Film Review: Halloween Kills

Director: David Gordon Green
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak
Running time: 105 minutes

It is no spoiler to say that Michael Myers is back on the streets of Haddonfield in the sequel to 2018’s Halloween, as he’s known for never staying out of action for long. Halloween Kills sees Michael Myers escape from Laurie Strode's trap and continue to kill everybody he encounters. Injured from the events of the last film, Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) is taken to hospital and is largely out of action. Taking matters into their own hands, Laurie’s daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) – as well as other survivors, both past and present – form a vigilante mob to try and hunt down and kill Michael, once and for all. 

While the preceding film Halloween (2018) writes 1981’s Halloween II out of the franchise’s canon, Halloween Kills confirms this erasure by beginning the film by showing the events directly after 1978’s Halloween, in a nostalgic fashion that should delight long-standing fans. The opening titles emulate the visuals used in the original 1978 film’s tiles, and the original electronic foreboding John Carpenter score – so effective at creating mood in the original it is like a character in itself – is utilised correctly in the opening sequence, but unfortunately this is not continued throughout the film, despite John Carpenter himself working alongside others on the film’s score. I found myself wishing the action remained in 1978, as the winning formula of 1978’s Halloween is lost in this sequel.

The return of Laurie’s family is not a welcome one for me. Her daughter Karen and granddaughter Allyson are devoid of any likeability or dimension. What helps this film transcend its 2018 predecessor is that it mercifully includes other characters. Laurie’s role in this film is not like it is in the previous film, with her limited presence making way for the vigilante mob to be the focus. Laurie’s role in Michael’s life, and his motivation for returning to Haddonfield, is questioned through Laurie’s conversation with an old friend in the hospital bed next to her. 

With Laurie being an intrinsic part of Michael’s mythos, Laurie’s backseat role in this film I sense, somewhat cynically, is to set up Michael Myers as a separate entity from her, to fuel further sequels without Laurie, rather than to give the film a chance to indulgently interrogate the link between Laurie and Michael to serve the fans. I didn’t feel that the film paid due diligence to the franchise’s past in this respect, and Laurie’s absence feels disappointing rather than functioning as a narrative device.

In 2018’s Halloween, Laurie is an outcast of Haddonfield, perceived by the town and her own daughter as unstable because of her obsession with Michael Myers and her isolated existence. In this film, Laurie is suddenly a figure of sympathy and inspiration. I would not have minded this if the reason for people’s change of heart was more convincing. It simply takes a brief and disappointingly hollow speech in a bar commemorating the anniversary of the events of Halloween 1978 by survivor Tommy Doyle (played by Anthony Michael Hall, and not the original actor), who was a child at the time of the events of in 1978, as well as a coincidental news report that Michael Myers is still out there killing, that convinces a bar of residents to go after Michael and recruit others. 

The franchise has been going since 1978, with Tommy a character in the original, and if this scene had the emotional punch it could have had with its allusion to the past, the film could be far more poignant. The natural element of a film that focuses on a town that has suffered at the hands off brutal serial killer, and a franchise that has so much history, should have been poignancy, at least executed to some degree of adeptness, and this is lost in Halloween Kills to misplaced humour and poor writing. 

The group created to defeat Michael consists of Haddonfield residents, including characters that fans of the 1978 original will recognise – the source of my enjoyment of the film. Despite the weakness of the film surrounding him, Michael Myers himself is on brutal form. Killing indiscriminately and with whatever weapon or object he can get his hands on, the gore in this film is more intense than any of its predecessors. 1978’s Halloween was never really about gore – instead, it was more about the dread and tension building up to the deaths. This film focuses more on the kills, as the title suggests. This may serve most casual audience members well, if they are seeking an undemanding horror fix – but the film doesn’t contain any true scares, with suspense and fear making way for viscera. 

Halloween Kills struggles with setting a consistent tone – it attempts to be funny, but at the wrong moments, which cuts through any tension or dread that there might otherwise be, like Michael Myers cutting through a torso. When an angry mob is in a film, you expect things to turn ugly. A scene of mob chaos in the hospital which is reasonably harrowing and should have been climactic is watered down by its conclusion, with the characters stating they have learned from it in one casual line of dialogue – then it’s as if it never happened and the stakes remain unchanged. This alarmingly poor scene placement is a prime example of the inconsistency of the film’s tone. The dialogue is not the film’s strong point either, and it is ridden with tagline-worthy cliched exclamations. However, there are a couple of lines of dialogue that certainly do deliver – direct nods to the 1978 original, which did make me smile.

Did you know? Director David Gordon Green has confirmed that the next film, Halloween Ends, will take place four years later and acknowledge that the Covid-19 pandemic has taken place.

Halloween Kills is in cinemas now