I loved 2018’s direct sequel to the original Halloween, but does the new film continue the rebooted timeline with a similar thought-provoking flair, or does it fall into the same traps that have plagued the franchise in the past?
Halloween Kills is a very confused movie. To be clear, the plot is not confusing – far from it, in fact – but what we are meant to take away from the film seems impossible to understand. I have a series of questions for us to tackle one at a time:
Question # 1: Does the person who named this movie think that Michael Meyers is called Halloween? Like, maybe the producer’s girlfriend who doesn’t know anything about horror cinema watched it and was like “Halloween sure kills a lot of people in this movie.” and “Why does Halloween remind me of T.J. Hooker?” and “Is Halloween immortal, or what?”
Question #2: Is Halloween immortal, or what? Sorry – Is Michael immortal, or what? I have admittedly only seen a handful of Halloween films, but in my experience Meyers has been presented as exceedingly tough, sure, but no more so than someone like Vin Diesel in the Fast and Furious movies. In Halloween Kills, Meyers is unmistakably inhuman based on the amount of stabbings, gunshots and immolations that he suffers with no ill effects. I don’t mind a supernatural slasher villain at all, but the fact that they are supernatural needs to be established in-universe. Everyone in this movie comes off like idiots by trying to take down what amounts to a Marvel villain with baseball bats and charcuterie knives.
Question #3: Does this movie want to sell me on the merits of vigilante justice, or warn me of the folly of the same? This is probably where the film gets wrapped around the axel the most. Anthony Michael Hall plays the grown up version of Tommy Doyle, the boy Jamie Lee Curtis was babysitting in the original story. He, along with a group of other survivors from Michael’s first killing spree, plot to take the law into their own hands and destroy the evil that is Michael Meyers once and for all. At one point, he rallies a zealous mob to stalk the wrong person, and that person ends up jumping out of a window to his death to avoid the apparent lynching he has coming his way. This section feels like a cautionary tale about mob justice, but later when the mob confronts the real Meyers, I’m clearly meant to pump my fist in the air and root them on. It’s not as if the filmmakers don’t have a particular point of view on the subject, but rather that they have two very strong yet conflicting views.
Question #4: Is this considered the second or third part of a story, and how many parts are left? It seems that Blumhouse wants to make a trilogy of Halloween movies, which is a dandy of an idea, except that they seem to forget that the first part of the trilogy is actually the 1978 Halloween that they rely on so heavily for their films’ set-up and lore. That leaves Halloween Kills in a weird limbo between being the middle of a trilogy and being the third film in a quadrilogy, which is not really a thing. This causes massive structural problems, because the story needs to get us to the big showdown between Curtis’ character, Laurie Strode, and Michael, but it can’t yet. So what we end up with is the film’s biggest asset (Curtis) sidelined from all of the action while Michael pads his kill count and there is negligible forward motion in the overarching story (beyond a single significant kill, which I hated.) The movie’s plotting lacks the rise and fall required to tell an engaging story, instead starting with Michael killing more people on Halloween night and proceeding in a straight line from there.
I would be interested to learn about the production history of this movie, and whether it was tumultuous. It feels like there was a script written that extended the prior film’s exploration of PTSD, and looked at how fear drives people’s worst instincts, and maybe analyzed the cycle of violence. Then, via some form of studio interjection, that script was carved to pieces like a Hadenfield fireman. What was pieced back together has a heavy focus on Michael getting a ton of impressively brutal kills, but lacks any kind of thematic coherence with the previous movie, or even within itself. It just fell so flat for me, which is a shame because I can look back now and see the perfect symmetry that the 1978 and 2018 Halloweens had that was spoiled by the desire to extend this story past the point where there was anything left to say.
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