The Ghoulish Plot: 40 years ago an escaped mental patient who had brutally killed his sister as a child went on a rampage in a small town, killing a handful of people before being stopped and captured while trying to kill Laurie Strode, played by the always-awesome Jamie Lee Curtis. After the original movie (which is still great), a series of sequels were produced that got weirder and cornier and tried to add more backstory and reasoning behind one of cinema’s great villains, Michael Myers.

This movie skips all that and is intended to be viewed as the direct sequel to the original, and now Laurie is a survivalist who is twice-divorced, partially estranged from her daughter and living in a remote cabin and plotting how to eventually kill Michael Myers if he ever escapes.

Then, one Halloween, you’re never gonna guess what happens – he DOES escape, and proceeds to go on another brutal rampage with an even higher body count.

Seen as a direct sequel, this is a fantastic follow-up to the original movie and delves into the trauma not only of what the original night did to Laurie, but what her reactions did to the people around her. And Michael is just as brutal and unpredictable as you’d expect, with some gruesome kills and not a whiff of explanation. As a character, I’d equate him to the shark in “Jaws” – he kills because that’s his purpose.

The original movie has been in my October rotation forever, and I hadn’t seen this one since it was first released and it still hits like a freight train. Jamie Lee Curtis delivers a great performance (as usual), and the supporting cast (most especially Judy Greer) all fill the rest of the plot with people you actually care about and don’t want to see murdered by Michael Myers.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: at one point Michael Myers enters into a restroom and somebody is trying to hide in a stall…so Myers puts his hand over the door and drops the teeth from his last victim onto the floor. Holy fuck, dude. I get scared enough when somebody tries to open the dumb stall and I’m in there.

Spookiness Factor: the direction and lighting make it possible that you never know where Michael is coming from; at this point we all mostly know how these things work but this one is done at the highest possible skill level. And it was directed by the same guy who did “Pineapple Express;” as though to prove getting super baked and watching horror movies isn’t stupid.

Rating: 8 out of 10 Full Size Twix