The phrase “Evil dies tonight” is uttered an exhaustive number of times in Halloween Kills, the toothless second chapter of director David Gordon Green’s planned sequel trilogy to John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher masterpiece Halloween, but those seemingly ominous and grandiose words are not indicative of the film’s actual atmosphere, or lack thereof, proving fundamentally false in execution. The underlying issue that lacerates Kills with the same fatality as its central antagonist is that for all its pithy outer sentiments, their foundational elements are inherently superficial.
I can say “Halloween Kills is worthy of its namesake” until the sun dissipates, which may admittingly be only the way Michael Myers will ever succumb to the cruel jolt of death that he has inflicted over innumerable people, but it doesn’t require much scrutiny to realize how blatantly deceptive that statement truly is. Like the infamously contrived plot point from the previous and equally meager 2018 film, the proof, or a convenient dispatching of a character’s phone, is in the pudding.
Narrowly confining Michael to the basement of her burning home, a battered and bewildered Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) escapes the clutches of her lifelong stalker with daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), thinking they have permanently subdued this human specter of pure evil. While Laurie is hospitalized with severe injuries, however, Michael, to exclusively the surprise of anyone who has been completely oblivious to this grueling era of Hollywood IP mining, survived and plans to continue his killing frenzy.
And to add fuel to whatever fire that clearly wasn’t sufficient at the Strode residence, an adult Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), the little squirt Laurie babysat that fatefully lethal evening in 1978, radicalizes the Haddonfield community to definitively eradicate Myers, along with fellow legacy characters and survivors Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards, returning) and Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens, returning).
Halloween Kills may aesthetically improve upon the concrete gloss of its predecessor with a slickly jagged style, but it buckles under similar fissures in its construction. Like the generational trauma that Green’s initial film in this doomed cinematic trio unsuccessfully attempted to explore, this internalized wilting continues to spawn tainted fruit. There are seeds planted for compelling ideas that are executed in the most vapid way possible. It’s already disheartening that the vast majority of characters are simply empty vessels for Myers’ slaughter, but its ideas are also fodder, their jugular sliced and diced by convoluted execution.
The original Halloween, a compact and economical film, and its signature knife-wielder were simply existential terror embodied, piercing with an eerie ambience that reminded audiences their days are finitely numbered. Ever since that ’78 spine-tingler, though, the filmmaking industry has gleaned all the wrong lessons from it, not realizing that the implications and craft of scares are just as imperative as their frequency and content. When a movie is so utterly bereft of the former, the latter greatly diminishes.
Halloween Kills is about as bluntly violent and grisly as a studio film is allowed to be, a starkly gory film that relishes in its audacity. Green has refined his acumen for set pieces, including a visceral brawl between Michael and a group of firefighters that cleverly utilizes point of view and forced perspective, but he continues in straining to generate palpable scares, lacking that holy essence that leaves you shuddering awake in the dead of night. They’re brash but seldom artful, moving with a clumsiness that is more frightening than their actual intent. One could argue that Green’s contrasting bombast to Carpenter’s subtlety is deliberately supposed to illuminate Michael’s festering malice in the Haddonfield community, but it’s completely imprecise and misaligned with the themes.
Laurie Strode, additionally, is a character of monumental pathos, a self-possessed survivor and one of the seminal female horror characters to at least be partially created by a woman, so it’s immensely vexing to witness her once more sidelined for tedious story mechanics. Curtis is as gripping as ever, elevating her repetitive, rote portions like a true professional, but congruent with the hospital setting she is egregiously confined to for (checks notes) at least 90% of the film, the plot is hermetically sealed and sterile.
Green and team nobly attempt to expand the mythology of Michael Myers into a beastly, insurmountable harbinger of death that sustains itself off the fear it perpetually invokes in others (again, a really interesting concept), but they mistake novelty and density for actual insights. Canonizing everything, down to the window in Michael’s childhood home (whose symbolic underpinnings are ironically untransparent), does not equate to actual nuance. All of this filmmaking snafu is most discernable in a mob mentality subplot, which culminates in one of the most tone-deaf occurrences I’ve seen transpire in film this year, and I endured the mockery of Dear Evan Hansen.
Dare I say less is more. Despite its manic theatrics, Halloween Kills is staggeringly bloated and aimless, including an erratic tone that can never settle on cheeky or somber, and it rots the more it meanders, like a carved pumpkin that sits out until Thanksgiving. Perhaps we were never intended to know the future exploits of Laurie and Michael: Maybe her achingly human trauma and his lurking disintegration into the expanse of night, those terrifyingly universal truths that rattle us to our very core, should have been crystallized to over 40 years ago. At least that way they don’t lose their luster, that striking flame that has been reduced to a fading ember here.
Grade: D+
Halloween Kills is now in theaters and streaming on Peacock for a premium subscription.
Photo Credit / Universal Studios
