Halloween Kills (2021)

Directed by David Gordon Green

Halloween Kills is, by the strictest legal definition alone, a movie. I could end this review right here, but I’ll keep going to satisfy my own need for revenge against this movie that held me captive in a theatre for what felt like three full hours. The “story” of Halloween Kills takes place mere moments after the events of 2018’s Halloween reboot, with the Strode family women riding away from the flaming wreckage of a house containing the now quite injured Michael Myers. Michael of course escapes and continues sowing havoc throughout the town, while Laurie Strode sits in a hospital bed for 90% of her screen time. People are killed. Flashbacks are had. Everyone talks about how evil Michael Myers is and how he’s terrorized this town for too long and how it’s all gonna be over now and evil dies tonight. Every single scene has some variation of that last sentence, and nothing else happens for the entirety of the runtime that advances the metaplot of the new Halloween trilogy in any meaningful way. And spoilers, but they DON’T KILL MICHAEL MYERS BECAUSE HOW COULD THEY?!? THERE’S ANOTHER MOVIE COMING OUT!

Look, we all know that 1978’s Halloween is a great movie. It revolutionized horror and is a shining beacon of what independent cinema can become. But I already knew that, and I bet you did too. So there isn’t any reason for there to be a big flashback at the beginning of Halloween Kills showing the events of 1978 but from a slightly different perspective, or for a character to explain to the camera exactly what happened that night in the scene directly thereafter, or for people to be constantly talking about what happened that night. If you’re making a point about how collective trauma can affect a town or generation then sure, that’s a reasonable sequence. You establish what happened and deep delve into the long term repercussions of one night of terror. But that isn’t what happens at all. There’s one sequence in the movie where it seems like they’re trying to tackle an actual plot, but as quickly as it starts up, that sequence ends, without changing anything. 

It may sound harsh but there isn’t any reason for Halloween Kills to exist. It feels more like a fan film made by a millionaire than any kind of addition to the Halloween canon, and I know at this point that there have been a lot of movies in the Halloween series that weren’t very good, but Halloween 2018 erased them! You got rid of all the bad ones (and some good ones), so why are you adding more bad movies to the series? If you don’t have an idea for what’s supposed to happen between the reboot and the ending of the Laurie Strode-Michael Myers saga, then how about you just make two movies, one that reestablishes the characters, and one that dives deep and finishes off the plot. Halloween Kills exists only to take your money and that makes me mad, and it should make YOU mad.