Shape & Ghosts, The

Another excellently done Maniac double feature. Like Siege and Snake, John Carpenter films lend themselves well to the format. Again, these would never replace the originals for me but Maniac does a great job in trimming them down to give a great hour long experience. Both of these edits are very well done. Visual editing is seamless. A particular highlight for me was the handling of the diary read scene, very well done. There's a hard audio cut right before the autopsy scene but that's also in the theatrical cut. I would have liked it to have been smoothed a bit but can't really hold it against the editor. The narratives work well and we basically got a best of. Really liked the ending of Shape. Great work all around.

I find it really hard to be objective when it comes to John Carpenter's movies (and now maniac51's edits), well maybe with the exception of the latter part of his career. In his prime I don't think any single director made movies that oozed with as much tension as him. maniac51 does another exceptional job of taking two of Carpenter's finest works and smashing them together to make a fun, lean ride.

Halloween, now "The Shape" is Halloween but stripped down to it's most essential moments. Yeah, you miss out on some fun stuff, a few Loomis one-liners for instance, but it's still Halloween in tone. I love the original film, I had two posters of the movie in my room growing up and I really enjoyed this edit of that film. Stripping out the extraneous dialogue and sequel-teasing work surprisingly well. It won't replace my numerous copies of the original but when viewed as a double feature as intended it's a great watch.

As for "The Fog" I know the original gets a lot of flack for being slow but it's always been a film that worked for me. It was the first Carpenter film I ever saw and I remember my friend goading me about how the fog would get us. As a kid I can honestly say fog terrified me for a good while. I still love the movie but I can see it's flaws. maniac51 addresses some of the problematic elements of the movie namely its pace and dialogue dumps. Cutting a lot of this material again feels organic and the edit is completely seamless.

I agree with the previous reviewer that Halloween is by far the superior film and the double feature is top heavy but I really appreciated the time and care that went into cutting both films. These double features have been great to watch and see the same films I have seen many, many (probably too many) times but in a different light.

This is another great Maniac double feature. My only criticism is that "The Fog" ("Ghosts") should have been first and "Halloween" ("The Shape") second. Halloween is such a phenomenal film, even cut to a bare-bones hour, that you kind of shoot your wad in the first half and then Fog is so excruciatingly slow. It's essentially the same problem that the Robert Rodriguez & Quentin Tarantino double-feature had, the awesome exciting film was first and the slow-burn film was the finale.