Halloween Kills: a 2021 movie with characters thinking like they were in a 1980's slasher
Universal Pictures
Where to Watch in Canada: In Theatres
Directed by David Gordon Green
Stars: Judi Greer, Andi Matichak, Will Patton, Jamie Lee Curtis, Dylan Arnold and Anthony Michael Hall
Right from the jump something felt off with the followup to the very successful 2018 version of' Halloween. The movie once again relies heavily on retelling the Michael Myers story, as if over ten movies later every person including those that have never watched the franchise don't know the story of Michael and the way he butchered his family. The grainy flashback attempt to period piece the flashback in this movie to the 1978 original doesn't work and just sets the tone for what lacklustre story was going to come next. The fact that they retold information that was widely known showed a lack of faith in the audiences knowledge, as well as a sign that they clearly didn't have much of a story to tell. Its your classic middle movie in a trilogy, but I would say this was just weaker than the average middle movie. Sure there are some good parts, but mostly Halloween Kills is one of the worst movies in the entire series.
Directly after the first movie, Michael Myers has survived yet again and continues his bloodbath. A vigilante mob forms to hunt down Michael and end his reign of terror for good
I like having this all happen over the same night as the original, but the more I think of it the more logistically it made no sense- the last movie went late into the night, so how many hours of nighttime exist in Haddonfield? Why did Laurie feel so confident that Michael was dead yet just minutes earlier she was screaming to let him burn? After all, she knows that her brother is not an ordinary man- yet we were expected to believe that she just completely believes her daughters lie that he's gone? The entire Thomas Mann storyline as the younger version of Will Pattons' Sheriff Frank Hawkins character is also an entirely unnecessary bag of questions when it comes to the direction that Green, Danny McBride, and Scott Teems, decide to take the character. All of this plus so much more that I wish I could get into but because of spoilers I will hold off on- were a clear indicator that our writers had no true direction or objective for this movie. It was purely a placeholder to get the story from A to B, and pave the way for Halloween Ends.
The writing doesn't get better outside of story arcs. There are so many characters that feel like they are straight out of the 1970's and 1980's where characters are just blood bags with no sense of logic or rational to their logic- being there purely to be murdered brutally on screen. Which is fine, if it's a single character that's being dumb for the sake of a glorious kill- but when the entire population of Haddonfield seems to share the same two braincells, then its clear that they just wanted cool kills and sacrificed believability to get there. The two John characters, Big and Little John, are the prime examples for just how terribly dumb the characters in this movie were written.
I have to also mention the painfully stupid moment inside the hospital, where clearly the message was about the negatives of mob mentalities. The way that we go about this message is so painstakingly bad as the mob accuses an individual of being Michael Myers, when the individual is like five foot eight, and i'm being generous. Michael Myers has been the boogeyman to this community for so long, his giant frame and intimidating walk supposedly haunts the dreams of Haddonfields residents- yet they mistake a five foot eight hunch back, for the six foot five confident apex predator.
The movie introduces the children of the 1978s' babysitter club, which had so much potential- as each individual has their own experiences and reasons for revenge against the deadly masked man. Yet, much like Jamie Lee Curtis, they're all disregarded as bodybags and purely their for references and cameos- none of them have any massive significance in the story outside of their original introduction earlier in the film and none of them get any justice. Outside of Tommy Doyle, whose "Evil Dies Tonight" chant is bound to become a drinking game when this movie hits the theatre- none of the babysitters club has any relevance, nor reason for us to care about them more than any of the unnamed mob-members.
There have been so many disappointing entries throughout the years to this franchise, but i truly believe that Halloween Kills may very well be the biggest let down of the bunch. After the solid introduction that its original instalment was, to have three years later this be one of the laziest written movies in recent memory is shockingly bad. Sacrificing character development, and logic, for some epic kills, and there definitely were a few epic kills, is a bad writing decision that left zero stakes in the movie and left me rubbing my eyes as I exited my theatre.
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