Halloween Kills
directed by David Gordon Green
This slasher film is a sequel to the 2018 film which was itself a sequel to the original 1978 classic original film and a retcon for some of the various sequels, remakes, and reboots that have taken place in the intervening forty years. It is also the second film in a trilogy.
directed by David Gordon Green
Perhaps the final film, imaginatively titled Halloween Ends, will at long last end the saga of Michael Myers. I hope so. Halloween Kills tries an appeal to nostalgia for those of us who remember the 1978 film by bringing back some characters from that film or its immediate sequel.
I felt no such sentimentality.
I don't think anyone missed those characters. Halloween wasn't a film where (children aside) you had much feeling for characters besides Laurie Strode. This film doesn't establish WHY we should care about people who implausibly survived their own encounter with Michael Myers.
I might have cared about them more if the film showed me the murders' impact on their lives, families, and relationships-in short what the 2018 film did with Laurie Strode, then considered a gun crazed paranoid grandma. Halloween Kills opens after the events of the 2018 film.
In present day Laurie Strode (Jamie Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) speed to the hospital. Michael Myers/The Shape (James Courtney and Nick Castle) has stabbed Laurie in the stomach.
Despite the pain Laurie is grimly satisfied that she's put a hurting on Michael and that he will soon be dead. Laurie has locked Michael in the basement and set her house on fire.
But Michael is NOT dead, as several responding firefighters discover in the film's best set piece. People initially try to keep this information from Laurie.
Tommy (Anthony Michael Hall) was the little boy whom Laurie was babysitting for and protected all those years ago. He's haunted by the murders and wants both to protect and to pay a debt to Laurie by personally killing Michael. When Tommy hears that Michael is back he forms a town lynch mob, including his friend Lindsey (Kyle Richards- who also was in the original film), to find and kill Michael. This lynch mob is incompetent, dangerous, and easily distracted.
Michael stalks and butchers several lynch mob members. Michael's victims include an emasculating and irritating Black woman and her submissive husband, a gay couple living in his old home and anyone else he encounters.
Recovering from surgery and comparing notes with Deputy Hawkins (Will Patton), Laurie reaches some conclusions that were floated in other installments but never exactly confirmed. This film is a mixed bag. When the film makes Michael look like the coolest character, something went wrong. This movie has LOTS of violence. TONS. OODLES and OODLES.
