by Foster Harlfinger, Contributing Writer
Taking place immediately after the events of the surprisingly successful Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills depicts the residents of Haddonfield, Illinois as they grapple with the return of their masked terrorizer, Michael Myers. “Mob mentality” is a phrase you will hear in many reviews given the film’s attempt to explore Haddonfield’s collective trauma through its cast of fed-up townspeople.
Reviewing Halloween Kills as its own film is a difficult task, because this entry clearly serves as Act Two of David Gordon Green’s three-act Halloween trilogy, and the film feels incomplete as a result. However, if Green is able to direct a satisfying conclusion to his trilogy with Halloween Ends next year, these films have the potential to make a highly rewatchable triple-feature. As its own film, however, Halloween Kills will undoubtedly split fans down the middle. Your enjoyment of this movie will entirely depend on what you hope to get out of a movie titled Halloween Kills. If all you want is for Michael Myers to plow through the town of Haddonfield, killing people in increasingly creative and grotesque ways, then you will have an excellent time. The film absolutely delivers on that front, and watching it in a packed theater will produce some extremely entertaining crowd reactions. Likewise, there are a number of moments in which the film’s fiery visuals and gnarly score unite to create truly exciting moments that will be sure to satisfy a certain sect of the film-going population.
However, if you enter Halloween Kills hoping to explore the generational trauma of the Strode women or to enjoy a skillfully crafted thriller with intelligent characters and a clever plot, you may find yourself hating this film. Laurie Strode, though excellently portrayed by Jamie Lee Curtis, remains asleep in a hospital for the vast majority of the film. In fact, all three Strode women are pushed to the sidelines, despite the fact that all three actresses are giving excellent performances. I am particularly happy that Judy Greer got a chance to shine, since she felt very underused in Halloween (2018). However, rather than develop these potentially intriguing characters, the film chooses to focus on the townspeople of Haddonfield. To say these townspeople are dumb as rocks would be an understatement. Characters who manage to escape Michael’s wrath could easily outrun his deliberate pace, yet they repeatedly stop, turn around, or hide when they could simply take a brisk three mile-per-hour power walk and survive. If you are the sort of person to roll your eyes at impossibly poor gun aim or characters who decide to split the group rather than band together, you will absolutely despise this film.
Audience members who are able to ignore the idiotic character choices and often cringeworthy dialogue (take a shot every time someone says, “Evil dies tonight!”) may walk away from Halloween Kills having had an excellent time. For all its many faults, I was able to give myself into Green’s admittedly unsubtle vision. The film is aware of the fact that a large portion of its audience wants nothing more than a gory kill-fest, and that mentality is reflected in the choice to center such a large portion of the film’s runtime around the murderous campaign of our antagonist, whose mask seems to flicker with the slightest hint of a smile. Halloween Kills will almost certainly divide fans of this series, though that seems fitting given that nearly every other entry in the Halloween franchise has done the same.
Grade: C-
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