Halloween is a brilliant film imo, the story is a bit naff/done, but I mean its pieced together to make one of the best horror films put on the screen. Okay its no alien and I don't rate it that highly, but its so not the worst film ever.
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Halloweed has no buildup in suspence |
WTF

I'm sorry but that's one of the (arguably only) things it does really, really well. It also pretty much invented that ending, the unstoppable slasher movie. Sure it wasn't the first slasher, but it was one of the first greats.
The story is pretty dumb, but then again, slasher... what else would it be? As one of the firsts it isn't that bad, and as a horror film, its technically superior to most of the similar titles at least, its a better made film with more memorable scenes that a thousand of the cheap copycat movies that followed.
and yes... its unfortunate that it led to Friday

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But it's like trying to convince kids these days that Day of the Tentacle is one of the best games ever, I guess. |

Tell that to max, he's hung up on Monkey Island. No matter how good some of the lucas arts games are, imo Day of the Tentacle was one of the better ones.
And onto Gremlins 2, its a more
satisfying movie than the first. Its social comment is more apt due to its setting where their really are Gremlins in the machine, pseudo-intellectual tv personalities reflected by the pseudo-intellectual gremlin, the utter piss take out of the treatment of horror as the genre, 'attack of the octupus' followed by "where's the moan... there's supposed to be a moan from the coffin". Hell even one of my favourite quotes is in there, "Casablance, now in colour with a happier ending!". The self-reflection of horror has never been finer in a movie. The first film didn't dare to be so bold, but in Gremlins 2 the paraody is really out there with spoofs from Rambo 2 to Q the Winged Serpant, and its a film the director really wanted to make, a creative freedom that was only given after the commercial success of the first. Whilst the first one is my favourite for many reasons, the two are inseperable, and when someone says gremlins, its impossible to tell where the first ends and the second begins because they both brought so much. Whilst the first pits the gremlins against an angellic piece of americana, the second is in a heartless technical nightmare, a place and industry that's lost its soul to cheap gimmicky.
The second film is Dante let loose and allowed him to acheive what sometimes he only hints at in his other films. A real film fanatics tour de force.
And then there were only two Dante films in the 90s that followed, Matinee and Small Soldiers. Now Small Soldiers really
was crap, that was like a gremlins film without any bite, soul or dignity, and just an all round bad film.