Halloween Kills (2021 | USA | 106 minutes | David Gordon Green)
A film that is deeply uncertain of what it wants to be or where its strengths lie, Halloween Kills succeeds in sending any lingering interest in this franchise to its grave.
Picking up basically right where the prior film, Halloween (2018), left off, the man who just won’t die Michael Myers has emerged from the bottom of the burning house where he was “trapped” to continue his killings. Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode is hospitalized after enduring many physical injuries she suffered while battling him, leaving her family to piece together what happened and figure out what to do next. They’ll have to join up with a ragtag group from the town to take the fight to Michael Myers, hunting him down to end his reign of terror once and for all. Or at least, until the inevitable next time when this all happens again and the franchise drags up his corpse for more shenanigans.
Halloween Kills is strange to evaluate as an individual film because of how it exists in a continuum. It primarily works to serve as a bridge between the last film and what is clearly a coming sequel. On its own, it is largely inert with disconnected scenes that have no idea of where they want to go. Particularly unfortunate, Laurie Strode is not the main character and instead spends most of her time stuck in a hospital bed while a bunch of other extraneous characters run around trying to somehow stop the killings. Curtis gets only a handful of lines, including one where she mumbles about being on too many pain meds to even really participate in the story. It is a waste of her talents that entirely sidelines her.
The film is occasionally quite funny, though it is unclear whether this is intentional or not. In particular, Jim Cummings as Officer Pete McCabe in an extended flashback opening sequence was a charmingly chaotic presence that caught me off guard. Playing what feels like a version of his cop character that he has perfected in films like 2018’s Thunder Road and last year’s The Wolf of Snow Hollow, he still is there too briefly to really let loose. The unexpected appearance is too long to be a cameo though too short to be a full character. How it all fits in with the general narrative is rather irrelevant, though the short scenes we get of him are pretty great. This is an example of one such silly exchange when McCabe finds a clue something is amiss.
“There’s a dead dog in here.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Whatever version of the movie Cummings is in is the one I would rather be watching. His scenes pack a darkly absurd tone that doesn’t carry throughout the rest of the film. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a spoof, though the film is so wrapped in self awareness that it gets rather close. There still are attempts to echo Cummings’ chaotic energy throughout the whole story, but without the earned charm and bonkers eccentricity of the early scenes the rest of the runtime plods along with a dull monotony that never finds a groove of any kind.
Narratively, it feels like it exists in an entirely alternate timeline from the most recent 2018 film. That story was far more interesting than anything happening here. The entire struggle facing Laurie Strode was that no one would take her concerns about Meyers seriously. Despite her being right, everyone downplayed and dismissed her. In this one, perhaps for the sake of just showing people we ought to recognize, there is an entire scene where characters quite somberly remember what happened all those decades ago. Where were all these people before? It serves to undercut the entire point of the film that just preceded it, jettisoning all the central themes it established. It lacks any continuity, making it so you needn’t have really seen the prior one. It does try to say something more serious about how fear can push society to violence, though with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It is shallow and forced, lacking any sense of nuance or tact.
Now, obviously, this is quite a serious analysis of a slasher flick that is mostly about the kills, but the last one at least was grasping at some of these deeper ideas. It gave it a subtly interesting quality and justified revisiting this story all these many decades later. The same can’t be justified here. Halloween Kills is utterly uninterested in pursuing the prior film’s directions and is, by extension, much less interesting. With nothing as engaging to latch on to, the film suffers deeply. All of the more sappy monologues about the nature of Michael Myers and who he really is all fall painfully flat. It just feels like padding that makes a relatively short film feel much longer. It flounders at every possible opportunity.
With all that being said, the main attraction of seeing Michael Myers go on a rampage is still moderately entertaining. From the opening scene where he decimates a bunch of firefighters who found him in the burning house where the last film left him, he is just nonstop from there on out. He remains relentless, going around and taking on each new target in his unstoppable rampage. If that is what you are looking for in Halloween Kills, then you won’t be disappointed. He remains as brutal and gruesome of a horror villain as ever, though many deaths are so goofy in execution that it defies credulity that this was meant to create anything resembling well-crafted terror. The filmmaking is pedestrian at best, never matching anything like the extended long take in the prior film. Further, the Myers’s degree of immortality just can’t be taken seriously and the ending takes this to absurd new levels.
It all plays out basically as you would expect, where the scenes of rampage are the high points and the rest of everything else is just baggage. The problem is that this “everything else” is the entirety of the story. As written, it is a film that can be skipped without any real loss. It all falls apart the longer it goes on, becoming a parody of itself without any real idea of where to go next. Events just happen without any purpose or emotional investment. It is a deeply disappointing dead end of a film that fails in almost every way. By its conclusion, you just wish it would die and put us all out of our misery.
Halloween Kills is in theaters and on Peacock on October 15.
Header image courtesy Universal Pictures.