It’s Halloween Night, and Michael Myers Lives to Stalk Another Street

Jamie Lee Curtis and Judy Greer in "Halloween Kills"
Photo Credit: RottenTomtaotes.com

In 2018, director David Gordon Green reinvigorated the “Halloween” franchise by ignoring all of the sequels and instead made a direct sequel to the original, continuing the story 40 years after Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) survived an attack from Michael Myers (Nick Castle and Tony Moran, sharing the role) on that fateful night.  What resulted was the best “Halloween” film since John Carpenter’s iconic 1978 chiller that started it all, and was also the beginning of a new trilogy.

However, the promising start for this trilogy is now followed by a lesser sequel with Green’s “Halloween Kills,” a movie that squanders a great deal of the potential that was established by the 2018 installment.

The story picks up right where the last movie left off, on Halloween night.  Not long after Laurie, her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichek) escape Laurie’s home after setting it ablaze with Michael (Nick Castle and James James Jude Courtney, sharing the role) trapped inside, they soon learn that he escaped.  With all of Haddonfield, Illinois, fed up with Michael’s reign of terror, the citizens band together to hunt him down.

The highlights of the cast are Curtis, Greer, Matichek, Anthony Michael Hall, and Kyle Richards, the latter two of whom return as Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace, the two children who Laurie protected from Michael in the original film.  For these five, this movie is a case of them doing the best that they can with a weak script.  They all work well together and maintain an energy of taking down Michael, and whatever bit of investment you’ll get from this movie is because of these cast members.

The screenplay by Green, Danny McBride, and Scott Teems (the former two of whom wrote the previous film with Jeff Fradley) doesn’t do much to move the story forward in any significant way.  While the last movie was a well-handled view of Laurie overcoming her trauma, this movie is offers a story that spoon-feeds you its message about fear consuming people.  It’s all hammered into you, particularly in an overlong sequence where people hunt for a man who they believe to be Michael, and then in the closing narration that thinks we’re not smart enough to figure out the theme early on.

The movie also spends too much time in telling us things that we either already know, or aren’t that important.  Whether it’s through the prolonged opening flashback, the shorter flashbacks peppered throughout the movie, or characters regurgitating details, this feels like a movie that’s trying to walk you through material with which you’re most likely familiar.  It also gets to the point where you could make a drinking game out of how many times you’ll hear the words “40 years ago.”

With Green and McBride being two of the screenwriters, the odd humor that came in small doses in the 2018 movie returns in full force with jokes that never land.  It’s at odds with the gratuitous brutality of the film, causing a tonal whiplash when the comic relief happens and overstaying its welcome to ensure annoyance from the viewer.

There are a couple of scenes that go on longer than they should, most of which have you spend too much time with characters who don’t have any relationships to those who return from previous movies.  We all know that these newer characters are going to be Michael’s victims, so extending their presence bogs down the movie.

Green abandons the moderate approach to blood and gore from the previous movie and instead takes a page out of Rob Zombie’s playbook and uses intense violence as a substitute for scares.  While it doesn’t reach the absurd levels of Zombie’s “Halloween 2,” it’s about the same as his 2007 remake, with Michael taking down Haddonfield residents left and right, and it becomes boring pretty quickly.  While Green’s last film had such memorable sequences as the long take of Michael making his way through Haddonfield residences, the motion-sensor scene, and Laurie’s climactic hunt for Michael throughout her house, there’s barely any tension to be felt throughout this movie.  It’s disheartening to see this drop in quality between the previous installment and this latest entry, leaving the viewer to wonder how Green could have allowed the story to go in this direction.

The next movie in the franchise, “Halloween Ends,” is due to come out in October 2022, and we can only hope that “Halloween Kills” hasn’t killed this trilogy’s chances of ending on a satisfying note.

Grade: C-