Halloween Kills Review

Review of Halloween Kills (2021) by screenqueeen: 👎 2/5

the thirteenth night in the lonesome hooptober day 41 film 36 cats: 0

94/100

better than Green's first weenie but only marginally so. the tension and flow worked so much better in the '78 flashback only to appear like a window into a beautiful, well-preserved vista of a tangentially nostalgic piece that feels purposeful. then the rest of the film becomes an extended version of the majority of HALLOWEEN 4 but focusing only on the angry mob and using that as an excuse to drag out the runtime by cutting to random different houses and families. Michael isn't an entity that reflects onto the community of Haddonfield like the way it seems to be argued here. he is a void that everything gets sucked through, crushed. eviscerated, unceremoniously until the next source comes along. we already have these HALLOWEEN sequels.

David Gordon Green wanted to continue from the first film only and go from there. but everything so far has just been poorly repurposed elements of sequels we are supposed to have already disregarded in favor of the promise that this trilogy is a new voice in an original, expansive story that seeks to go where previous attempts did not. we saw where that went when Green, McBride & Curtis leaned hard on the trauma angle. yet where that felt like a gross misunderstanding of sympathetic trauma and its survivors, this does the same thing with the risks of vigilantism. but once that trolley cart gets moving the film has run out of things to say (if it did at all) and has also never thought out any interesting or dramatic implications for what it appeared to be setting up in the previous film. seeing where Green took this one after the paint-by-numbers re(squeak)quel tells me he had nothing of his own to go off of. the flow gave a feeling of watching a tv miniseries poorly adapted to stretch a feature film that wanted to emulate something Ryan Murphy would've secreted in a truck stop bathroom*. there is nothing of consequence outside the short term cause and effect.

there is more of a focus on Michael killing various townspeople but there is no foundation of what this surface-level terror is built on. when there's nothing behind horrific actions like the way Michael kills people, it's not exciting beyond the flash of the moment and some brief appreciation for the idea of the methods used to end the lives of various people, fleshed out to try and make them feel real. is it the town wanting to move on from what they see as an antiquated bedtime story meant to scare kids around halloween? is it that they don't want to face the very real possibility that small towns like their own can harbor an evil such as this and when if ever this form is eradicated, it's only a matter of time until it returns in a different form? is it that everyone in Haddonfield believe somewhere that they deserve this evil? nothing is behind the apparent societal fear of a guy who killed his sister as a kid in the 60s, shocking the entire community and it shows. when Green tries to build an elaborate set of moving parts on top of our memory of the 1978 original, recapped during the entirety of 'WEEN 18, the whole fucking thing falls apart.

the final moments of the film is a desperate grasping at straws, trying to make something happen that would affect the stakes of what has been set up within this new trilogy. each new iteration of what we think we want out of a HALLOWEEN sequel proves the point that moving on from Michael in favor of a different story was always the better idea. this thought popped back up when i saw the very obvious SEASON OF THE WITCH nod with the silver shamrock masks and got kinda mad at Green for fundamentally misunderstanding what makes HALLOWEEN work then poking at the only movie in the franchise that dared to come up with its own thing to develop elsewhere but equally as sinister.

*if this makes you mad then i don't think we can ever be friends