Phil Claydon’s Helloween wastes no time tipping its mask. It opens in 1996 with a cold-blooded murder that plays like a direct homage to Carpenter’s Halloween. From the jump, you know exactly what the film is aiming for. The setup is clever, though, because it doesn’t just rely on slasher tropes; it stitches together newsreels, documentary footage, and social media clips to paint a picture of cultural hysteria. The first act has an inventive energy, and the editing style hints at a movie with scope beyond its budget.
Jump ahead to 2016, and clowns have become a viral phenomenon, popping up on every street corner and trending across platforms. At the center of it all is Carl Cane (Ronan Summers), an incarcerated killer whose legend has metastasized into something larger than life. If headlines have called Helloween “The British Terrifier,” that’s misleading. Having now seen it, the film is closer to a mash-up of The Purge and The Dark Knight, with Cane coming across as a cross between Heath Ledger’s Joker, the animated Joker, and a dash of Riddler’s theatricality.
Ronan Summers is the film’s MVP, throwing himself into Cane with manic conviction. His performance is magnetic, unsettling, and at times even darkly charismatic. He goes big, and the movie is better for it. By contrast, Michael Paré, cast as investigative journalist John Parker, feels muted to the point of distraction. His subdued delivery can’t compete with Summers’ intensity, and their scenes together tilt awkwardly off balance. Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, as psychiatrist Dr. Ellen Marks, anchors the film with professionalism and a believable sense of dread, though the script often sidelines her in favor of Cane’s theatrics.
For all the marketing hype comparing it to Terrifier and The Purge, the movie doesn’t really live up to either. The body count is surprisingly low, and the gore is mostly implied rather than unleashed. It often feels closer in spirit to the first Purge film, where the bulk of the runtime is spent inside one location with characters waiting for the inevitable home invasion. Once Cane enters the house, the story shifts into a strange rhythm: he lectures, he philosophizes, he forces characters through Saw-like challenges. The suspense drags instead of escalating, and the promised “clownmageddon” never quite materializes.
The film borrows liberally from elsewhere, Joker’s anarchist philosophy, The Purge’s social unrest, Halloween’s masked-boogeyman DNA, and rarely transforms those influences into something fresh. At times, it feels like a Joker fan film dressed up in killer clown trappings. A late twist tries to inject shock value, even adding a Harley Quinn-style accomplice, but it comes off less like revelation and more like cosplay.
Ultimately, Helloween plays like a movie convinced it’s breaking new ground while actually stitching together familiar parts. It’s not without merit, Summers is genuinely electrifying, and the early media-montage world-building is sharp, but the film falls short of its own ambitions.
What could have been “The British Terrifier” ends up as a patchwork slasher, unsure whether it wants to be scary, satirical, or simply a showcase for its villain. It’s a flashy but ultimately hollow ride; Ronan Summers’ performance delivers, but if you’re expecting the next horror phenomenon, you’ll likely walk away feeling like you’ve seen this clown act before.
Jessie Hobson