Halloween Kills The Franchise
An unimaginably frustrating experience, Halloween Kills dares to steal the crown for worst Halloween movie ever made — hokier than the retconned sequels and uglier than the Rob Zombie remakes. Between the asinine script and the unnecessarily brutal violence, the film is dumbed down to the ranks of a limp-dick Friday the 13th sequel at best. Among the film’s crimes, the most horrifying is how Kills manages to not only reprimand the successful 2018 sequel but also exploit the 1978 classic, begging the question as to why we didn’t just leave Michael Myers alone in Haddonfield more than four decades ago.
David Gordon Green returns to direct — although difficult to tell that this is the same guy who delivered Halloween (2018) — and after a strong opening sequence recreating the events of Michael’s capture in 1978, not just in the way the sequence was shot but down to that Loomis lookalike, Halloween Kills proves by the end of its grueling 1h 45m runtime that it has no true story to tell.
Picking up right where H18 leaves off, Laurie Strode — the impressively committed Jaime Lee Curtis — sits in the back of a truck with her family after having burned her house to the ground, trapping Michael Myers to his apparent death by fire. Naturally, this being a Halloween sequel, a team of firefighters flee to put out the flames, unknowingly setting free the menacing boogeyman as Laurie screams “Let it burn!” — a worthy metaphor for what has seemingly become a scorched franchise.
Michael — like the star of a Nine Inch Nails music video — emerges from the flames in slow motion, charred halloween mask still on, to very rudely slaughter all the firemen who unknowingly save him. Death by impalement, pickax and buzz saw to the face merely set the bloody stage for what will become a mind-numbing exercise of violence for the 90 minutes to follow. With a 30+ person body count (the highest in the franchise) the film absolutely sells the kills in its title, and if Michael Myers butchering people is the only reason to tune into a Halloween flick, then Halloween Kills outguns them all — except that’s not the element that cemented John Carpenter’s original as a stone-cold horror classic, at all.
Halloween (1978) has atmosphere; mood, suspense, character development — the psychological torture of a young girl being stalked by a masked killer from a distance until the moment he attacks. Halloween (2018) follows this formula, peppered in with modern themes of PTSD and survival, and both films succeed because they create absolute tension surrounding a haunting presence who instills fear by those that merely speak his name. Halloween Kills on the other hand is a nonsensical charade of endlessly gruesome violence that is void of suspense and absent of character.
One of the film’s early examples of brutality paints the film’s lifeless tone as Michael breaks a tube light and shoves it through a woman's neck. The scene is of course topped with the woman having to watch her already dead husband slumped over like a hunk of meat be repeatedly stabbed in the back by Michael, who's trying out every knife in the kitchen, because reasons. Halloween Kills is an unimaginably violent film for seemingly no reason other than to sell the kills in the 'Kills.' Worse than the violence, Kills is also a brainless slog of a story in which the citizens of Haddonfield -- who all but carry torches and pitchforks -- walk around chanting 'Evil dies tonight' so many times, the audience will be begging for Michael to gauge their eyes out the same way he does to a poor bastard nearing the third act.
There's a point in Halloween Kills where the film's plot completely shifts to the Haddonfield mob attempting to corner Michael Myers in the town hospital, and seek revenge on him for wreaking havoc on their town -- and the scene is quite literally one of the most absurd, morally questionable, visually appalling things to happen in a Halloween movie, and perhaps any horror movie of recent memory. If Green hadn't already proved that he had no clear story to tell with Kills, it's absolutely evident in this scene. Without entirely spoiling it, essentially all of Haddonfield mistakes an escaped mental patient for Michael Myers -- Myers, who is a tall, slender, giant -- and the patient resembles the appearance of Danny Devito's Penguin in Batman Returns.
The film is an absolute abomination that once again abandons Jaime Lee Curtis in a hospital for the entire film (for the second time in the franchise), leaving no beating heart or soul in any of the characters. Any likable character is brutally murdered, and the climax leaves one of the most asinine showdowns in horror movie history (a lady shows up to fight Michael Myers with an IRON -- A CLOTHING IRON). Unless Gordon Green and McBride are secretly tapping into their comedic roots and delivering the most unintentionally hilarious comedy of 2021, then it stands that Halloween Kills is maybe the biggest monstrosity of the entire Halloween franchise, perhaps only behind Halloween Resurrection. Then again, Resurrection at least has the common courtesy of Busta Rhymes drop-kicking Michael Myers, for better or worse. Halloween Kills on the other hand has a bunch of senior citizens shouting "Evil dies tonight" with the same energy of the crowd yelling "Brennan has a mangina" in Step Brothers.
