...quite an effective little thriller, with enough suspense and shivers to satisfy most veteran horror-movie fans.
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If at first you don't succeed.... Anchor Bay's initial DVD issue of "Halloween" did not come off too well visually, the picture quality often looking faded and washed out, especially in nighttime sequences, and sometimes accompanied by instances of jittery, fluttering lines. The latter, of course, would be subject to one's DVD player, some better able to decode lines, angles, and curves. Nevertheless, the average viewer was left wondering if the image was entirely the fault of a poor print, a poor transfer, or poor playback. Anchor Bay's new Limited Edition DVD set changes everything.
I'm sure you don't need to be reminded that "Halloween" was director John Carpenter's first really big success, the one with Michael Myers running around (the precursor to Jason and Freddy and the rest), the homicidal boogeyman who kills everyone in sight in a small Midwestern town one Halloween night. Michael's psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), is convinced that Michael is the incarnation of pure evil and is hot on the escaped lunatic's trail.
Jamie Lee Curtis is the heroine, the first of many such terrified teenagers who would later be slaughtered in the genre that got its start with this film. Unlike others of its kind, however, "Halloween" is quite an effective little thriller, with enough suspense and shivers to satisfy most veteran horror-movie fans.
Yet it's not nearly so gory as most of its imitators, displaying, in fact, very little blood. A good, tight, little fright flick, all in all, innovative and chilling, including the music, which Carpenter wrote himself.
Video:
I don't think it's exaggerating to say that Anchor Bay's new transfers are twice as good as their old one. The box blurb says they have been "fully restored under the supervision of Lucasfilms' THX Digital Mastering Services....from a new 35mm interpositive (made from the original camera negative)." This results in a much cleaner image than the older grainy one, and a picture notably free of wavering horizontal lines that can be so aggravated by some DVD players. The video is still not absolutely crystalline, but I expect that is a fault of the print itself; this was not a big-budget movie. The size ratios offered are 2.20:1 widescreen and 1.33:1 full-frame, the latter a pan-and-scan affair that cuts out about 50% of the picture.
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