Rating: 😒🎃

As a title, Halloween Kills is fertile ground for snippy critical mockery. “Halloween Kills The Franchise,” “Halloween Kills My Love of Slashers,” “Halloween Kills My Attention Span;” all of these feel like headlines I've seen regarding the newest installment of Michael’s Big Day Out. Having now watched the film, I can confirm such quippy, lazy headlines misrepresent the movie entirely. To offer more nuance and accuracy, they should read something like: “Halloween Kills And Also Sucks The Dick Straight Off A Dog Sloppy-Style For Real; Had Me With My Head In My Hands In The Damn Theater, My God.” Bluntly put, it's rougher than any snarky one-liner can communicate.

How did we get here? 2018’s Halloween was a good-enough, probably better-than-average entry into the current canon of horror rebootquels. It didn't move mountains and it certainly stumbled in places, but at the end of the day Michael killed a bunch of dudes and Laurie was there and the plot was cohesive as it needed to be. The bar, however low, was cleared. Halloween Kills, director-writer David Gordon Green’s second stab at the material, plays like a meandering mish-mash harvested from the cutting room floor. It is meaningless yet infuriating, stupid yet unfunny, and formless yet exhausting. Whether we like it or not, Green may have perfected the art of the garbage slasher sequel.

Halloween Kills picks up right at the conclusion of Halloween — both the 2018 and 1978 versions. In the present day, Haddonfield hunkers down as Michael continues his twenty-five person killstreak. In the past, we see how police caught Michael after his ventilation by Dr. Loomis; a full retcon of Halloween II. From here, things happen. People die. Random cast members who survived Halloween (1978) enter the mix, then immediately and brutally exit. There’s a couple of comedy homosexuals. The girl from Psycho Goreman shows up as the same character. An angry mob forms. The 1978 flashback becomes a cop guilt story. Jamie Lee Curtis is onscreen for about 8% of the movie and spends most of that time in a hospital bed. More people die. After 105 minutes of this, the film stops because it eventually must and promptly dissipates like smoke. There’s no climax, because there was never a narrative. Just like that, Michael Myers claims another victim: setup and payoff. Zing!

Honestly, there’s no element of this film which doesn’t exhaust me to think about. It’s hard to pick apart exactly what goes wrong, because so much of it is always going wrong at every moment. Familiar characters get nothing to do, the plot never advances, and the kill scenes which aren't excessively cruel lack shock or impact. When credits roll, it’s painfully and even shamelessly obvious that Halloween Kills exists only to pad out two films into a trilogy. There is nothing here, in the grand scope of Green and company’s narrative, that couldn’t fit into the end of Halloween and the beginning of a second installment. The story of Michael and Laurie’s confrontation after forty years feels completely inert, because there’s no story being told. In most slasher films this wouldn't be an issue, as plot rarely truly matters, but the creators of this Halloween cycle seem dead set on making the ultimate, definitive, epic and cool conclusion to Myers v. Strode. In doing so, they cause a lot of problems for themselves.

One of the major issues with Halloween 2018 is that it retconned the franchise alllllll the way back to Halloween 1978. This meant slashing out Halloween II, which until this point was the engine driving the entire series. That’s the film which revealed Laurie was Michael’s sister, thus providing a crux for his murderous rampage and doling out baked-in context for every conflict to follow. It’s fine when Michael goes after Jamie’s daughter in Halloween 4, because that connection is in place. When Halloween H20: Just Add Water retcons the series back to II and ends with Laurie severing Michael’s head, it kicks ass because of the weird family tragedy and us having seen Michael pursue her for two films. In Halloween 2018, there were a few nitpicky holes created by the lack of motivation for both Laurie and Michael, but in Halloween Kills, the absence is like the collapse of foundation beneath a burning building.

I'm not a purist, and I don’t put horror canon on a pedestal. I love when movies do wacky retcon lore shit — Curse of Michael Myers, Saw V, etc — but the removal of Michael and Laurie’s family ties feels like Icarus flying too close to that great pumpkin candle in the sky. It's clear David Gordon Green wanted to do, uh…...something with his interpretation of The Man Behind The Captain Kirk Mask, but so far his narrative hasn't delivered and thus Halloween Kills falls into a twofold abyss, with both past and present storylines bleeding out thanks to empty writing. The 2018 threads can't keep up with an overall absence of motivation, but still want to pretend like the franchise’s history and emotional resonance are intact. There's a bit where Laurie says Haddonfield is going to fight Michael like they "always do" — bro, your retcon! This is the second time her or anyone else has ever met Myers!! What relationship do they have? What the hell do you mean like you "always do???" Laurie, girl, in this canon you hid inside a closet from him one time and then an old guy dressed like Columbo lit his ass up! Y’all can't roll back the whole damn franchise and still play like Michael's been crank-calling Haddonfield residents since 1978!

Speaking of 1978…...oh lord, the 1978 material. Without Halloween II in place to buoy the connection, Halloween Kills does a massive amount of unnecessary flashback legwork presenting what happens after John Carpenter’s autumnal opus, and all of it sucks shit through a straw. When the first flashback starts, you get the sinking feeling this’ll be the hackiest material of the whole franchise. By the time some schlub shows up in Donald Pleasance makeup delivering lines that sound sentence-mixed like a YouTube Poop, the feeling is a knot. Once it turns into a narrative about how hard it is to be a cop, I was fully groaning in the theater. Shoutout to the guy several rows back, one of four people in the theater for this, who surely witnessed me throw my hands in the air multiple times. Exasperating.

I really, really can't convey how dumb the moment-to-moment actions of this film come across. I have no problem with brainless plot beats, but Halloween Kills exercises an insipidity which crosses the threshold to insulting. The 1978 story ends with Michael being surrounded and captured — why on earth would I believe Dr. Loomis and the Keystone Cops could put a stop to Michael when in this film we see him clear crowds like Neo in the Burly Brawl? One of the movie’s only (and stupidest) 2018 threads involves a mob forming and then mistakenly killing an innocent man — why would they go after this guy with the same hair and stature as Danny DeVito’s Penguin, when they know Michael is a 6’3” killing machine? Why does Laurie have a two-minute romantic subplot with a cop? Why is Laurie even in this movie? Why does Judy Greer see a vision of child Michael? Is Michael some kind of fear demon now? Is he homophobic? Why did the writers add a gay couple from a 2007 movie to this? Why the Halloween III masks? Why all the other fanservice if you're going to actively shit on the canon but offer nothing in return? Why, why, why???

With slasher movies I don't like to nitpick about story details, but it can't be helped here because Halloween Kills desperately wishes to be a bold, emotionally resonant horror film with some kind of pathos and payoff. But there's no pathos and no payoff because there's no sense of connection between these people, and everyone talks in thudding one-liners and platitudes which mean nothing to nobody. It’s on the level of a Friday the 13th sequel with its flat characters and senseless kills, but at least Friday never tried to convince me it was some big important prestige slasher opus forty years in the making. Like Michael himself, Halloween Kills just barrels ahead on pure instinct, without regard to emotion, logic, or sense. If you stabbed, shot, or otherwise aggrieved this film, I don't think it would bleed. There was nothing in the veins to begin with.

David Gordon Green’s lifeless take on this material feels utterly convinced it's the end-all, be-all interpretation of Michael and friends. The misplaced swagger would be less insulting if there was literally any artistry or personal stamp to the film at all, but this feels as though it could've been made by anyone, anywhere, and my god at least Rob Zombie’s duology had his distinct motor-oil-and-weed stench pouring from every crevice. Instead Green offers a big heaping helping of nothing, with the implied promise that something, anything will be delivered upon during Halloween Ends. I don't believe it. If you're going to make me sit through the “this meeting could've been an email” of horror films, I don't trust you enough to sit through another. If Laurie’s going to take Michael out of this world, I wish she would just do it already.

Also, if y’all are gonna spread your thin-ass plot across three movies like this, just make a damn miniseries. I haven't watched the new Chucky show yet, but I'll bet hard cash it's better than this tripe.

HALLOWEEN KILLS: This Meeting Could’ve Been An Email