Review: Halloween Kills

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

John Carpenter's 1978 "Halloween" remains the greatest slasher film in movie history, and the 2018 reboot by David Gordon Green was a surprisingly effective rethinking of the series, which at that point was up to 11 entries. So, it's a surprise and disappointment that the second film in this new trilogy, "Halloween Kills," is a significant step backward.

The original "Halloween," which by far remains the scariest of the series, was a lean and effective thriller with not an ounce of fat on it, while the 2018 Green film was a tense return to the series that erased all of the other films and acted as a direct sequel to Carpenter's original. Much like the original "Halloween" bled into "Halloween II" by making them take place on the same night, "Halloween Kills" picks up directly after the end of 2018's "Halloween."

As the film opens, Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode, the final girl of the 1978 film now grown up into a survivalist grandmother, is riding away in a truck with a stab wound to the abdomen with her daughter, Karen (Judy Greer, who is the MVP of this latest venture), and granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), as firefighters rush to the scene of Strode's house that is engulfed with flames. Michael Myers, thought to be dead in the burning house, strolls out of the flames and slaughters about a dozen firefighters.

It was around this point that I felt that "Halloween Kills" was off on the wrong foot. And it never gets back on the right one. Where to begin? For starters, the film makes the same mistake as 1981's "Halloween II" by relegating Curtis to a hospital bed, which she barely leaves during the film and spends much of her time in the company of Officer Hawkins (Will Patton), who was left stabbed and bleeding by Myers's kooky doctor in the previous film. In fact, the picture opens with a somewhat intriguing, if ultimately unnecessary, prologue set in 1978 — hello, digitally enhanced Donald Pleasance! — during which a young Hawkins (portrayed by Thomas Mann) misses his chance to kill Myers.

So, rather than focusing on Laurie, which was the selling point of the 2018 film, "Halloween Kills" instead focuses on a support group of characters who were in the 1978 film, some of whom are portrayed by the original actors, who meet annually on Halloween to commemorate surviving Myers' original massacre. They include Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), the leader of the group and once upon a time the young boy with many questions for Laurie, as well as Lindsey (Kyle Richards), the young girl being babysat in 1978; Lonnie Elam (Robert Longstreet), who bullied Tommy in the original film, and nurse Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens).

That group is together at a bar when they hear the news that Myers has escaped and is engaged in his latest rampage. Armed with purpose and a baseball bat, Tommy decides to take charge, rounding up a vigilante group — which quickly begins harassing the wrong man whom they believe to be Myers — and roaming the streets while shouting, "Evil dies tonight!" Strangely, the film focuses much more on this group — as well as an aging couple who are neighbors of Strode and a gay couple watching "Minnie and Moscowitz" in the former Myers home on Halloween night — rather than the 2018 characters, although Greer gets most of the film's best moments. These new — or rather, old — characters are merely here to be among Myers' latest victims.

The original "Halloween" was violent, but it wasn't fetishistic about it, and the 2018 version, while more so, wasn't either. This latest "Halloween," on the other hand, looks as if it were filmed by Lucio Fulci. Heads are smashed repeatedly against walls and necks are twisted at odd angles. A man is stabbed in the eye and blood sprays out of his socket, while another man has his eyes gouged out, the eyeball oozing out as blood sprays everywhere. A man who falls from a hospital window lays splayed on the sidewalk, his body parts arranged at grotesque angles and viscera spreads out over the sidewalk. "Halloween Kills" may not be very scary, but it's plenty gross. The film's Black and LGBTQ characters seem to bear the brunt of the violence.

Also, the film becomes even less scary as the characters discuss what they believe to be Myers' nature. In the original, Carpenter was smart enough to not assign any motivation to Myers, merely pronouncing him as "pure evil," which made him scarier. In this new film, you won't forget that he's evil because it's mentioned every few minutes.

Social commentary in horror movies is a longstanding tradition — director George Romero did it best with his "Dead" movies — but the mob mentality on display, which appears to bear some resemblance to individuals participating in election disruption around the nation late last year or storming the Capitol in January, comes off here as slightly ham-fisted. Green has noted that the last in the series will take place four years later during COVID-19 and "peculiar politics." This sounds compelling, but only time will tell if that films works better than this one.

But, perhaps, the strangest misstep in "Halloween Kills" is that its ending seems to fly completely in the face of what the 2018 film seemed to be saying. In that picture, three generations of women fought back against the violent man who'd left them frightened for years. The end of "Halloween Kills" seems to say that doing such a thing is, ultimately, a fruitless task and, well, there's no point to it. 

The picture has some moments that are intriguing — the opening sequence set in 1978, for example — but it ultimately squanders them in favor of relentlessly gory deaths, an over-the-top attempt at social commentary, the sidelining of its most interesting character and a bleak ending that contradicts the previous film's concept. Perhaps, the finale will be an improvement, but the 12th entry into this 43-year saga has too many unforced errors.