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Halloween

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Falcon. Dir John Carpenter; Producer Debra Hill; Screenplay John Carpenter, Debra Hill; Camera Dean Cundey; Editor Tomy Wallace, Charles Burnstein; Music John Carpenter Art Dir Tommy Wallace

Donald Pleasence
Jamie Lee Curtis
Nancy Loomis
P.J. Soles
Charles Cyphers
Kyle Richards

After a promising opening, Halloween becomes just another maniac-on-the-loose suspenser. However, despite the prosaic plot, director John Carpenter has timed the film's gore so that the 93-minute item is packed with enough thrills.

The picture opens 15 years earlier, on Halloween night in a small midwestern town. A young boy spies his sister necking with her boyfriend. As they mount the steps for her bedroom he slips on his Halloween mask, pulls out a butcher knife and does some cutting.

For the rest of the thriller the Hitchcockian influence remains, but the plot ambles along to a predictable conclusion. It is now the present, also Halloween. Donald Pleasence, a psychiatrist who has been caring for the killer during the years, is on his way to the state hospital to make sure that the maniac is never freed.

Of course, the maniac escapes, returns to the scene of the original crime and searches for suitable victims, in this case a trio of babysitting friends.

(Color) Widescreen. Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1978. Running time: 93 MIN.

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