This review contains mild spoilers for Halloween Kills.
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Count me among the true believer camp of David Gordon Green and Danny McBride’s 2018 Slasher-rejuvenator Halloween. The way that film played with the iconography and inventiveness of John Carpenter’s undisputed classic, with parallels and recontextualized compositions, and a deadly sense of humor and trauma, is probably the high-water mark of this genre in the past 20 years. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Halloween Kills doesn’t quite achieve the same heights as its predecessor. In fact, it definitely doesn’t.
But – and here is where things are going to start to get complicated – this is assuming that was the aim of Green and McBride on their second attempt. And after sitting with this film for the better part of a week, I have come to doubt that this was their intention at all. Because in Halloween Kills, the plight of Laurie Strode, her family, and the entirety of Haddonfield, which were rendered so deliberately in the last film, is almost incidental. If one area of ‘Ween ‘18 is consistently carried over and built-upon this go-around, it’s the almost feverish and ghoulish obsession of the people of this town to project their fears, pain, and culpability onto a blank Shape. The biggest departure, then, is that this is a film more interested in interrogating the derivation and implication of that instinct, than in delivering some form of ass-kicking catharsis.
As the trailers showed, Halloween Kills takes place mere minutes after the transcendent ending of the previous film, in the aftermath of Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), Karen (Judy Greer), and Allyson’s (Andi Matichak) capture and immolation of a resurgent Boogeyman Michael Myers. This might lead you to believe that this movie pops off immediately, but this is just the first point at which your brow will begin to furrow while your eyes begin to widen, because Halloween Kills slams on the brakes and drops us right back into 1978 with a younger version of almost every character in this film, who, in turn, are almost exclusively characters from the rest of the series which Halloween ‘18 erased from the timeline. Every one of the kids from the John Carpenter movie, along with younger versions of nearly every character in the previous film are present in a flashback that shows the apprehension of Michael Myers (Nick Castle and James Jude Courtney), and the traumatic run-ins each of our crew of elder survivors – Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall in an absolutely bizarre performance) and Lindsey Wallace (Real Housewife Kyle Richards), Lonny Elam (Robert Longstreet), and even Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens). For basically the first 10 minutes (a cold open worthy of The World Is Not Enough) we are made to understand that the idea that we will be spending much, if any time with the hard fought central trio of the previous film is folly. David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, and one of the most curious edits of a studio film in years have conspired to make Halloween Kills a movie with Capital S Scope. The backdrop is essentially the entire town of Haddonfield, and an almost absurd amount of the residents therein, all of whom are carrying their own personal Myers-inspired trauma akin to Laurie’s in the last film1, and a general bubbling frenzy over The Boogeyman. I can’t explain to you how strange it is to set a movie moments after the previous entry and then not even get to Laurie and her progeny for almost 20 minutes, especially when you’ve had both present and past action separated by a credits sequence (which is gorgeous). But this is just scratching the surface of how bizarre a film Halloween Kills ends up being, because as I mentioned earlier, even when Laurie, Karen, and Allyson do appear, the film barely focuses on them, opting instead to have the plot and story driven by the citizens of Haddonfield in a vignette series, to which the Strode clan basically just react passively, or glom onto in fits of mania, respectively. This isn’t to say that our three stars don’t have business. Far from it. It’s just that Kills is much more interested in digging into how the fallout of the previous film’s is affecting their psyches than using it to motivate plot or action. If anything, a lot of the hard-earned “badass” stuff that we kind of expect to land on Laurie and her family ends up spinning out and backfiring. But rather than point to this as simply a script issue, I have come around to the idea that this is at least a little intentional on the part of Green and McBride.
This is where we get into the ideas the movie is ostensibly anchoring itself on. There is definitely a case to be made that Halloween Kills is a film about how communities deal with horror and violence. There is also a heavy-handed focus on the aftermath of acts of violence, with scenes of dying characters forced to watch Michael’s ministrations and goofs as they slowly bleed out. All the more fuel to add to a sense of righteous vengeance on behalf of the survivors leading the townspeople in a bid to destroy The Evil. Mix all of that with an inordinately persistent theme of firearms almost exclusively creating death and harm to their wielders rather than their targets, and you begin to see that this is a film filled with intent.
Culminating in a mob scene in the hospital where a crazed group of citizens hound and chase one of the patients that escaped when Michael’s bus crashed, and the scenes of violence, aftermath, group hysteria, and accidental repercussions practically scream to the audience that they are watching a movie with Something to Say. The problem is that given the absolutely baffling edit of vignettes centered on random townspeople for scenes that run entirely too long, the actual execution of a coherent message is fairly botched.
I have to assume there is a longer cut of this film with more spaced out action scenes that conducts itself with a bit more purpose, because I simply cannot square the same creative team that delivered one of the best slashers ever made came back to the table for seconds, and then released something this messy and lacking in form. Halloween Kills is a movie that does not bother to justify its weight for spans of innumerable minutes, narratively, and does not possess enough of a central spine to justify the entirely strange ways the characters in it behave from one shot to the next. And here is where I’m probably going to lose some of you: I enjoyed basically every second of it.
Halloween Kills is entirely bloated, goofy, violent, nasty, beautifully crafted, shoddily constructed, and I found it totally compelling (if not strictly in the way I was likely expected to). There is a concussed sort of bafflement I experienced while watching Halloween Kills that gradually gave way to a nebulous sort of awe. As I sat watching a character named Big John essentially starring in a Duran Duran video while singing goofy old Halloween music, I completely gave myself over to this nonsense, letting the gibbering narrative play out in the back portion of my brain while I admired the production design and the absolute 100% commitment of this entire cast to delivering their very best in service of something that is categorically ridiculous from top to bottom. What’s more, while I don’t question anyone’s assertion that this movie is bad, I kept having a recurring thought while watching it that this movie is going to be a staple in years to come, after it is thoroughly destroyed by the critical consensus.
The strange energy of Halloween Kills and the confounding decision to root the film in the kind of dumb slasher lore-humping of Halloween 6 while aiming at some kind of contemporary anxiety with fumbling hands lends this a watchability that I think is going to endure. This movie is going to be discussed by weirdos for decades to come, and you can officially count me excited for wherever they decide to take this unwieldy and absurd new story. I can’t say I would have used my carte blanche sequel gig to make a labyrinthine and meandering examination of a community’s sinful urge to seek catharsis in violence, and their subsequent punishment for it. But I can say that the results of David Gordon Green and Danny McBride deciding to do so left me in the kind of surprised befuddlement I rarely experience in one of these.
