John Carpenter's 1978 original Halloween
is quite an experience. It's scary and shocking, but also exciting and fun,
like being lost in a haunted house at the amusement park. And you are rooting
for the young, innocent babysitter to survive the assault from "The Boogeyman."
The new film in the series is Halloween Kills, which is the second film
in a trilogy that is supposed to be a direct sequel to the 1978 original,
erasing all the sequels in between, so Laurie Strode doesn't die twice, and
there is no link to the druids or even Busta Rhymes. Halloween Kills,
however, is a dour, mean-spirited movie that is all about the graphic kills and
nothing more.
When we last saw serial killer Michael
Myers (James Jude Courtney) in 2018's Halloween, he was trapped in a
house set ablaze by Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). Halloween Kills
opens with a wounded Laurie being rushed to a hospital as firemen fight the
fire and inadvertently free Myers so he can kill again. When news spreads that
Myers is on the loose again, Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), a childhood
survivor of "The Shape's" 1978 Halloween night carnage, puts together a mob to
hunt down and murder the seemingly unstoppable killer once and for all.
Like the 2018 film, Halloween Kills
is directed by the once talented David Gordon Green and co-written by Danny
McBride. I give them some credit for attempting subplots, but a side story of a
deputy wracked with guilt about events from 1978, as well as social commentary
about mob justice, are both poorly handled. They feel like throw away ideas
just to separate the kill scenes. The filmmakers couldn't decide if they wanted
us to be for or against the mob.
Curtis, the star of the film, is hardly
in it. She is sidelined to a hospital bed and likely shot all of her scenes in
just a few days. Then there are the returning cast members from the original
film—Kyle Richards as Lindsey, Nancy Stephens as Marion Chambers, and Charles
Cyphers as Leigh Brackett—as well as returning characters now played by
different actors, like Hall. Most of them are only here to die violently.
As for the kills, some come off as just
cruel. Yes, I know this is a horror movie, but there is an ugliness to Halloween
Kills, like when Myers plunges knife after knife into a dead man as his
dying wife watches or the hospital riot scene when a mother inadvertently sees
her dead, mutilated son on a slab.
In this movie, Myers may have killed
more people than Cecil B. DeMille. It's a ridiculously huge body count. So,
he's no longer "The Shape" or "The Boogeyman," but rather an offshoot of Arnold
Schwarzenegger from Commando or something like that. One thing is for
sure—he bears no resemblance to anything from the classic original film.
Halloween Kills is in theaters now, and is also available to stream on Peacock Premium.
