Mark Reviews Movies: HALLOWEEN KILLS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 14, 2021

The skepticism surrounding director David Gordon Green's Halloween, which served as a direct sequel to the 1978 masterpiece of the same name (and created a fourth timeline within the franchise's other sequels), was certainly warranted. The filmmaker, though, seemed to pull off a nearly impossible task: making a 40-years-late follow-up that, unlike every other sequel and/or reboot in the series, understood what made the original film as staggeringly effective as it was and remains.

Green returned Michael Myers, the always-walking killer/boogeyman who stalked and killed residents of a small Illinois town, to his roots as a primal force of unstoppable evil. The 2018 sequel also invented a thoughtful reason to keep this story going beyond the requisite scenes of bloody murder. Michael—or "the Shape," as the character is credited—also represented trauma for the target who somehow escaped decades prior, after seeing her friends killed and nearly being murdered herself. Like Michael when he has his eyes set on a potential victim, trauma such as that doesn't simply stop.

With the Shape seemingly dead at the end of the 2018 entry, there seems little reason for yet another sequel. Obviously, Halloween Kills exists, so Green and his fellow screenwriters (newcomer Scott Teems and a returning Danny McBride) had better have a good reason for bringing Michael back, beyond the fact that they can because the masked killer is essentially invincible. Alas, one can sense the screenwriters trying to figure out that reason throughout this routinely plotted and thematically meandering sequel.

The present-tense story here picks up almost immediately after Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) fought Michael, trapped him in Laurie's basement, and set fire to the isolated fortress she called home. Perhaps attempting to distract us from how absurdly and simply Laurie's decades' long plan to finally kill Michael falls apart (Firefighters are typically called in to, you know, fight fires, after all), the screenplay first jumps backwards in time to 1978. Michael (played by Airon Armstrong in the flashbacks, James Jude Courtney with the mask in 2018, and Nick Castle without it) is returning home after his killing spree.

Here, we learn that a significant number of things happened during and previously unseen characters were impacted by Michael's trip home. Hawkins (Will Patton in the present and Thomas Mann in the past) almost caught the killer and had a run-in with Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence or his digital likeness returns by way of some semi-convincing but uncomfortable trickery). Another teenager had a close call with the murderer and, like the other survivors of that night, has been traumatized ever since.

Yes, this movie is once again about how Michael has devastated the lives of people for decades, whether it be Laurie or the kid she was babysitting, who has grown up to still be called Tommy (Anthony Michael Hall), or Lindsey (Kyle Richards, returning from the 1978 film), the babysat kid of a victim, or Marion (Nancy Stephens, also returning), the nurse who was almost Michael's first victim that night. There's also Lonnie (Robert Longstreet), a character who's awkwardly retrofitted to be part of both the flashbacks (having the aforementioned close call) and the current story (He's the father of Allyson's boyfriend, played by Dylan Arnold).

When word spreads that Michael is back in Haddonfield and survived the fire, Tommy forms a posse of survivors and concerned townsfolk with a rallying cry: "Evil dies tonight!" The movie's existence, of course, lets us know that evil, possibly, might die in a year or two, maybe—and only until some other filmmakers decide to bring it back.

These flashbacks, all of these returning characters and/or actors, and the general expansion of the lore surrounding Michael try to imbue the movie with the air and weight of a mythos that turns out to be counterproductive. Such maneuvers sank previous sequels/reboots in this franchise, as Michael and his murderous ways were explained or mythologized with decreasing persuasiveness and increasing silliness. The screenwriting team here fall into that trap with a bit too much eagerness.

Our main characters are placed on the sidelines (Laurie is in the hospital for the whole movie, and Karen tries to keep Allyson there, too), only to take focus at the climax (Karen and Allyson partake in the action, while Laurie has a couple of monologues that attempt to rationalize Michael in the vaguest possible terms). Tommy's obsession to kill Michael and protect his former babysitter becomes the more significant focus, as many people suffer and die for that fixation, while a paranoid and bloodthirsty mob loses all sense of reason. That, Laurie suggests, is what Michael wants, and whatever the hell that's supposed to mean is apparently left for the next installment.

Green still presents Michael as a slow but relentless killer of uncertain power, only certain about killing. When Halloween Kills isn't building up its own myth or ambiguously hinting at half-considered ideas, the movie does possess some suspenseful sequences of the killer's stalking and hunting. The fewer and fewer moments of that here suggest Green and company might not understand this character and what he represents as well as the previous film displayed.

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