I think we’re ready to declare Halloween officially over – we’ve now watched John Carpenter’s indie classic, Halloween. We’ve still got 5 or 6 movies sitting on the TV that are worthy, but they can wait a while.

I haven’t see Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween and while I agree that the original Halloween looks pretty dated, it’s still a fun, fast-paced, creepy movie. Plus, Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode is so adorable in this movie that you just have to make sure she gets through it all in one piece.

Although the movie is focused on Laurie, her sidekicks, Annie and Lynda, are expertly used to reveal many facets of Laurie’s character without the cheap (in more ways than one) fallbacks of either narration or wordy exposition. The acting isn’t all that great, but it’s a pretty smart script with a lot of creepy scares but very little actual gore. I’d forgotten how many times Lynda utters the word, “totally” – if you made it into a drinking game you’d be unconscious before the end of the first act.

One of the most amusing elements is the Halloween night movie that plays on the television throughout the last half of the movie – The Thing. Carpenter of course remade the thing just a few years later. For some reason I find that more amusing than the fact that Curtis is the daughter of Janet Leigh, the original Psycho scream queen. Okay, I think the fact that the killer’s iconic mask is an altered William Shatner mask is amusing, too. And that Laurie nearly kills the killer with a knitting needle. I’m sure there are other things, but you should just watch it yourself if you haven’t seen it or haven’t seen it in a while.