Recent Reviews
Blu-ray Review: HALLOWEEN
By Jonathan Stryker (Facebook); Jonathan Stryker (Twitter)
Dec 3, 2013 - 1:00:11 PM

It seems like it would be an exercise in redundancy to recap the plot synopsis of John Carpenter's seminal 1978 film Halloween.  The film has been theatrically released, aired on cable and network television, and released in virtually every home video format in existence at one time or another. Its latest incarnation is in the form of a Blu-ray disc (for the second time in this format) which contains a brand-new commentary featuring both John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis as they watched the film together. This is different from the original commentary which consisted of a feature length discussion culled from separate comments from John Carpenter, Jamie Lee Curtis and the late Debra Hill.  This appeared on both the Criterion Collection laserdisc in 1994 and the Anchor Bay DVD in 2003. 

This new Blu-ray features a stunning transfer supervised by cinematographer Dean Cundey and the film has never looked better; television and radio spots; the theatrical trailer; the additional twelve minutes of footage shot for the television airings in both 1981 and 1982 (it would have been nice if they had incorporated this footage into the film in an alternate version by way of seamless branching, but I suppose that would have been more expensive); the On Location: 25 Years Later featurette; and a new featurette cleverly called The Night She Came Home which runs nearly an hour and features a camera crew following Jamie Lee Curtis from Los Angeles to a Horror Hound Weekend convention in Indianapolis, Indiana, the one and only convention that she has done for this film. Unless you were actually at that show, you may not have the patience to sit through the featurette in its entirety.  However, these one-hour highlights give the viewer who may not have ever attended a horror film convention before an idea of what goes on, the type of people who frequent this sort of thing, and how genuinely nice Jamie Lee Curtis is towards her fans.

It also includes an 18-page essay with black and white on-set photos by photographer Kim Gottlieb-Walker depicting the shooting of the film.

Recommended for die-hard fans of this now classic film!