A direct sequel to Halloween (2018) and picking up immediately where that film left off, Halloween Kills is a 2021 horror film directed by David Gordon Green. As Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Laurie’s daughter, Karen (Judy Greer) and Karen’s daughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak) flee the burning house in which they have locked The Shape / Michael Myers, they are unware of the horrors about to be unleashed on the town of Haddonfield. Meanwhile, survivors of the original massacre — Tommy (Anthony Michael Hall), Lonnie (Robert Longstreet), Leigh (Charles Cyphers), Lindsey (Kyle Richards) and Marion (Nancy Stephens) — band together with other residents in a bid to kill Myers once and for all.
+ if you’re a fan of dumb people being killed in brutal ways, then this is the movie for you. I think there were only two people in the entire film that I felt bad for when they met their end; for the remainder, Myers was my personal hero
+ the best parts of the movie were recreations/sequences to be inserted into the original 1978 film, with Myers’ clean white mask once again being the scariest part of the whole movie. These sequences were great, except for whoever was playing/re-enacting Dr Loomis, who looked and sounded nothing at all like Donald Pleasance
+ two of the first characters we meet are the husband and wife from the absolutely fantastic extended shot scene from the first film. I found how that tied to the first film to be quite clever
– the entire plot is just frustratingly benign. Since this film picks up immediately after the previous, with Myers surviving (which is not a spoiler, it happens in the first minute and was the focus of the trailers) it almost retroactively renders the 2018 film moot as well. Several scenes were seemingly done solely so that someone could have some witty ‘trailer line’ at the end, often just variants on the same thing: “The monster dies tonight.” “Happy Halloween.” “Let’s finish it for good.” “Now it’s time for us to hunt him.” — these are all made up examples, but if you cringed at any of them then I did as well as the writers did here
– Myers as a character, or perhaps more fittingly “The Shape”, has always toed the line between supernatural horror (compare Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees) and the ‘scary because it’s real’ serial killer (in the vein of Leatherface or Ghostface). This film references this fact, but unfortunately does so in a way that just made me roll my eyes and cringe
– every single character is an idiot that got exactly what was coming to them. Whether they were just horrible people, whether they were idiots or whether their actions were a result of something else entirely (clumsily tying into the above point) I had no sympathy for any of them, and indeed feel that instead my time was wasted by even bothering to remember their names. There is one couple who are so annoying and embarrassing, seemingly unintentionally so, that they drag the movie down every second they are on screen
– the first movie’s extended scene was a highlight of the first film, and there is nothing at all that comes even close to that level of production in this movie. Worse still, there is the perfect opportunity to have done another or similar extended scene near the end of this movie and it was not done
> I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it forever: nothing makes my butthole clench like Michael Myers’ mask. The Shape is the scariest villain in cinema, and there will be no discussion on this fact
Should you see this film: This movie sucked, particularly after how much I liked the 2018 movie. The characters were some of the stupidest I have seen in any horror movie, the plot amounts to almost literally nothing, and I was begging for the movie to end on a high but it just never came. Rewatch the 1978 original, then the 2018 sequel, and stop there.
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