Film Review: Halloween Kills

Halloween Kills
2021
David Gordon Green
3/10

Considering how well the direct sequel to Halloween went forty years following, there were a lot of directions that Halloween Kills could have gone. The biggest question was how in the hell Michael Myers gets out of that burning inferno that was Laurie's self-made prison, but this is resolved rather quickly. Sticking to paying nods to the former sequels, this one also takes place on the exact same night as 2018's Halloween, with the Haddonfield Memorial Hospital playing a large role in the plot. So what really could go wrong?

Unfortunately, just about everything. If the former film did everything to avoid falling into trap after trap of the typical slasher, this one seems like it did everything it could to do exactly that. Incompetent characters who's deaths could have easily been avoided are all over the place. Characters from the 1978 film are all back in full flesh, sheerly for the sake of pleasing the nostalgia crowd, only for almost all of them to get killed brutally anyway. Tommy, Lindsey, Sheriff Bracket, Lonnie, and Marion all make a comeback, and only Lindsey survives. You get these weird fan-service speeches by them at the beginning, as if we needed them to explain who each character is, and they talk as if none of them had seen each other in the last forty years, and suddenly all met up at this bar. These characters would have been better as little cameos worked in on their own, rather than being the center of a half-baked plot. Outside of fan service, the entire film is practically held-up by showing some of the goriest kills we've seen from The Shape, one after another, without much of any real plot other then Michael going through Haddonfield to get back to his house. I said that the kills in Halloween were merely an afterthought that worked within the actual plot, in Halloween Kills that basically is the plot!

It doesn't stop there. The side plot we get to intersect all of this is the one following the other escaped patient that gets caught up in the mayhem, who just happens to wind up at the hospital where the angry mob is (because we all know that that's where an angry mob would congregate and cause all sorts of chaos, right?). Not only is this angle completely pointless, being nothing more than a distraction, but it's not even fun, charming, or worth the stupidity the way it is in the likes of the thorn trilogy. Adding insult to injury, there's the ridiculous "evil dies tonight" chant that leads us all the way up to the escaped inmate's suicide. There really are no real characters introduced that we can follow or grow any kind of attachment to, as basically everybody is simply fodder to be fed to the gore machine. Several of the kills seem to just be Michael drawing them out as another person watches, such as the grave keeper watching him kill her husband at the beginning, or Allyson watching Cameron get his head dragged through railing posts. Karen was never one of my favorite characters in the film before this, one of my very few complaints about it, but she's far more annoying here. I really didn't even care for the showdown at the end, as the mob beats Michael to smithereens, only for him to stand back up, murder most of the crowd, and disappear as Laurie gives a speech on how the fear powers him. I guess maybe that's a nod towards Carpenter's original idea for Halloween 4, where he physically grows larger as the town is more afraid? That would be neat, except for the fact that the next film disregards that entirely.

There is only one real saving grace here, as well as a little side gag that's somewhat fun. Little John and Big John, a gay couple living in the Myers house, was all sorts of entertaining despite how silly it was. On a more objective level, however, the first fifteen minutes of this are incredible. Cameron finding the injured deputy, and throwing back to 1978 to see the aftermath of Loomis firing six shots into Michael was not only a genius idea, but was executed wonderfully. It was extremely visually pleasing, using the lighting schemes and music from the original film to fell more authentic, and the accuracy of the mask as well as the setting was very much on par. Tying Hawkins to Michael's character was a nice touch, and they way they pulled that off in the flashback was absolutely stellar. It's truly a shame, because such a strong opening makes the rest of the film feel like an even bigger let-down.

Halloween Kills is something that I could equate to Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise Of Skywalker. It's fan service by-the-numbers in every way possible, acting as an insult to half of the audience while bowing down to the other. You basically have to look for the worthwhile things, and almost all of those are found in the very beginning. It's visually pleasing, but there is zero charm, no real plot, no new characters to follow or care about, including the ones we did care about in the prior film. It's like if we took all of the ridiculous things from the other sequels, stripped away the element of fun that they had, and smashed them all together for one giant gorefest of a film with no backbone.