Way back when his first entry in the series, “Halloween (2018),” was released, it was revealed that writer/director David Gordon Green (“Pineapple Express,” “Prince Avalanche”) had initially conceived of the film as a two parter, filming the entire thing at once and releasing part one a year before part two. This idea was eventually abandoned, as they didn’t want to make a film people hated and then had to wait a year to see more of what they hated, instead making one standalone film to show they could make a good “Halloween” story.
That worked, as the 2018 film is a fantastic return to the series roots, maintaining a chilling tone with plenty of intrigue and speculation over who Michael is, what makes him tick, and why he’s going after Laurie, as well as what Laurie has grown up like after the killing spree when she was a teenager. The reason it's helpful to reference back to Green’s comments is because “Halloween Kills” is very clearly part one of a two part film, with part two hitting theatres next year in the form of “Halloween Ends.”
Many of the ideas that “Kills” brings to the table are cool, but they’re cool on paper. In execution, “Halloween Kills” is a massive step backwards for the series, acting as a mostly flat middle entry that exists to get from the end of “Halloween (2018)” to the beginning of “Halloween Ends.”
While there are many issues at play, the biggest one is the fact that this film was clearly conceived as a middle chapter to a trilogy. Not much really happens, there aren’t any character arcs, and much of what each character does feels like filler. It’s about 30-40 minutes of plot stretched into 105 minutes. Maybe the film was a victim of marketing that built it up to be the next big chapter, but regardless, the film feels limp, hollow, and like a series of extra ideas left on the cutting room floor from 2018.
Jamie Lee Curtis (“A Fish Called Wanda,” “Knives Out”) has some cracks showing in her performance, which is relegated to standing in a hospital room monologuing about how Michael “transcends” the more he kills. It dives further into the hokey “supernatural” elements that the 2018 film seemed to be happy to discard, and you can tell from the look on Curtis’s face that she’s not buying it as much as the audience isn’t.
Andi Matichak (“Assimilate,” “Miles”) continues to be a potential shining new face to follow in the footsteps of horror legends like Curtis, even as she is also handed some kneecapped material. She spends most of the film tracing Michael’s path and isn’t given any form of arc or any dramatic material to deal with. It’s a testament to her abilities that she, like Curtis, manages to lift the film up simply by being on screen.
Then there’s Judy Greer (“Arrested Development,” “Ant-Man”). The beloved comedic actress was a bright spot in the 2018 film, playing a counterpoint to Curtis’s Strode. She offset her mother’s paranoid, revenge fueled tendencies, until she didn’t and it was a highlight of the film for many. In “Kills” though, her character has been brutally neutered. It’s as if someone took her well meaning but idiotic character Cheryl from “Archer” and put her in this film. She makes some of the most boneheaded decisions in the series' history, and it's the kind of writing where, it doesn’t matter how good the performance is, it just brings everything down.
In one of the film’s best ideas though, writers Green, Danny McBride (“Pineapple Express,” “This Is The End”), and Scott Teems (“The Quarry,” “Rectify”) have brought back more of the kids who’s sitters were killed by Michael in the original film. Anthony Michael Hall (“The Breakfast Club,” “The Dead Zone”) plays Tommy Doyle, a man bent on exacting revenge from Michael in a performance that seems to have been given the proper time and care to make it work dramatically. Kyle Richards (“Down to Earth,” “The Watcher in the Woods”) reprises her role from the original film as Lindsey Wallace, as does Nancy Stephens (“Bright Promise,” “Escape From New York”) as Marion Chambers.
The reintroduction of these characters proves to be a smart way to both reference the original film and also to show how the town in the years since has dealt with the killings. However, like the rest of the film’s plot, it's a good idea on paper only. Tommy ends up getting the rest of the town together to find Michael in what feels like an incredibly ham-fisted attempt to say something about mob mentality. It falls painfully flat because the film doesn’t seem to have any concept of self-awareness. It feels like it's pointing at the audience and saying “isn’t it horrible how much they all want violence and death and revenge?” as the audience sits and watches a movie about violence, death, and revenge.
Worst of all, while horror films have to have people make stupid decisions for the bloodshed to flow, it feels particularly stupid here, especially following a movie where people seemed to have wised up. Even as he’s trying to organize large groups to hunt Michael, these groups then split up into fairly small bunches that then split up even further. Characters who even live in Michael’s house and lecture kids about how horrific he is proceed to leave doors open all around their house and split up whilst investigating strange noises.
It's also hard to take the film seriously as it attempts to show people grappling with the grief caused by Michael’s violence given that it's the most violent “Halloween” film yet. As you watch Michael bash a young boy’s head in a few minutes after watching the mother of one of the 2018 film’s victims crying as she sees her dead son’s body in the hospital, it starts to feel a bit malicious, and not in a fun way. It feels cold, cruel, and uncaring. It seems like a weird complaint to make, that a horror film about a masked killer feels cruel, but it just does.
“Halloween Kills” is the perfect example of a film that excels in its technical merits and fails in nearly every other way. The poor script and lack of any real momentum kneecaps the performances, and while its shot well and contains another excellent score from John Carpenter (“Halloween (1978),” “Escape From New York”), Cody Carpenter (“Halloween (2018), “Ghosts of Mars”), and Daniel Davies (“Halloween (2018)”), its music and shots set to some cruel and uncaring moments. Its “message” rings hollow and the film seems to just be doubling back, repeating numerous mistakes the series supposedly had fixed with the 2018 film. When “Halloween Ends” is released on home video and this trilogy is inevitably fan-edited into one massive three-and-a-half hour long movie, “Kills” will be remembered for being slotted right in the middle, edited down to twenty minutes of plot, and nothing else. 2/5
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