Let’s get this out of the way early: Jamie Lee Curtis is
largely relegated to a hospital room in
Halloween
Kills. Her iconic final girl, Laurie Strode, gets no kick-ass action
sequences battling perennial boogeyman, Michael Myers. She winces (a
lot) from her injuries sustained in the
2018 installment,
threatens to go
hunt Myers down, and waxes philosophical about the nature of evil—but gets to
do nothing beyond these trivialities. Knowing that
Halloween Kills is the bridge film between
Halloween and next year’s
Halloween
Ends, one suspects that director David Gordon Green is reserving Curtis’ genre
capital for a climatic showdown for the ages in the last film—but that does
little to alleviate the feelings that something’s missing from this film;
namely, the lynchpin of the
Halloween
franchise.
Ok, now that that’s out of the way, we can move on and
assess
Halloween Kills on its
Strode-less merits. I’ve watched the film twice; the first time as my
ten-year-old self who’s still enthralled by the boogeyman in suburbia, the
second time with a more deliberate critical eye. Like any film in the venerable
franchise,
Halloween Kills is a mixed
bag, hitting some of its marks with brutal precision while missing others
completely.
The new film begins with a very clever prologue that
continues the 1978 film’s storyline—the pursuit and capture of Michael Myers.
It involves a young Officer Hawkins (Thomas Mann) and a life-and-death decision
that changes the trajectory of far too many lives to count by now and an
encounter between Myers and young Lonnie Elam (Tristian Eggerling). It also
features an impressive—if improbable—cameo by a character from the original
film. Green and company really shine in this sequence, which possesses both the
look and feel of Carpenter’s original, and ably set the mood for what’s to
come. After this pre-credit sequence, the film picks up where the 2018 film
ended: Laurie’s compound engulfed in flames and its intergenerational trio of
final girls—an injured Laurie, daughter Karen, and granddaughter Allyson—jostling
down the road in the back of a pick-up truck en route to Haddonfield Memorial.
After giving the audience a reasonably plausible explanation
for how he survives the fiery deathtrap Laurie rigged for him, a slightly
charred and
very pissed-off Myers
goes on a rampage, slicing and dicing his way back to Haddonfield proper. Myers
is
angry in this movie—with the kills
brutal beyond anything seen in the franchise since Rob Zombie took his one-two
crack at it. While Mikey takes out the majority of Haddonfield’s fire
department and a drone-flying interracial couple, the audience is re-introduced
to the survivors from the original film—Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall),
Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards), nurse Marion (Nancy Stephens), and a grown up
Lonnie Elam (Robert Longstreet)—who gather at a dive-bar for an annual
commemoration of the tragic events of Halloween night ’78 and to toast Laurie.
Elsewhere, Lonnie’s son and Allyson’s on-the-outs boyfriend Cameron (Dylan
Arnold) happens upon a critically injured Officer Hawkins (Will Patton). As the
parties converge upon Haddonfield Memorial, news that Myers has somehow
survived and is killing his way back to town gets out. The survivors—led by a
baseball bat-wielding Tommy—decide that “evil dies tonight!” and a vigilante
mob is formed to hunt Myers down once and for all. Otay, Panky.
If it sounds like there’s a lot going on in
Halloween Kills, it’s because there is.
Green is firing on all cylinders in this one, his many story threads mirroring
the growing chaos of the mob outside Haddonfield Memorial. Karen (Judy Greer),
who’s given far more than the yeoman’s work she had to do in the last film, is
convinced that Myers is coming to the hospital to kill her mother. Allyson
(Andi Matichak) ignores her mother’s directive to sit vigil at her
grandmother’s bedside, instead arming up and joining Cameron and Lonnie in
their hunt for Myers. Sheriff Barker (Omar Dorsey, also returning from the last
film) tries—albeit unsuccessfully—to control the mob tensions about to tragically
spill over at the hospital, even getting into verbal fisticuffs with
Haddonfield’s former sheriff, Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), who’s now head
of hospital security. And Michael Myers? He’s making a beeline for his former
family home on Lampkin Lane, now inhabited by an affectionately quirky gay
couple nicknamed Big John and Little John and played by
MADtv’s Michael McDonald and
The
Mick’s Scott MacArthur. Suffice to say that Myers reaches the ‘ole
homestead before the ragtag crew of would-be vigilantes does and is
not a fan of the new color scheme. Or
charcuterie.
The film’s third act coalesces in a weird, dreamlike,
violent denouement—complete with voiceover by Laurie from her hospital room—the
sole intention of which seems to be setting up the next film. It’s in this
final sequence of events where Green is either going to succumb to the same
fate as all previous sequel directors or rise above it in spectacular fashion:
Explaining how and why Michael Myers “transcends” human mortality. It’s clear
after the Haddonfield mob puts Myers through his paces that he’s something…
beyond a mere mortal man. How Green will
expound on this in
Halloween Ends
will ultimately cement his standing in franchise history.
Halloween Kills
isn’t a perfect film and suffers from middle-child syndrome, the degree to
which won’t be evident until it can be held up within the context of the full
trilogy of films. As purely a sequel, it’s briskly paced with some exceptionally well-executed
sequences, like the parkside SUV assault, and some less so. (Yes, I’m talking
to you, Big John and Little John.) The nostalgia factor here with returning
characters is high (hell if I didn’t get misty-eyed when Cyphers first appears
on the screen), with surprisingly strong performances from Richards and
Longstreet. Matichak, too, is exceptionally good. Disappointingly, Hall’s Tommy
Doyle is a misfire. With his bellowing and menacing baseball bat stance, it’s
as if he were channeling Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan from
The Walking Dead here. Chalk this up to the film’s inconsistent
writing, which Green shares with Scott Teems and Danny McBride. For every
well-written scene (like the one in which Greer’s character attempts to help
one of the escaped Smith’s Grove patients who’s been mistaken by the hospital
mob for Myers), there are two that suffer from cringe-worthy dialogue and weird
pacing. Even the big twist at the end of the film feels off, illogical in the
context of time and what’s going on just outside the Myers house where it
occurs. Elsewhere, Green makes at least one surprising choice in which a
character most would peg as a goner early on actually
survives their Myers encounter, which leaves one wondering if said
character will have a part to play in the final film. On the plus side, John
Carpenter (with son, Cody, and Daniel Davies) delivers another outstanding
soundtrack that manages to sound distinctive while remaining true to his original
’78 score.
Like its predecessor’s commentary on generational trauma,
Halloween Kills works better in a broader
sense with its depiction of the dangers of mob mentality. When the hive mind
overrides rational thought and reason, Green and company postulate here, the
resulting consequences can be worse than the original trigger. The denizens of Haddonfield
rise up—collectively—to defeat their longtime boogeyman. It’s a noble
undertaking to want to reclaim their home, but Green is there to remind us that
sometimes evil wins—especially if you’re the lady who brings an honest-to-God iron
to the street fight. And, sometimes, there’s collateral damage.
Halloween Kills gives us the collateral
damage in spades. This Curtis-light entry in Green’s
Halloween trilogy may be short on the Strode but it’s heavy on the
brutality. Its breakneck violence works best when viewed as the (fast) moving
part to a whole not yet fully in view.
Narrative choppiness aside,
Halloween Kills ultimately delivers the slasher goods. Michael
Myers is the soulless killing machine we’ve all come to know and love over the
course of 40+ years in eleven films (with a twelfth on the way) and a body
count now over 150. Best advice: Turn off your brain, grab some popcorn, and
just ride the waves of slasher nostalgia. Let the armchair critics of the world
argue pointlessly over the film’s merits—or lack thereof—and just lose yourself
in the seasonal slaughter. There will be plenty of time for more serious
discourse and analysis once we see what kind of bow Green slaps on his trilogy
with
Halloween Ends.
Rest up, Laurie Strode—we expect big things from you in the
next one.
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