“Halloween Kills” (2021) is the direct sequel to “Halloween” (1978) and “Halloween” (2018). It starts right where the latter left off. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter, Karen (Judy Greer), and her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak) are wounded but triumphant believing that they have finally killed Michael Myers (Nick Castle) by trapping and burning him alive in grandma’s home, but nope. When the town finds out that Mike is back, they decide that “Evil dies tonight” and are under the misguided belief that they are the ones to do it. On a completely unrelated note, “Halloween Ends” is slated to come out on October 14, 2022.
“Halloween Kills” is technically the twelfth installment in the Halloween franchise, including Rob Zombie’s spin on the story. For the record, I have seen every movie, but most of them are forgettable absurd crap. I have not seen most of them since the nineties, so I don’t remember a lot, but apparently this feature borrows a lot of elements from these sequels, which is baffling to me. Did these filmmakers really decide to erase their predecessors just so they could take others’ lesser ideas and make them seem fresh and original? If I had to prepare to see this film again, I may have rewatched “Halloween II” (1981) because most of the action takes place in a hospital, and I appreciated the fact that this hospital was at least well-lit and full.
If “Halloween Kills” stuck to its mission statement and was only interested in the original, this Mike seems unrecognizable from Michael Myers. I have rewatched the original multiple times, two times this year. “Halloween Kills” is right to draw on the idea that Michael Myers is attached to and aggressively possessive of his mask and his house, but the only thing separating Mike from John Wick are his opponents. He will dispatch anyone, anywhere with anything, and there is very little reason for it. The filmmakers seem to think that being a psycho killer is sufficient motivation for his actions in this movie, but I want Michael Myers to hire me so we can sue for defamation.
Michael Myers is a voyeur. He enjoys watching, scaring, and killing people, and he takes his time doing so. He does not kill everyone who crosses his path, especially children. He gives them time to get away and focuses on the babysitters once their charges are safe. He will kill someone to steal their car or clothes but not necessarily since the hardware store was just a B&E. Because he only relates to and interacts with people through murder, his homicidal relationship with teenage girls is the most memorable in the first movie. He stabs and strangles them, but Michael does not know how to be a guy his age and is curious about that as well. When he kills Lynda’s boyfriend, Bob, in the original, he stops and studies Bob in a distinct way that he does not do with any of his other victims then decides to disguise himself as Bob to kill Lynda. Michael needs the William Shatner mask to act, but when he wants to do something more, he needs additional disguises. For Michael, killing allows him to get closer to people, relate to them and do a poor mimicry of them. He is literally masking, but because he is so warped, instead of expressing sexual interest in women, he kills them.
In “Halloween Kills,” anyone can get it. Are you a firefighter who saves Mike’s life? You can get it. Obnoxious kids trick or treating? You can get it. While I prefer more of this film to “Halloween” (2018), they both share the same unfortunate qualities without considering the implications. In both movies, he goes into random, irrelevant people’s houses and kills them then leaves and kills people on his way elsewhere. While I am willing to concede that Mike would invade a house to get supplies, he would not necessarily kill someone if they did not get in the way. This part of the franchise cares more about body count and graphic kills than the overall story. The filmmakers see Mike as a killing machine, not a fucked up person. Mike would be more at home in a nightclub with strobe lights flashing as he kills scores of people with techno music playing in the background.
The original and “Halloween Kills” are consistent in depicting Michael’s love of destroying happy couples. This sequel has two adorable couples: an elderly biracial couple and a same sex middle aged couple with the same first name so they adorably call each other Little John and Big John. Yes, their names are ironic. The growing diversity of Haddonfield is to be applauded, but widening Michael’s victim pool feels regressive as if Michael is punishing people for being different. Why am I not offended? Because he kills everyone.
John Carpenter had a sense of pacing which heightened the tension with judicious kills whereas “Halloween Kills” is all chaos cinema and Beauty and the Beast’s Mob Song without the music. It is the one Halloween film which would have been better if Laurie Strode just stayed comatose for the entire movie to reduce the number of bloviated monologuing about evil. Instead there are flashes of badassery that end in disappointment as she sits her ass down after a rigorous jaunt down the hallway.
“Halloween Kills” uses a shell game sleight of hand to shift focus from Laurie to Haddonfield and the cops as the main antagonist to Mike. The film seamlessly recreates 1978 Halloween night after Dr. Loomis shot Michael and follows the sheriff’s men as they try to track him down. Visually it is the best part of the film. One of those men knew Michael as a child and establishes Michael’s motivation. He just wants to stand at his window and look at the town. If you stand there, he is going to kill you. Why this spot? What is he looking at? The movie cannot decide: Haddonfield or his reflection in the window. The movie renders Laurie redundant. The cops take Laurie’s place as the real victims, and this theme continues in the present with Laurie and Hawkins, a sheriff’s deputy, sharing a hospital room. Does it work? It is strange that the flashback never references Annie’s death, and Sheriff Brackett does not appear until later in the film. If these men are to be sympathetic, it would be as people in mourning for the loss of their daughter, but the film does not understand basic human emotion and sympathy.
I normally love movies that explore social issues, but “Halloween Kills” is a glaring exception. The film tries to critique police brutality and mob mentality, which would be fine outside of this context. Gasp the cops wanted to beat and kill Michael Myers and framed him for killing a cop. Um, even without the cop killing, Michael Myers had still killed five people earlier and attacked at least one. Police brutality and extrajudicial murders are bad, but considering that Mike can’t die, he will be fine. Don’t cape for the immortal murderer.
“Halloween Kills” is effective at drawing from the story’s mythology and revisiting the first movie’s characters to see who they are forty years later, but these characters are superficial and just add to the body county. The Dead Zone’s Anthony Michael Hall plays Tommy Doyle, the now grown, former little boy that Laurie babysat on that fateful night. The movie tries to suggest that ordinary people are just as monstrous as Mike, but once again, the filmmakers do not understand that less is more. The first film is chilling because Haddonfield was populated, but felt abandoned. The adults were complicit in Michael’s murders because they refused to help or parent their children. Children were protecting children. 2021 Haddonfield is the complete opposite, and considering Covid, their loud and dumb response feels realistic as they rush to get killed, but makes it hard to take the moralizing against mobs seriously if they are so ineffective. Someone needed to beg Stephen King to consult on this film because in such works as The Mist and Storm of the Century, King manages to give a personality to the masses. On the other hand, if the film had developed the persecuted mental patient mistaken for Mike, then maybe the lesson would have landed, but it just feels like another distraction. Instead, viewers walk away with the lesson that police brutality and mobs are bad except when directed at Mike. (Side note: Michael can drive so if someone dressed in white crashes your car, it is not him.)
I do not like group activities so it seems unlikely that I would join a mob, but if I did, and if I had lost my mind and thought that we could beat Mike, I would contribute by taking and destroying the mask. Do not let Mike put his mask back on! Someone else can rent and operate a wood chipper then take the bits to a crematorium. Black people would not be in that mob. We would be running the other way once Mike appeared. Also I’m slightly mad at any movie that leaves me yearning for a Josh Hartnett character that at least appeared to be able to go toe to toe with Mike if he was not supernatural. Additional footnote: firefighters’ instinct would not be to square up against someone emerging from a fire, especially since there was no Mike alert yet.
All my good will for “Halloween Kills” evaporated in the final scenes. Mike’s supernatural abilities now includes astral projection and teleportation. Another solution: build a thick Plexiglas wall around the Meyer home and just let him stare out the window, but keep a clear perimeter. Have lookouts to make sure that Mike is not on the move.
“Halloween Kills” is not so bad that it is good. It feels as if the movie did not have to suck, but it did, which is a shame because the solid elements were there before it took a hard left.
