Alright, so we've come to it at last. Is this going to be the glorious middle part of a trilogy like The Empire Strikes Back or is it going to be a horrible, horrible mistake like... y'know what? It's 2023 and I'm not beating that particular dead horse any more dead than it already is. Let's just get into it.
We begin where we left off last year. Actually, we don't. Laurie's (Jamie Lee Curtis) granddaughter's (Andi Matichak) ex-boyfriend finds the guy who drunkenly tried to coerce her into sex having been impaled through a fence and Deputy Hawkins (Will Patton) still alive and having a flashback to Halloween night 1978... where a younger him was apparently pursuing Michael Myers... a night that sits firmly in his mind and affirms his modern affirmation that he must kill Michael.
A brief note here before continuing the plot summary: We get a few links to the past, much like we did in the 2018 film. Here, they're... way more overt and obvious, sad to say. The recreations of Haddonfield in 1978 are good, of course and go through a lot of detail (they even got the original Myers House right in most of the details from the '78 movie), but it shows how little there is actually going on in the modern era... and what does go on is... anywhere between intense and frankly very odd. One last note about the 1970s scenes - the recreation of Donald Pleasance as Loomis was not only masterfully done, but only done with makeup rather than with CGI. Well done indeed!
Anyway, Frank had an opportunity to kill Michael Myers that night, but wasn't able to finish the job. The cops captured Michael after he murdered one additional victim that night, bringing his body count up to seven for Halloween 1978 in this continuity. But hey, at least Ben Tramer is still alive!
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| "I don't know what happened! All I did was pour a bowl of cereal!" |
Forty years later, Hawkins remains haunted as does pretty much all of Haddonfield and tonight is the night that they rectify that mistake. As is said in the film about thirty times by various characters - "Evil dies tonight!".
Spoiler alert: It doesn't.
Let's get this out of the way - I know this is a polarizing film in the fandom and I completely see why. The flashbacks are done very well and with great detail and love clearly given to the franchise. It is very clear that the people who made this film love the Halloween franchise... at least the '78 film. Unfortunately, that is tempered with the modern era scenes, which get repetitive really, really fast and don't really have too much of substance I'm sorry to say.
The kills tend to be pretty alright and Michael really works on getting his total back up after the 2018 movie nerfed him back down to just who he killed in the '78 film. In the first sequence after escaping Laurie's burning cabin, Michael downs seven firefighters in rapid succession (and we later find out he killed eleven in total) and it's only the beginning of a frankly staggering killing spree for just one movie even in the slasher genre. So, if you're up for the kills, then Halloween Kills most definitely has you covered.
Oh, and by the way: Michael Myers has killed Marion Chambers twice by the end of this movie. Spoiler alert.
What it doesn't have is a consistent tone, which is also a problem its predecessor had in points but not nearly to this degree. I'm aware that Danny McBride and David Gordon Green are more famous for their comedy (although Green didn't start as a comedy director and McBride has been in several movies outside of comedy), and there are plenty of scenes here where that is showcased, such as when Michael breaks into the house of a comic relief couple... and I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to be terrified or supposed to be laughing, given the banter between the husband and wife before Michael unalives them in gratuitously gory fashion. This really needed to be toned down a lot and it really wasn't, so the film suffers for it.
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| "Okay, so the safety word is 'Samhain'." |
Another example is outside a bar where Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) leads a mob to attack a vehicle that has not Michael Myers in it as they believe, but a wounded and terrified Smith's Grove patient who is severely injured by the crash that follows and barely escapes.
And for three, we have a scene where a woman tries to shoot Michael and his hits her hand with a car door, forcing her to shoot herself through the face. I actually got an audible laugh out of that one, but it's also the same scene where Marion Chambers is brutally murdered and Lindsey Wallace is brutally attacked... and then later, Tommy and the others find three bodies on a playground with the masks from Halloween III put on them by Michael (nice touch, by the way). I'm just not sure, tone-wise, what is it I'm supposed to think.
Hell, let's go four for four: we have Michael stalking a stoned gay couple that now live in the Myers house intercut with the mob mistaking Smith's Grove patient from earlier for Michael (...somehow) and eventually causing his death at their hands when he jumps out of a window to escape them. There you go, four prime examples of how absolutely schizophrenic the tone is throughout pretty much this entire movie.
The film's second biggest problem is... it's adoration of the original. Now, I love the original film. Love it. I do. I really do, but if I wanted to watch the original movie, I'd just watch the original movie. And there is way too much "Yes, we've seen the original movie" in this movie. This isn't a problem specific to this movie, Halloween 4 was particularly guilty of this. Simply repeating or paying homage to the original film is not enough to make the movie interesting or good. The reason why I like Halloween 5 so much, despite its own flaws, is that it didn't just try to repeat or drown itself in the original '78 film, but instead tried to do something different. Halloween Kills... does very little different and doesn't make much of an attempt to do so at points where it really would have helped.
A minor complaint of mine is that Laurie is barely in it, spending a majority of the film confined to a hospital bed after the events of the previous movie. It's understandable, of course, but it really brings the film down when we're left with only Laurie's daughter (Judy Greer) and granddaughter that we barely know... and are left with the survivors of the '78 film and a bunch of brand new yahoos that we don't really know and most haven't been introduced until this film.
Paraphrasing Noah in the Scream series, you have to care so it hurts when the bodies start dropping. We don't care about these people and we don't have any real reason to. More to the point, other than them just being the people of Haddonfield being sick of Michael's shit, the film gives us no reason to care about any of them. To give the film credit, it tries... but we really have no time to get invested in or care about anyone outside of Laurie and her family. Even the familiar names like Tommy Doyle, Lindsey Wallace, and so on... don't resonate like they should.
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| "It's Halloween, everyone's entitled to one good movie... it just isn't this one." |
Also, by the way, Paul Rudd was actually contacted about reprising his role as Tommy Doyle from The Curse of Michael Myers, but he... literally had anything else better to do, and I'd say he dodged a bullet on this one.
In the end, Halloween Kills is a stop gap film. It's abundantly clear that it was filler between what the filmmakers wanted to do... and what they wanted to do. Given that with the 2018 film this was intended to be only two films rather than three, I guess they didn't quite know what to do with the time in the middle that they were given by Blumhouse. It leans so heavily on the '78 film that it's about to break that film's legs, the tone is wildly inconsistent for its genre, and we are given an entire town full of characters that we really just have to see as sacks of meat that exist to be busted open as soon as Michael puts on Drowning Pool's "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor".
If you're wanting a high body count, the film does provide... but that's really it, and I'm not sure even the fans of the blood and gore enjoy this one. If you want a good movie from the franchise... well, it's not this one. It's not the worst, that I will say, but it's definitely one that needed more work done on it than what we got. This is bad, make no mistake, even for the few qualities it does have that are good.
But hey, we have Halloween Ends coming up. The clear second half of what the filmmakers wanted to do to begin with. I'm sure that that won't turn out to be a complete and utter pile of garbage specifically made to piss people off and be even worse than this one, right?
...right?
...hello?
...I have a bad feeling about this.
Halloween Kills is brought to us by Miramax, Blumhouse Productions, and Trancas International Films.
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