Halloween Kills (2021)
SHOULD I SEE IT?
YES
For those fans who enjoyed the 2018 relaunch of Halloween, this sequel has definitely been something you have been waiting for.
Full of violent kills and some quasi-timely themes, Halloween Kills lays the groundwork to keep this franchise alive a little bit longer.
Comes with a lot of mayhem, violence, and incorporates elements of the 1978 original to try and make this feel like a cohesive story from beginning to this temporary end.
NO
Seriously people. What are we even doing here?
Spits in your face and then tries to convince you its merely raining. Halloween Kills is an ugly, cruel, joyless viewing experience.
Remember when horror films used to be intense and scary? Now we just make a movie where websites write articles ranking and counting the amount of kills. Basically, Halloween Kills is cinematic clickbait.
OUR REVIEW
In the 2021 sequel Halloween Kills, now in theaters and streaming for Peacock subscribers, the film begins directly after the final scene in 2018’s Halloween. With everything that occurred in that film and over the course of this one, October 31, 2018, at least in the town of Haddonfield, Illinois, may be one of the most eventful days in our nation’s history.
Of course there is no Haddonfield, Illinois and there is no actual serial killer named Michael Myers. After about 20 minutes of this film, I wished there was not a movie named Halloween Kills. Uglier in tone and intent, gorier, and more unnecessary than the 2018 film, director David Gordon Green appears to be working through some things and using Michael Myers (portrayed by both James Jude Courtney and Nick Castle) as his muse.
The entire premise of the film is silly. At the end of 2018’s film, the endurable Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) have lured a rampaging Michael Myers back to Laurie’s home, conned him into the house, and have set the entire structure ablaze. Of course, Michael is trapped in a safe room when the embers catch fire, and lo and behold, he has escaped to live to slaughter another day.
And so naturally, Green and collaborators Danny McBride (yep, still that one) and co-writer Scott Teems, pick things up moments after Laurie is rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. Cameron (Dylan Arnold), who cheated on Allyson an hour or two before in the timeline, and I think who we are supposed to hate, becomes something of a hero in finding the injured Deputy Hawkins (Will Patton) and helping him get to the hospital. Later, he reunites with Allyson to come together to try and kill Michael. Yay to short memories and boo to continuity!
Much of this installment finds Laurie in a hospital bed next to Deputy Hawkins while Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), one of the kids Laurie babysat in the 1978 film, decides to bring together an angry mob to end Michael once and for all.
There is nostalgia pumped into this effort here and there, but Halloween (and I’ll say it louder for the people in the back) was never really about grisly murders, serial killers and gore. At its core, Michael Myers embodied fear and anxiety. In the 1978 film, co-writer and director John Carpenter told the story through Laurie’s observations of being a teenager, growing up, fearful of what may come and uncertain of what awaits outside of the Haddonfield city boundaries. As much as anything, Halloween was about the fear of the unknown and how it can consume people into worrying what may come when the protections of growing up fall away. That Michael murdered his teenage sister as a child helped create a pall that hung over the town and only added to a sense of increasing intensity throughout Carpenter’s classic film. As recently theorized (and somewhat poorly I might add), Halloween was no knock-off of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The movie was its own fascinating, multi-layered horror story with stakes embedded in real world anxieties.
This ain’t that.
Much like the 2018 Halloween, this is a bastardization of what made the source film sustain such an important legacy. People have bent over backwards to talk about how Green’s 2018 work was about grief and the trappings it can place on someone. I mean, I guess, but it also made no sense when it came to the practicality of how to survive a murderous lunatic and took way too much glee in murdering podcasters and extending out death scenes that tried to one-up themselves in scene after scene and the more they occurred.
This time around, a gay couple’s death is played as something of a goof. A kindly interracial couple have a prolonged, agonizing end to their lives. Nothing matters. When an angry mob takes over the psychiatric hospital and Laurie marvels at Michael’s creation, you might as well insert your January 6 insurrection parallels and symbolism and let your analogies run wild.
(And yes, I am aware Green shot the film in 2019. Maybe he is a psychic. The parallels are there.)
In one of the dumbest sequences in any film this year, this mob Tommy assembles mistakes a paunchy, balding, hunched over man, who can barely run (Ross Bacon), for the hulking, strong, upright and lanky Michael. They insist that this guy is Michael, somehow believing they have stumbled upon the indestructible Michael Myers in a hospital gown with no signs of any injuries whatsoever.
I’d laugh if the movie earned it, but instead that sequence is just another baffling and insulting decision made by Green and crew. What’s become clear, as websites write gleeful articles about how many people die and how they all meet their demise in Halloween Kills, is how nothing about the 1978 film matters. Like to anyone.
Nuance? Gone. Trusting the audience? Forget it. Cheap, tawdry laughs after witnessing light tubes stab into a person’s jugular? Why not!
Halloween Kills is the middle portion of a trilogy that culminates with Halloween Ends in 2022. At this point, do we even need it? Let’s just ring the bell and declare Michael Myers champion. He seemingly survives all, including the deconstruction of everything that made him a horror movie icon in the first place.
CAST & CREW
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, James Jude Courtney, Nick Castle, Will Patton, Anthony Michael Hall, Thomas Mann, Jim Cummings, Dylan Arnold, Robert Longstreet, Charles Cyphers, Scott MacArthur, Michael McDonald, Ross Bacon, Kyle Richards, Nancy Stephens, Diva Tyler, Lenny Clarke, Michael Smallwood, Carmela McNeal.
Director: David Gordon Green
Written by: Scott Teems, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green
Based on characters created by: John Carpenter, Debra Hill
Release Date: October 15, 2021
Universal Pictures | Peacock