Halloween Kills Review (Film, 2021)
content warning: blood, gore, violence against women, medical/surgical footage, death by suicide, foul language
Halloween Kills pretty much picks up where Halloween (2018) leaves off. While the women of the Strode family escape Laurie’s burning home in the back of a pickup truck, the fire department arrives to put out the blaze. Michael Myers has survived the inferno and continues his killing spree on Haddonfield. A group of survivors decides enough is enough and try to take justice into their own hands.
There are three major flaws to this narrative approach. The first is trying too hard to make every character to ever appear in the original two Halloween films matter. The second is giving away Laurie Strode’s storyline to the whole town. The third is the lack of content.
First, a Halloween talent show performance at a local bar reveals that many minor characters in the Halloween universe (at least what these films accept as the Halloween universe) still exist. There’s Tommy, the boy who Laurie Strode was babysitting. There’s Lindsey, the neighbor girl Laurie Strode’s friend was babysitting. There’s Marion, the nurse that Michael carjacked when escaping the hospital. There’s the father of a victim, another child who narrowly escaped dying, a cop who was involved in the original capture of Michael, and a slew of other people who knew someone who knew someone who got killed in Halloween or Halloween II.
So many new characters we have no real pre-existing relationship with are introduced as main characters in this film. All those big characters from the Halloween (2018)—Laurie’s daughter and granddaughter, the granddaughter’s boyfriend, the one detective who comes so close to capturing Michael—are put on the backburner for most of the film. They’ll pop up to remind you of things that happened in Halloween (2018) but otherwise are ignored in favor of the new characters. They’re ignored by the screenplay and they’re literally ignored by the townspeople out for vengeance.
The result is a body count slasher. When characters are introduced out of nowhere and given funny or quirky scenes to make them memorable, they’re just there to pad a slasher film or the next sequel. The acting is such a mixed bag this time around because these actors have so little work with. It’s, ironically, the actors with experience in comedy, like Michael McDonald and Scott MacArthur, that find the most depth and actually feel like they belong in a Halloween film. Kyle Richards also finds great moments as Lindsey, a thankless role that she performs the hell out of.
Even then, I was left not caring who lived or died. When the film finally tries to recenter on any character we were told was important in the first film, it’s too late. I’m not being facetious when I describe people as the boyfriend or the granddaughter; I genuinely don’t remember enough about them after over an hour of having to constantly learn new characters to care.
This brings us to the second flaw: giving up Laurie Strode’s story. In Halloween (2018), we discover that Laurie Strode is a woman obsessed. Her entire life is a cycle of drug and alcohol abuse to escape the pain and preparing to fight Michael Myers again. No one in the town believes her, treating her like an outsider who’s gone off the deep end. Then she turns out to be right and does everything she can to act on her training.
Out of nowhere, every person in town is ready to grab the closest thing they have to a weapon and take down Michael Myers. They still don’t listen to a word Laurie Strode says, but they sure have no problem stealing her entire role in the new film to feel good about themselves. Laurie’s story of preparation and revenge does not work when expanded to mob justice because a mob is not something that is actually planned and considered.
This leads to the film spinning its wheels for over an hour. Different people in town get together to hunt down Michael while Michael kills another group of people. Lather, rinse, repeat. The former survivors lead the way, but have seemingly learned nothing, not even what Michael looks like. There’s a whole subplot about mistaking an inmate who survived the bus crash for Michael Myers that is just absurd. That sweet man couldn’t possible be Michael, and anyone who ever looked up at Michael would know this but magically forgets he’s not really short.
That leads us to the third flaw. There’s not enough story in Halloween Kills. Instead of building a plot, they stop the momentum to introduce the next group of potential victims. These are characters we’ve never met before in this way and really know nothing about.
The mob justice storyline could’ve been a great sequence in a film like this, or recurring a motif in the background. It is the substance of the film once the film stops flashing back long enough to actually live in the present. If you cut out the flashbacks to minor characters who suddenly matter now, I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t be a feature length film anymore.
When every victim in a horror film is given equal weight and screentime, no victim matters anymore. You waste so much time creating this massive cast at the expense of actually having a compelling plot. “Haddonfield wants Michael Myers dead” is not enough to carry a feature length film.
There is some good here. The score is incredible. John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel A. Davies create some of the best scares in the film with music alone.
Emily Gunshor’s costume designs work really well. As hard as it is to keep track of all the new characters, it’s easy to tell them apart as they have clear visual styling. It’s basically cartoon series rules where each character has a clear shape and color to their costuming so you can instantly tell who is who. I might not know why Big John and Little John matter to the plot at all, but I could pick them out instantly in any scene.
The fight choreography is innovative for the horror genre. If you like slashers for the kills, Halloween Kills has some incredible new scares I haven’t seen before. We know Michael Myers is deadly with anything. I’ve never seen him rely so heavily on his fists, his feet, and the surrounding environment.
Halloween Kills is a middling slasher film that suffers from its own ambition. Blumhouse made a huge deal about this series correcting the Halloween canon and only relying on the first two films. If you’re going to make that claim and then use the second film to mostly remind you that these characters existed in 1978 or 1979, you really didn’t have an idea on how to “fix” the canon.
The result is packed with too many characters and not enough plot. What stretches out for an hour feels like a padded second act of a better slasher film. The final act is good for this style of slasher, but feels totally out of place after everything that happened before. You don’t get to turn back the clock and pretend you’re actually a sequel to Halloween (2018) after ignoring it for most of the runtime.
Halloween Kills is playing in theatres.
***
