Out of the countless slasher icons, few are as memorable as Michael Myers. With his silent demeanor and lifeless mask, there’s a unique aura of mystery to the character and his evil, which director David Gordon Green does manage to pull off with his take on the character in the newest Halloween flick. And while Green does manage to retain some of the elements that made the 1978 Halloween so effective, the film’s jumbled screenplay and unnecessarily intense visuals hold it back from being as masterful as the original classic.

Jamie Lee Curtis returns as Laurie Strode for the first time since 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, and she shows in her performance in this film why she is such an endearing scream queen. Not only does she have her badass moments when facing off against Myers, in a Sarah Connor-esque jump from original to sequel, but through her character she brings up the element of trauma and how it affects a person. Obviously her experience with Michael would cause some scarring elements to her psyche and would last for the rest of her life, and the film really shines in showing just what these kinds of traumatic elements can do to a person.

The film also manages to retain some of the atmosphere the ’78 version had. It’s certainly more intense and gory, but it still manages to capture some of that Halloween feeling, with one tracking shot of Myers going from house to house in his murderous rage being the highlight of the film.

And yet, the film doesn’t have the spark that made the John Carpenter classic so entertaining; even the elements that work here still have a large amount of flaws. This is largely in part due to the screenplay, written by Green and Danny McBride. The idea of Strode’s trauma is great, and it’s inventive for a slasher movie to look at a “final girl” years after and show what they’ve gone through. The problem comes to how she interacts with the other characters, particularly her daughter played by Judy Greer. There’s a grudge the two share, but said grudge makes little sense. Greer’s character is holding this grudge because her mom tried to teach her how to protect herself in case a crazy guy tries to come and kill her. Doesn’t really make much sense, and it feels like the movie needed one more scene between the two to help illustrate this conflict better.

Of course Green and McBride probably couldn’t add another scene in since they still had to have moments where Myers tried to kill people. And while it’s expected that a slasher would go for some blood and intense kills, the film went too overboard and exposed the worst that the slasher genre can offer. The first Halloween only had a handful of kills, while this one felt more extreme, with more deaths and more gore. Obviously some may not be bothered by it, but it felt unnecessarily intense and cruel for my tastes. Add on some unfunny comedy, apart from one or two chuckles, as well as a twist that offers nothing, and it adds up to a film that really needed another rewrite.

That isn’t to say there isn’t any value in Halloween. It’s clear that David Gordon Green wanted to pay respects to the series, and Jamie Lee Curtis is great as always. But it very quickly becomes a film that gets worse and worse the more one thinks about it, and it’s a shame to say about a film attached to such an important brand.