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.
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| 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. |
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.
