Halloween Day By Day: He Knows You're Alone (1980)

Few can argue that John Carpenter's Halloween is one of the most influential films of all time. It's a lean, mean, technically brilliant scare machine that established a formula for genre flicks to come.

Yes, it spawned many imitators. Some were good, most were bad, and then there's ones like He Knows You're Alone.

Given that last sentence, you're probably thinking director Armand Mastroianni's Halloween clone -- and it is very much a clone -- is a dud. And it's not. Granted, it's not really scary or even suspenseful, and Mastroianni apes Carpenter's style to a T, but it's this latter point that is half the fun of watching the movie.

So many shots are set up and framed to replicate what Carpenter did effectively in Halloween. The hope being, obviously, that the same impact will be felt here. There's the POV shots, the moments where the killer suddenly appears in frame (complete with musical stinger) or materialized from the background, that I honestly hope Carpenter got some royalties from this.

Ditto the music by Alexander and Mark Peskanov. It's like someone said "copy John Carpenter's score from Halloween," and they did.

While all this ripping off should make me hate He Knows You're Alone, I still had a good time with it. In fact, it's like a game. Watch the movie and see how many sequences and filmmaking techniques copy Halloween. It kinda fun, actually.

There is a bit of originality here. The opening sequences in a movie theatre is quite good, as are some of the stalk-and-kill moments. And I especially enjoyed the performances by Caitlin O'Heaney and Don Scardino. They are a pair of likeable leads, and I actually found myself rooting for them, which doesn't happen often in these Halloween ripoffs.

I'm tempted to give this a Bad, because it really is a desperate Halloween clone. But I've seen it twice, and enjoyed both viewings, which means it's a Good in my book. Shame on me!

PS: this was Tom Hanks' first film. Yup, THAT Tom Hanks.