Oh Just Give It Up

There are more than a few Hollywood studios that should be encouraged to form a sentence from the words 'dead', 'flogging' and 'horse'. Indeed, you'd be hard-pressed to count the number of movie franchises that have been milked way beyond what can possibly be healthy to squeeze every last penny into corporate pockets and, we're sad to say, there's now another name to add to the list. Halloween is officially the series that will never die and a ninth film has begun the inexorable journey to production. If you'd like to cast your mind back you'll remember that the emergence of Michael Myers in the original Halloween was a landmark in movie horror. Forget Jason Voorhees, scoff at Freddy Krueger, Myers was the man when it came to sicko psychos. A few sub-standard sequels later and the masked maniac was nowhere near as threatening and it all became a little routine - something that's quite worrying when you're talking about mass murderers. The franchise did enjoy a heydey with the surprisingly good Halloween: H20 but, rather than leave things there, Halloween Resurrection came along to dirty the waters once more. Frankly a ninth film is something the genre could probably do without but, given that the $15 million Resurrection reaped more than twice that in the US alone, there must be an audience out there and, from the studio's point of view, it is hard to argue with the maths.