It’s been a very long time since I’ve encountered a horror movie as polarizing as HALLOWEEN KILLS, and that has to do with two things: its 40-plus-year legacy featuring several retcons and artistic variations, and its fervent fanbase who cite wildly different entries as being their favorites. The problem with the HALLOWEEN series, or really any ongoing series that had a legitimately good first entry and later devolved into broadly distilled, sensationalized versions of the same concept, is that audiences become split as to what they want. The first movie creates the mold and the rules, but every sequel, by design, has to do something new, and through their very nature, they become sillier and sillier parodies of their own idea. The first HALLOWEEN is a critically lavished film that even Roger Ebert once referred to as a classic, so each time a sequel is made, a portion of the audience hopes to see something that lives up to that legacy—something classy with an emphasis on suspense over gore. Most of the HALLOWEEN sequels aren’t good movies—“dead teenager flicks” is what Ebert called those—though they are fun in their own way, so when you’ve got two halves of the audience vying for polar opposite experiences, those schools of thought collide in a violent crash, and because we’re living in 2022 A.R. (After Reason), an era during which everyone is angry about everything all the time, even something innocuous like a HALLOWEEN movie can cause blood-raging fights. In an effort to entertain both schools of thought, I’m approaching this too-long review in a different way. The first half will be written by someone who wanted HALLOWEEN KILLS to be legitimately good in the same way as the 1978 original and the 2018 reboot. The second half will be written by someone who acknowledges HALLOWEEN KILLS is the eleventh movie to feature Michael Myers wandering around Haddonfield and killing its citizens in all kinds of ways, and as such, didn’t expect much beyond some senseless violence and a reasonably engaging story. Depending on what you want from HALLOWEEN KILLS, pick your poison and read on. (Spoilers everywhere.)
Take 1: “I Wanted A Good Movie”
Prior to its arrival in theaters to both huge box office and critical acclaim, 2018’s HALLOWEEN seemed like a real longshot. In the preceding years, Rob Zombie had killed the series dead with his experimental nonsense, and this was after 2002’s dismal HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION had not only undone the goodwill brought forth by the series-jumpstarting HALLOWEEN: H20 but also killed its leading final lady, leaving the future direction of the franchise uncertain. (If next year’s HALLOWEEN ENDS also kills off Laurie Strode, it will be the third time her character has died in this goofy series—pretty impressive.) Before 2018, there hadn’t been a watchable HALLOWEEN movie for twenty years, so there was little reason to be optimistic. Still, director/co-writer David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride (and poor Jeff Fradley, the seldom mentioned third writer), under the watchful eye of John Carpenter, managed to deliver one of the best sequels in the series, with Carpenter going on record as saying it was even better than his original. With the dream team having fairly earned the accolades for their approach, there was no reason to believe HALLOWEEN KILLS wouldn’t be at least comparably good, or at the very least wouldn’t squander the goodwill established by their first go-round.
The curse of the sequel strikes again.
The “good” news is HALLOWEEN KILLS isn’t the worst sequel in the series, regardless of the timeline you’re sticking with—I don’t think we could ever plumb those kinds of depths ever again—but based on the pedigree involved, the poor execution of good ideas, and the good execution of a less intellectual and more visceral experience, that leaves HALLOWEEN KILLS in a kind of cinematic no man’s land where it’s hard to choose one side or the other…and that’s worse. HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION, for instance, is a piece of shit I’ll never watch again—though unfortunate, there’s no conflict there and I’m at peace with its place in the HALLOWEEN hierarchy. While HALLOWEEN KILLS has a lot to offer, and parts of it are terrific, almost every line of dialogue drips with soap opera cheese and even its best parts don’t push the narrative forward in any meaningful way, which is a huge detriment. If your movie doesn’t have a point, then fuck—what are we doing here? Though HALLOWEEN KILLS definitely tries, and has ideas either brand new or fleshed out from previous sequels (the vigilante aspect from HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS, for example), it feels unfinished, overwrought, and aimless, coming off less like a proper entry and more like an extended opening act for HALLOWEEN ENDS. It’s the holding pattern of horror sequels—the palate cleanser in between courses—and that sucks.
HALLOWEEN KILLS continues exploring the concept of trauma as established during its predecessor, this time expanding beyond Laurie Strode and her family and looking at how the other citizens of Haddonfield are still emotionally reeling from the night he came home and how that trauma manifests…which is with revenge. Right out of the gate, this newborn series is transitioning from philosophical and intimate nuance to primal, in-the-streets chaos. HALLOWEEN KILLS is a malfunctioning carnival ride wrenching loose from its hydraulics and shooting off a nonstop torrent of sparks in the form of very wet and crunchy violence inspired by the third act of 1931’s FRANKENSTEIN: it’s a ballistically grotesque ballet that’s fascinating to witness while being dangerously unhinged. In the conceptual sense, it doesn’t stray too far from what Gordon Green et al. established in 2018, but it does choose to do something that feels quite wrong for a Curtis-having HALLOWEEN movie: bench her during the most crucial part of the game, making this latest sequel feel perfunctory and incomplete. HALLOWEEN KILLS is the sixth HALLOWEEN film to feature Curtis’s Laurie Strode, but the first in which she never shares a single scene with her masked nemesis. Of course, this was by design, as the filmmakers wanted this entry to be about the rest of Haddonfield (“One of their numbers was butchered and this is the wake,” Loomis says in 1981’s HALLOWEEN 2 while Haddonfield townspeople are vandalizing the abandoned Myers house), but also because the filmmakers would really be straining credibility in having Laurie walk away unscathed after so many encounters, especially with a gaping wound in her belly. While all of that is perfectly reasonable, at the same time, it makes the experience of HALLOWEEN KILLS feel incidental—like it’s not actually a HALLOWEEN sequel, but more like some random external adventure happening in a HALLOWEEN shared universe. If it’s HALLOWEEN, Laurie and Michael have to do battle—that’s, like, a rule. If you’re playing in the canon sandbox established in 1978, then you’ve broken that rule—just one among many. That’s like having James Bond call the police on the main supervillain instead of taking the guy out himself. No one wants to see Laurie Strode sitting on the sidelines and espousing really cringey half-assed philosophies on the nature of Michael Myers—we want to see her kick his ass once again because that’s who she is and what she does. She was once our Final Girl and has since become our Final Woman…so what gives?
My biggest gripe with HALLOWEEN KILLS is its poor treatment of the legacy actors and characters being glimpsed for the first time since 1978. Featured most prominently is Tommy Doyle, the young boy Laurie was babysitting that pesky Halloween night which started all this, played by Anthony Michael Hall. Alongside him are Lindsey Wallace (a surprisingly terrific Kyle Richards), Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), and Lonnie Elam (the wonderful Robert Longstreet of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE) while retired sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers) is working a security shift at Haddonfield Memorial. As a lifelong series fan, of course it was incredible to see those characters and/or actors return to the series…but also a damn shame to see how wasted most of them are. How do you put Laurie Strode and Leigh Brackett under the same hospital roof and not have them share a single scene together, perhaps with a melancholy reunion in which they collectively mourn over the slain Annie, her friend and his daughter? Though the yearly Halloween-night binge drink was a clever way to group all those 1978 massacre survivors together, why not give them each just a single moment to come off like human beings with a shared history instead of having Hall’s heavy-handed bar-stage soliloquy do all the work? Though I value their inclusion, their presence smacks of vapid “look, see?” fan service in hopes we’ll get lost in dreamy nostalgia and not notice how superficial their appearances are—not to mention that killing four out of the five characters seems a little sadistic, with three out of the four being killed in dismissive ways, as if their history in the series never meant anything. Brackett ranks a blink-and-miss-it face slash; Marion, who dies for the second time in this series, has the honor of going out looking like a fumbling idiot (say all you want about HALLOWEEN: H20, but at least it offered Marion a fighting chance); and poor Lonnie doesn’t even get an on-screen death. Tommy is the only legacy character to get a ceremonial end, and even that felt wrong.
All during this, bit players from HALLOWEEN ’18 who were never even given names return in expanded roles, only so HALLOWEEN KILLS can have even more recognizable people to snuff out, and with great violence. While it makes sense to reuse characters you’ve already created instead of introducing new ones, it seems really strange that these characters, who haven’t had their own face-to-face encounter with Michael Myers and who only learned about him for the first time Halloween night of 2018, would so immediately want to throw hands alongside these legacy characters who’ve lost loved ones, or nearly died at Myers’s hands, or spent the last forty years navigating their own traumas. That, primarily, is what HALLOWEEN KILLS is: angry characters going after The Shape and failing spectacularly (and once that “oops!” self-inflicted gunshot occurs, the movie officially becomes ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET THE SHAPE).
Though HALLOWEEN KILLS jumps from location to location and timeline to timeline, with something heavy going on almost all the time, it never feels like anything is actually happening. It wants to be “about” something but executes that aboutness with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It wants to pretend the heavy suggestion about The Shape being supernatural in nature is some kind of gigantic revelation…until your most basic fan remembers that Dr. Loomis shot him in the chest six times in 1978 and “he just got up and walked away.” It wants to establish the origin story of Frank Hawkins (Will Patton) by trying to convince the audience that his past with The Shape is just as intertwined and significant as Laurie’s own, but it simply can’t stand up to the forty-year head start she has, nor to Curtis’s consistent presence in the series—not to mention that the carelessly established motivation for Hawkins’ character hinged on his forty-year regret for not shooting The Shape in the brain when he had the chance…even though HALLOWEEN KILLS solidly establishes that wouldn’t have killed him anyway. Even Andi Matichak’s presence as Allyson is wasted on the vigilante angle, which not only feels wrong for her character but feels more like the movie is babysitting her for the time being in lieu of offering her something more substantial to do. More than anything, and maybe years down the line he’ll confirm this, HALLOWEEN KILLS feels like the kind of senseless, garish sequel Carpenter would’ve hated, had it been attached to the franchise’s first timeline that, after a while, he had nothing to do with.
Take 2: “I Wanted A Fun Movie”
HALLOWEEN KILLS is a fucking blast. With a body count of fortyish people, there’s a violent and brutal death every three minutes. Gordon Green isn’t just channeling Carpenter this time, as he did in 2018, but also seems to be embracing his inner Argento. The gallons of blood used during production must be somewhere in the thousands. Holy smokes, is this thing Italian? Between the bloodletting and the corny dialogue, it must be.
HALLOWEEN KILLS also presents Michael Myers at his most brutal, vicious, mean-spirited, and utterly unremorseful, with his fire-scorched mask giving him the JAWS 2 treatment. James Jude Courtney, with a little assistance from Airon Armstrong, returns for another round of Haddonfield mayhem and strikes an even more imposing figure than his last appearance. The Shape of 2018 was methodical but physically capable; here, he’s embraced his full-on Kane-Hodder-as-Jason-Voorhees, dispatching his victims in ways we’ve yet to see in this series. Sure, he does his playful cat-and-mouse thing by hiding in dark corners and behind doors, but really, who gives a shit? Why bother? The Shape of HALLOWEEN KILLS is going for quantity over quality. He could’ve knocked on the door dressed as the pizza dude or popped out of a sugar bowl to lop off someone’s head and the audience would’ve barely reacted because the death of any character we see on screen is an inevitability. There’s no hope for anyone—not even Stewie from MAD TV (“Look what I can do!”). And boy, the movie wastes no time in getting to those deaths: the opening massacre of the first responders to Laurie’s farmhouse inferno is majestic—and the closest we’ve gotten to seeing The Shape kill someone with a chainsaw.
Before the first retcon in 1998 with HALLOWEEN: H20, the HALLOWEEN series had been that random horror property Jamie Lee Curtis appeared in for just a couple movies before saying farewell and advancing to bigger studio fare. When she returned to the series for the first time in 1998, it felt like an event because it was an event, and though her presence in a HALLOWEEN film doesn’t guarantee it’s going to be good, it still feels right. Seeing her stick with this series forty-plus years after the original movie is special. HALLOWEEN belongs to her and John Carpenter (and the every-day-missed Debra Hill), and here they are, all these years later, playing make-believe together like a bunch of kids—this time with filmmakers who grew up on the very movies they’re now putting their own stamp on. Quality of output aside, what a nice thing.
Speaking of, Carpenter, son Cody, and Daniel Davies return to score, offering another sinister, kick-ass musical landscape. Themes from both HALLOWEEN eras are present and accounted for, along with a whole host of new material to properly shadow this new take on HALLOWEEN lore. Their score even acknowledges the angry mob angle, for the first time ever adding a chorus of voices to the legendary HALLOWEEN theme, which plays over the opening credits that feature not just one illuminated jack-o-lantern, but a dozen—each one growing more intense with flames as they flow past.
What does it all mean?
Haddonfield citizens are mad as hell and they’re not gonna take it anymore.
The 1978 timeline stuff, which sees Michael’s detainment by Haddonfield police, including young Frank Hawkins (Thomas Mann) and his partner, Pete McCabe (the always enjoyable Jim Cummings, actor/director of THE WOLF OF SNOW HOLLOW), works damn well, and is probably the best material in the whole movie. The loyal recreation of the Myers house is tremendous, as is the mask, which is the closest this series has gotten to faithfully depicting those two holy totems. Evidently some fans have been blasting the “all CGI Loomis” that was inserted into this sequence, somehow not recognizing him to be a real, living, non-CGI human being (Tom Wright Jr.). Has CGI really gotten that good? I guess I haven’t noticed. Though the actor’s appearance is uncannily spot on, and overdubbed by the previous movie’s convincing Loomis soundalike, he would’ve been better utilized in a blurry background, similar to how Michael’s maskless face has been left obscured throughout the first two movies of this new trilogy. Still, seeing his trench-coated form standing at the Myers house threshold as the camera cranes back across the front yard, revealing a motionless Michael flanked by police—in a shot that mimics the original’s opening scene where six-year-old Michael has his clown mask ripped off by his father—well, it’s the stuff of legitimate chills, and Carpenter and co.’s revisitation of the same theme used for that scene but now gussied up with discordant overlays is probably the movie’s greatest moment. (You’ll have to ignore the massive continuity errors presented here, however, like the missing six bullets Loomis had fired into Michael’s chest mere minutes ago, or that the accidental death of Hawkins’ partner, which Haddonfield P.D. plan on blaming on The Shape, is retroactively left out of any mention of the 1978 body count used by HALLOWEEN ’18.)
The fake ending, in which the Haddonfield mob finally appears to get the best of their boogeyman with a bad-ass beatdown, only for Michael to gain the unsurprising upper hand and give them all a little what-for, is another exciting sequence that offers the audience some manipulative catharsis—but in a strange way, also offers the audience a little hope. “He’s turned us all into monsters,” Brackett says following the hospital mob’s lynching of an innocent man, which may be the moral of HALLOWEEN KILLS: no matter how vicious Haddonfield’s people become—and really, they’re us; we’re that mob—we can never be as evil, black, and unfeeling as The Shape. In this scary day and age, I’ll take it.
HALLOWEEN KILLS ends with the shocking death of Karen (Judy Greer), which doesn’t just play out in Judith Myers’s old bedroom in the fabulously restored Myers house, but is even executed in the same way as Judith’s death in 1963: thrashing hands, obscured points of view—no glimpses of actual violent penetration, but still uncomfortable to witness. I’m surprised they didn’t pop in the ol’ eyeholes to give us a look through Michael’s mask. A move like this is pretty ballsy, and is frankly the only important thing that happens in the entire movie, because it now means Laurie Strode, technically, has failed—that the years and years she spent training her daughter to survive against the evil in the world, which did permanent damage to their relationship and shaped them both into broken people, didn’t mean a damn thing in the end. And with the recent revelation that HALLOWEEN ENDS is going to be set four years after the events of HALLOWEEN ’18 and HALLOWEEN KILLS, that’s plenty of time for Laurie to grow even crazier. (She’ll be shacking up with Hawkins by then—I’m calling it right now.)
If I had to break down this entire manifesto into one sentence, it would be this: HALLOWEEN KILLS is a good slasher movie, but a bad movie in general…and yet I still kinda liked it. In spite of its hideous dialogue (“Evil dies tonight!”) and aimless plot, there’s no denying that HALLOWEEN KILLS offers a new flavor to the unkillable series, made with a certain operatic and violent flamboyance that’s difficult to categorize. I don’t know why, but I have this odd feeling, in years to come, it’s going to enjoy a ground-up reevaluation—either by the first-round audiences left underwhelmed during its preliminary release, or by the next generation of viewers who find it. Love it or hate it, HALLOWEEN KILLS may very well have staying power, and I’ll be morbidly interested to see how it holds up in five, ten, or forty years from now.
The complete list of special features and tech specs are as follows:
- — DOLBY VISION/HDR PRESENTATION OF THE FILM
- — DOLBY ATMOS AUDIO TRACK
- — GAG REEL
- — DELETED/EXTENDED SCENES
- — HADDONFIELD’S OPEN WOUNDS — Those who die at the hands of Michael Myers are not his only victims. We look at some of the returning characters, and why their past traumatic encounters with The Shape made them natural candidates to try and defend Haddonfield against him.
- —THE KILL TEAM — It takes a big team to create a film the scale of HALLOWEEN KILLS, especially when part of the task is raising the bar for Michael’s gruesome kills. We hear the people behind the mayhem discuss how they continue to push the franchise to new heights.
- — STRODE FAMILY VALUES – Filmmakers and cast discuss the three generations of Strode women that have been terrorized by The Shape, and the roles Laurie, Karen and Allyson play in trying to vanquish his evil.
- — 1978 TRANSFORMATIONS – Shooting new footage that matches the feel of the iconic 1978 footage is no easy task, and even takes a little bit of luck. We reveal some of the secrets of how filmmakers achieved these stunning sequences.
- — THE POWER OF FEAR – The impact of Michael Myers’ pure evil extends far beyond his victims. We examine how fear of The Shape changed the psychology of the people of Haddonfield.
- — KILL COUNT
- — FEATURE COMMENTARY – Director/co-writer David Gordon Green and stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Judy Greer
- — Optional English SDH, Spanish, and French subtitles for the main feature
Tags: Andi Matichak, Anthony Michael Hall, Blu-ray, Bob Odenkirk, Cody Carpenter, Daniel Davies, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green, Horror, jamie lee curtis, Jeff Fradley, Jim Cummings, john carpenter, Judy Greer, Kyle Richards, Lenny Clarke, Michael McDonald, Michael Simmonds, Nancy Loomis, Omar Dorsey, P.J. Soles, Scott MacArthur, Scott Teems, Sequels, Thomas Mann, Tim Alverson, Tom Wright Jr., Will Patton
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