Halloween Kills: Send it to an early grave

Halloween Kills (2021) • View trailer

One star (out of five). Rated R, for strong gory violence, grisly images, profanity and drug use

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

What. A. Stinker.

 

Unless I’m missing one, this is the 12th entry in the undead franchise that began with 1978’s Halloween, a modest little shocker that still out-performs all of its descendants.

 

Having barely survived what they felt was their final encounter with the murderous
Michael Myers (hah!), Karen (Judy Greer, left) and Allyson (Andi Matichak, right)
rush a badly wounded Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) to the hospital.

The series has been wholly re-invented at least twice, and Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode has been killed the same number of times … only to be resurrected by subsequent filmmakers anxious for her dwindling fan cred, who explained this away by insisting, “Oh, that one (or those several) didn’t count.”

Even by such increasingly contrived standards, in a textbook case of rapidly diminishing returns, director David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills is an insufferable waste of time.

 

For starters, Curtis’ top-billed credit is a bait-and-switch; her Laurie Strode is present for only five, perhaps 10 minutes … and she spends the majority of that time moaning in a hospital bed.

 

Instead, our nominal “heroes” are Laurie’s daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), returning from 2018’s Halloween, the most recent re-boot, which kicked off a trilogy that’ll conclude (yeah, right) with next year’s Halloween Ends.

 

And while it’s nice that Green — along with co-writers Scott Teems and Danny McBride — have name-checked characters and events from John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, it would have been even better if they’d written a coherent script. Seriously, nothing that happens in this misbegotten flick makes any sense — except as a means to set up another welter of gory deaths — and every character’s dialogue is random, hysterical gibberish.

 

So okay: It’s fun to see the now-adult Kyle Richards, reprising her role as Lindsey Wallace, one of the kids Laurie babysat back in 1978; and Nancy Stephens, as Marion Chambers, the nurse accompanying Donald Pleasance’s Samuel Loomis (also glimpsed in fleeting flashbacks); and Charles Cyphers, as Haddonfield’s former Sheriff Leigh Brackett, who lost his daughter during the masked Michael Myers’ initial rampage.

 

But it would have been even more fun, if this new film gave them something intelligent to do.

 

Sigh.

 

By way of quick recap, the 2018 film concluded as Laurie, Karen and Allyson cleverly trapped Michael in a long-planned basement dungeon, and then set the entire house on fire. At long last, the demise of Michael Myers, right?

 

Of course not.

 

Halloween Kills kicks off seconds after that previous film concluded, with Karen and Allyson rushing Laurie to the hospital, because of injuries sustained during the climactic melee. Meanwhile, clueless firefighters battle the blaze at Laurie’s home, and — wouldn’t you just know it? — unwittingly set Michael free.

 

He returns the favor by butchering all of them. (No good deed goes unpunished, donchaknow.)

 

As the subsequent rampage progresses, Green and his co-writers make it quite clear that Michael is unkillable: the truly immortal “boogeyman” that Loomis christened him, back in 1978. Which isn’t very smart, actually, because it makes this entire film an exercise in futility. Why should we waste time with a premise that ostentatiously guarantees no way to win?

 

The prickly family dynamic between Laurie, Karen and Allyson — which gave the 2018 film a smidgen of realistic dramatic heft — has been abandoned. Now Greer and Matichak just dash about frantically, spouting nonsense.

 

New characters introduced solely to be plucked — er, skewered — include Big John and Little John (Scott MacArthur and Michael McDonald), a gay couple living in the former Myers’ family home (whose performances skirt the edge of an outdated stereotype); and Vanessa (Carmela McNeal) and Marcus (Michael Smallwood), briefly glimpsed in the 2018 film.

 

Will Patton’s Officer Hawkins also returns, from the 2018 film, in a cameo even more fleeting than Curtis’ appearance.

 

We also spend an insufferable amount of time with Tommy Doyle, another of the kids who survived the original 1978 killing spree, now (over)played — with preposterous, foaming-at-the-mouth intensity — by Anthony Michael Hall. Yes, the former “brat pack” co-star of 1980s classics Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, who later regained modest fame during the five-year run of TV’s The Dead Zone, and has kicked around in unmemorable roles since then.

 

In a clumsy nod to the pitfalls of real-world social media misinformation, Tommy whips Haddonfield’s residents into a frenzy as the night progresses … and of course they ultimately target the wrong person. (Oops. Our bad.)

 

In the hands of actual writers, that could have been a welcome — and highly disturbing — subplot, and a clever means of (ahem) cutting away from Michael’s lethal antics. Alas, as presented, it’s only a shrill and brief distraction: a sad waste of a good idea.

 

All of these ridiculous antics take place against a score — by John Carpenter, son Cody and godson Daniel Davies — that makes ample use of the unsettling synth cues that masterfully heightened the 1978 film’s creep factor. Again, a nice touch … but also totally wasted here.

 

I see that Green also directed the upcoming Halloween Ends, and is attached to a 2023 remake of The Exorcist. Hey, if you’ve desecrated one classic horror franchise, why not go for a second?

This is what happens, when commerce — greed — comes before art.