Halloween Kills (2021).
Directed by David Gordon Green
Written by Danny McBride
Starring a bunch of townspeople who get slaughtered one by one.
The Stage.
Taking place directly after the events of Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills moves the focus from the Strode family to the idiotic townspeople of Haddonfield, Illinois. Led by the survivors from the 1978 attacks, they form a big mob to hunt down Michael Myers, and I’m sure you can figure out how that goes.
The Review.
Just like the 2018 legacy sequel, the film looks great (unless you watch it on Peacock, which for some reason looked like a poor quality Blu-ray on my OLED) - there’s some fantastic imagery on display. David Gordon Green knocks the look out of the park, both of the Halloween setting and Myers himself. The half-burned look is the best Michael Myers has ever looked. I also like the score for the film.
The story actually steals a lot from the unproduced Halloween 4 script written by Carpenter and author Dennis Etchison. That script really had no main character, instead focusing on the town as a whole (including people like Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace), and how the town has been affected by the 40 year old tragedy. The same thing happens here, as the film pushes the Strode women to the background in favor of those who survived the old attacks. The film plays out much differently, but elements of the old script were clearly used - for example, in the script, Myers loses two fingers to a hungry dog. In this series, he lost them to a Laurie Strode shotgun blast. There are a ton of similarities, but that script was absolutely bonkers in the climax, which made Myers a full on supernatural entity who grew his fingers back, and then while being shot, absorbed the power of the bullets and turned into a 12 foot tall behemoth. I feel like they’re going towards a similar thing here by seemingly giving him more strength with the more damage he’s incurred.
The Brain has become The Jock.
The idea of the town banding together to hunt down Myers is intriguing - the hunter becomes the hunted. Unfortunately, they fail, and it’s because they’re all stupid idiots. Chanting, “Evil dies tonight!”, the mob (led by an unrecognizable Anthony Michael Hall) decides that the best way to kill Michael Myers is to stick together…so immediately, they split up. Fragmented, they incur the wrath of Myers one by one, and in particularly brutal fashion. Younger kids and babies are still off-limits, but everyone else is carved up like soft pumpkins, and some of them absolutely deserve it based on the stupid decisions they make. Oh, there’s a masked killer? Let’s go to the old Myers house in a pack of three, only to have the driver say, “Stay here, I got this.” and then get promptly slaughtered as he walks into the home alone. Or the couple who clearly know that there’s a killer in their house, and instead of like…leaving…they decide to stalk whoever is there with the world’s tiniest knives, until they’re both bloody meat sacks. Even when people are in large groups, they follow the Kung Fu film formula of attacking one by one until they’re all fucking dead. Even Karen Strode, who has seen how hard it is to kill this man is guilty of this, as she shoves a pitchfork in his back at one point and then just takes it out and walks away, like Steph Curry chucking up a three and turning his back to the basket.
Aside from a random Jim Cummings appearance in the pointless flashback sequences, the best thing about Halloween Kills are the kills. It’s by far the nastiest of the Halloween films as people are gutted in mean spirited ways like broken fluorescent bulbs to the neck, a knife under the eye and through the brain, a head twisted all the way around, and someone’s face pushed in until their eyes pop straight up into the air.
The End.
The film is gory and stupid, and only really serves as a violent bridge to the final act. While the kills are impressive, the story doesn’t really go anywhere and the people who live in Haddonfield all deserve to have their vacant real estate sold for rock bottom prices.
I’ve also come to the conclusion that Michael Myers just isn’t that interesting as a villain. He’s got no personality, no clear drive, and no rules. He went from a six-year-old kid with a knife to an immortal pea-brained oaf and no one knows how or why. The next installment is called Halloween Ends, and I think that at this point, it needs to.
