[Originally published in Movietone News 66-67, March 1981]
You don’t review movies like these, you step on them. One could probably trace the existence of several dozen Halloween ripoffs jockeying for a starting spot sometime during the 1980 drive-in season—some of them aiming not only to be take-the-money-and-run successes at the box office, but also to announce the availability of one more sharply talented John Carpenter type on the Hollywood scene. There is the rub, of course: we don’t need John Carpenter types when we have John Carpenter. And these are Carpenter types in emulation only: when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, do-you-know-what-a-camera-is-for?, do-you-stand-deliciously-in-awe-of-images-in-motion? level where the auteur of Halloween has proved himself, most of these yoyos show their true colors the instant we have something to look at onscreen. To say that Friday the 13th and Prom Night bear structural or technical similarities to Halloween is like saying Hitchcock and William Castle both made movies about homicidal maniacs (Psycho vs. Homicidal). Cunningham, Lynch, & respective companies seem oblivious to the notion that a film should generate a rich interior logic of its own and sustain it. The subjective camera identified with the killer in Halloween—subjective in its moment-to-moment sense of form and framespace as well as in those instances when we are (maybe) looking through the eyes of an assassin—is corrupted in these films into a blunt instrument that works only if the audience is willing to let it, indeed, to do all the work themselves: there’s a killer loose, you know, so let’s all guess whom, when, and how he’s going to strike; we guarantee a minimum of one gory demise every ten minutes once the real action gets underway.