Halloween Kills (2021)

Movie rating: 4/10

Old franchises, like slasher movie villains, keep coming back long after they should be dead. In Hollywood today, IP is king and no story can ever end so long as a studio’s cash cow is still producing milk.

John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) is easily the greatest slasher film of all time and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) the ultimate final girl. The sequels amped up the violence and were decent entertainment, but never came close to matching the original. Successive films offered more insights into Michael Myers, but only made him less frightening the more they revealed. Rob Zombie’s reboot at least had the benefit of his unique artistic vision.

Now we have the Blumhouse Halloween trilogy, which ignores all the other sequels and reboots and functions as a direct sequel to the original. The trend of ignoring previous sequels has always struck me as the coward’s way out. The very title of Halloween (2018) represented another lazy trend, of not even bothering to give prequels or sequels different names (see also: 2011’s The Thing, 2022’s Scream). But I’ll admit I was pleasantly surprised. Here’s my original take after seeing the film:

Halloween (2018) review: A lot better than I expected. Making a direct sequel to the original as an exploration of trauma turned out to be a clever move. Jamie Lee Curtis gets to play Laurie as T2-era Sarah Connor, officially making her the most badass grandma in movie history. Meanwhile, John Carpenter actually expands and improves upon his classic score. Director David Gordon Green maintains suspense while amping up the brutality of the kills for a modern audience more desensitized to slasher film violence. 8/10

Unfortunately, the sequel sees a big drop in quality. The basic concept of Halloween Kills, again directed by Green, is interesting. After Michael escapes the fire he was trapped in at the end of the last film, the residents of Haddonfield, Illinois band together to hunt him down. It’s surprising that this concept hasn’t been done more in horror films. Usually we have a killer hunting down its victims one by one, but I don’t think I can recall a movie that focused on a group of people hunting down the killer. That makes sense: since there’s strength in numbers, ganging up to defeat a rampaging mass murderer is the logical move.

For its first half, Halloween Kills follows this plot more or less effectively, anchored by Anthony Michael Hall as an older Tommy Doyle—one of the children Laurie babysat in 1978—who leads the town’s effort to kill Michael Myers. But as the film went on it became more difficult to maintain my suspension of disbelief.

Based on the timeline of the series in which Michael Myers was born in 1957, “the Shape” would be 61 years old by the time this movie takes place. It’s difficult to accept a man of that age, who has spent most of his life in a sanitarium or in prison, taking as many hits, stabs, and major head trauma as Michael does and continuing to advance. That’s why it’s even more absurd in the middle of the film when a mob at the hospital becomes convinced that fugitive convict Lance Tovoli (Ross Bacon) is actually Myers. Sure, Michael wears a mask. But the short, overweight Tovoli bears no resemblance to the tall, powerfully built, fast-moving killer he is mistaken for.

One of the points of the film is that by keeping people in a state of fear, Michael is turning them into killers themselves. In case anyone missed it, a character asks in the least subtle way possible, “Have we become the monsters?” But that’s a disappointment after the movie began in a more intriguing way. Haddonfield is full of cops, but town residents make the valid point that police have failed to protect them. This is particularly interesting given movements like Black Lives Matter that have highlighted how police fail to stop crime and routinely kill unarmed civilians, putting forward slogans like “Defund the police” and even “Abolish the police”. Near the end of the first act, Tommy begins organizing fellow Haddonfield residents in a bid to find Michael. It would have been great to show ordinary citizens organizing to protect themselves better than police—something that has successfully happened throughout history in revolutionary or near-revolutionary situations. Instead, the movie ends up turning the masses into a disorganized mob, baying for the blood of a man who is clearly not Michael Myers.

By the end of the first hour, I was starting to become bored and unconcerned with what was happening onscreen. It doesn’t help that our main protagonist, Laurie, spends most of the movie incapacitated at the hospital. Since we know this is a trilogy and that the story won’t be resolved until Halloween Ends (2022), it becomes a question of just waiting around to see how Michael will cheat death at the end again. The way that happens is that the movie simply tosses all logic and believability out the window. Michael is cornered by a great many people and attacked in myriad ways that should kill him, but simply do not.

The movie tries to get around this by suggesting that Michael may in fact be a supernatural force:

Laurie Strode: I always thought Michael Myers was flesh and blood, just like you and me, but a mortal man could not have survived what he's lived through. The more he kills, the more he transcends into something else impossible to defeat. Fear. People are afraid. That is the true curse of Michael.

Allyson: He'll always be here, won't he? Even when we can't see him.

Laurie Strode: You can't defeat it with brute force.

Even if you buy into that concept, it was done with more subtlety and effectiveness in John Carpenter’s original. There Michael was simply referred to in the end credits as “The Shape”. He again mysteriously seemed to vanish at the end when he should have been dead. The difference is that Carpenter was offering audiences something new at the time and presenting these ideas with far more economy, inspiration, and creativity on an ultra-low budget. Here it feels like just going through the motions.

There are things to appreciate about Halloween Kills. The acting and music—again composed by Carpenter in an expansion of his classic synth score—are very well done. Michael Myers looks as threatening as he ever has. There are some amazing shots of him, particularly one early on in which he emerges from a house being consumed by flames, looking like a demon from hell. But I was left most strongly with a sense that I’d seen it all before.

In one scene a character stabs Michael with a pitchfork, a likely more symbolic moment than the filmmakers intended. We know he’ll be back at least one more time in Halloween Ends, and for as long as these movies are profitable. But Hollywood really should stick a fork in Michael Myers. Creatively speaking, he’s done.