream van. It's here, and in other equally memorable scenes, that Carpenter demonstrates his knack for injecting terror into the mundane details of daily life, propelling this potent thriller to cult favourite status and long-standing critical acclaim. From this Carpenter went on to make the original Halloween, one of the most profitable independent films of all time. --Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com
It was a cold Halloween night in 1963 when six year old Michael Myers brutally murdered his 17-year-old sister. Fifteen years later he escapes from prison and returns home...
Halloween is as pure and undiluted as its title. In the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a teenage baby sitter tries to survive a Halloween night of relentless terror, during which a knife-wielding maniac goes after the town's hormonally charged youths. Director John Carpenter takes this simple situation and orchestrates a superbly mounted symphony of horrors. It's a movie much scarier for its dark spaces and ominous camera movements than for its explicit bloodletting (which is actually minimal). Composed by Carpenter himself, the movie's freaky music sets the tone; and his script (cowritten with Debra Hill) is laced with references to other horror pictures, especially Psycho. The baby sitter is played by Jamie Lee Curtis, the real-life daughter of Psycho victim Janet Leigh; and the obsessed policeman played by Donald Pleasence is named Sam Loomis, after John Gavin's character in Psycho. In the end, though, Halloween stands on its own as an uncannily frightening experience--it's one of those movies that had audiences literally jumping out of their seats and shouting at the screen. ("No! Don't drop that knife!") Produced on a low budget, the picture turned a monster profit, and spawned many sequels, none of which approached the 1978 original. Curtis returned for two more instalments: 1981's dismal Halloween II, which picked up the story the day after the unfortunate events, and 1998's occasionally gripping Halloween H20, which proved the former baby sitter was still haunted after 20 years. --Robert Horton
Halloween III: Season of the Witch was producer John Carpenter's attempt to get the series away from the original psycho-on-the-loose storyline and turn it into a vehicle for more far-fetched Halloween-themed horror tales. Incredibly, the fans voted for more of the same and Carpenter walked away for others to rehash the Michael Myers plotline in a succession of lookalike movies that are still turning up every few years. Though original screenwriter Nigel Kneale (of the Quatermass series and The Stone Tape) removed his name from the final film after a coarsening rewrite by director Tommy Lee Wallace, his strange touch is evident in the offbeat story. After the mysterious deaths of a toyshop owner, a doctor (Tom Atkins) and the man's daughter (Stacy Nelkin), an investigation takes place in the Irish-dominated Northern California community of Santa Mira, a company town owned by the Silver Shamrock Novelty corporation, whose bestselling Halloween masks are pushed by an amazingly irritating TV jingle you won't ever be able to get out of your head ("Two more days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween"). Atkins and Nelkin are typical low-rent horror movie protagonists, dim-bulbs who discover an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style conspiracy involving sharp-suited corporate robots. But guest star Dan O'Herlihy steals the film as a Celtic joke tycoon ("the man who invented sticky toilet paper and the dead dwarf gag") who hates the way American kids are despoiling the religious spirit of Samhain and decides to teach them a nasty lesson. His scheme, which involves a stolen Stonehenge megalith ("sure, you'd never believe how we did it") and a techno-magic spell that turns the heads of TV watchers into writhing masses of snakes and insects, is value for money. O'Herlihy mixes enough serious malice into the charm to come across as a great screen baddie. On the DVD: Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a disappointment on disc. After letterboxed titles, this defaults to full frame throughout, severely cramping Dean Cundey's Panavision cinematography, and it's a grainy, indifferent print that ill-serves the performances or the atmospherics. However, the severe cuts to the gruesome scenes made to previous video releases (in order to preserve the theatrical 15 rating) seem to have been restored. With an extras-packed Halloween disc on the market, it's a shame the most interesting of the follow-ups rates such a flimsy release--with not so much as a trailer as an extra. --Kim Newman
A group of teens win a contest to spend a night in Michael Myers' childhood home to be broadcast live on the internet. But things go frightfully wrong and the game turns into a struggle to make it out of the house alive.
Isolated cut off inside an abandoned police station a handful of cops and some convicts on their way to Death Row must join forces and defend themselves against the gang called Street Thunder who have taken a blood oath to destroy. From the director of Halloween and The Thing Assault On Precinct 13 combines elements of the classic western and modern thriller to create a cult favorite.
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