Review: Halloween Kills my love for cinema

Michael Myers, the menace that never dies (thanks largely to box office results and the general incompetence of his victims), returns again in Halloween Kills, the latest film in the Halloween franchise hitting theaters this weekend. Or if you’re a big fan of The Office and have Peacock, you can watch it there too. The question is, should you? Let’s get into it.

However, before we do, I want to put my cards on the table, as always, and tell you I didn’t see the first Halloween. The first one from 2018, not the first one from 1978, though I haven’t seen that one either. But I have seen a good amount of the sequels from the original series, and I remember that the context never being particularly important (especially not for Season of the Witch). So I figured I could stroll on into a showing of Halloween Kills and get a nice self-contained film. I was wrong.

What happens in Halloween Kills?

Halloween Kills follows right after the events of Halloween (2018), on the very same Halloween night, and the movie very much expects you to have seen the last one. I mean, is it really important? Eh, no. The movie catches you up to speed well enough with some lines here and there, a clip or two. However, one thing the movie doesn’t care to do is reintroduce the characters in interesting ways. Laurie, her daughter, her daughter’s daughter…they just appear and get lost in the swarm of other characters. And there is a swarm of them.

There are a lot of characters in this movie, and I don’t like any of them. Well, actually the couple that moved into the Myers house are interesting, but the rest of ‘em, snoresville. At least until they reach their — no spoilers — final scene.

So there’s this old gang of boomers, two teenagers, a Sheriff, an insane escaped inmate, a gang of punk trick-or-treaters, the new owners of the Myers house, and then the Strode family. Halloween Kills suffers from a surfeit of characters, and there isn’t enough time to get to know or like any of them. And when we do spend a little time with them, the dialogue does nothing for me. It’s just bad, on the nose and with no style.

An example: at one point, we cut to the inside of a car, and we hear a woman say, “Dr. Loomis was right!” “Who?” someone asks from the backseat. “Michael Myers’s first doctor. He knew evil when he saw it!”

And then we hard cut to something else. Boom, that’s the scene. And I ask myself as I sit there, Why was that important to see? Little did I know that it would all pay off in the character’s final scene. She points a six-shooter and Mikey and says, “This is for Loomis!” See, if she hadn’t randomly brought up Loomis the first time, it wouldn’t make sense when she does it this time.

The story doesn’t have a clear protagonist. Or if it does, it’s sure as hell not Laurie Strode. She’s incapacitated for most of the movie. All she does is talk to this other guy next to her in the hospital room about Myers. There’s two scenes of it and it all sounds the same. Credit where credit is due: Jamie Lee Curtis does the best she can, but asking her to make this script work is like presenting Michelangelo with a pile of cow manure and saying, “Alright, now paint me something as good as the Sistine Chapel.”

So there are no main characters, but there is a substitute: in the first act of the movie it looked like the protagonist was going to be a collective mob set on killing Myers. As the movie goes on the mob gets bigger and bigger. Are any of the characters interesting? No, but I thought the idea of a bunch of scared people gathering in defense of one person was interesting. I was really expecting something good from that.

Alas, I am a fool. Instead of fighting Myers, the mob somehow confuses the known giant with superhuman strength and endurance with a short, stocky escaped inmate. It must be because both he and Myers are bald. It had barely anything to do with anything, and after that the mob is gone until the very end, where it can disappoint me again with another anticlimax.

Is Halloween Kills scary?

The horror elements in Halloween Kills are just meh to me. Plenty of characters die, but no one I like or hate enough to want dead, so they mean nothing to me emotionally. Sometimes Myers gets rough with it and I cringe, but not much beyond that. This film also loves its fake-out scares with sharp loud music. The only fun kills are when Michael kills a group of several people who gang up on him, and only then because it’s goofy as hell. Halloween Kills suddenly becomes an action flick with Myers taking people out one by one as they run up to him.

So, yeah, that was Halloween Kills. Overall, it was a mildly amusing waste of time that’s just setting up for another movie where Laurie fights Myers in a final showdown…at least until the  next sequel. If I were the producers, I’d call the next one Halloween Dies.

Or Halloween Dries, Michael does his laundry.

Or Halloween Drives, Michael starts working for Uber. Just about anything would be more interesting than this.

Grade: D+

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