"Halloween" manages to reinvent itself this time around but not in the ways that one might think. Unlike the recent Rob Zombie interpretations, it isn't overly gory and does not try to portray Michael Myers as anything other than what he is. This time around we don't get subjected to sensitive childhood scenes of Michael being abused by bullies in an attempt to make the audience have any level of empathy for a man whose sole purpose of existence is to brutally murder innocent people.

This film succeeds because rather than trying to reinvent the wheel like the previous two installments, it returns all the way to the ancient wheel design that the Greeks first constructed. It's an old-fashioned bloodfest that pits perpetual final girl Laurie Strode against Micheal for a (seemingly) last game of cat and mouse.

For as much murder and mayhem as is usually found in this series, this installment also manages to shed some light on more profound issues like mental health, female empowerment, and the complicated family dynamics that come with victims of trauma. Laurie finds herself so haunted by past trauma's that her paranoia causes a rift between her and the rest of her family. This creates an estranged relationship with her daughter and makes it difficult to cultivate a relationship with her granddaughter. This is one area that the film could have been better. Instead of trying to mend her relationship with her family, Laurie seems to become somewhat vindicated and her forty years of paranoia become rationalized for the other characters in the end.

This movie gets a 7/10 because it manages to bring new life to a series that had become very stale but mishandles some pretty heavy issues like mental illness. At the end of the day, it was what it needed to be, which was a return to the classic slasher genre.