HALLOWEEN KILLS (2021)

Studio:     Blumhouse/Universal
Director:    David Gordon Green
Writer:     Scott Teems, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green
Producer:  Malek Akkad, Jason Blum, Bill Block
Stars:     Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Will Patton, Thomas Mann, Anthony Michael Hall, Robert Longstreet, Dylan Arnold, Omar Dorsey, James Jude Courtney

Review Score:

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Summary:

The town of Haddonfield erupts in mass panic as Michael Myers continues his vicious 2018 killing spree on Halloween night.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

On his walk home from the high school dance, Cameron Elam comes across Officer Frank Hawkins bleeding on the ground. A flashback shows Frank and his police officer partner Pete McCabe confronting Michael Myers inside the Myers house at the end of Michael’s 1978 killing spree on Halloween night. Frank accidentally shoots and kills McCabe while trying to fire at Michael. Michael escapes outside, but becomes surrounded by Dr. Loomis and a group of deputies. Frank stops Loomis from shooting Michael and he is taken into custody instead. The flashback also shows Cameron’s father Lonnie having a brief encounter with Michael prior to McCabe’s death.

Back on Halloween night in 2018, survivors of Michael’s 1978 massacre gather at Mick’s Bar to commiserate. Bar patrons Marcus and Vanessa join Tommy Doyle, Lindsey Wallace, Marion Chambers, and Lonnie Elam’s group for drinks after Tommy delivers an impassioned speech about what happened 40 years ago.

Firefighters arrive at Laurie Strode’s burning compound to extinguish the blaze. Michael murders all 11 firefighters and escapes.

Karen and Allyson rush Laurie to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital. Now a security guard at the hospital, former sheriff Leigh Brackett recognizes Laurie from 1978. Laurie undergoes emergency surgery for her stab wounds. Upon his admission to the hospital, Frank joins Laurie in the same recovery room.

Michael murders a couple, Phil and Sondra, in their Haddonfield home. Later that night, Michael kills Big John and Little John, the couple that currently lived in Michael’s childhood home.

Cameron calls his father to tell him about Frank and the murdered deputies. News also breaks on the television to alert everyone at the bar that Michael Myers escaped custody and is now on another killing spree.

Vanessa thinks she sees Michael in her and Marcus’ car outside the bar. Tommy organizes a mob to confront Michael. The driver speeds away, crashes, and flees. Unbeknownst to the crowd, the driver turns out to be Tivoli, the other Smith’s Grove Sanitarium patient who escaped alongside Michael.

Allyson and Karen learn from Sheriff Barker and another officer that Michael is still alive. Cameron arrives at the hospital to tell Allyson that Tommy and Lonnie are organizing a posse to hunt Michael. Insisting that Michael will come to the hospital to kill Laurie instead, Karen forbids her daughter from joining the mob. After saying goodbye to her unconscious grandmother, Allyson sneaks off with Cameron anyway.

Lindsey, Marion, Marcus, and Vanessa find Michael stalking two pranksters in a park after having murdered their young friend. Michael stabs Marion and Marcus to death. Vanessa tries to shoot Michael, but he hits her with a car door and she accidentally shoots herself. Lindsey gets away. Tommy, Lonnie, Cameron, and Allyson eventually happen upon the scene and help Lindsey recover.

Tommy brings Lindsey to the hospital. Karen warns Tommy that Michael will come to kill Laurie. Tommy rallies everyone in the waiting room, including Brackett, to join his effort to hunt Michael. Sheriff Barker tries calming everyone to no avail.

Laurie and Frank talk about how they almost had a romance at one time. Tommy rushes into the room to warn Laurie that Michael is still alive. Over Karen’s objections, Laurie injects herself with a painkiller so she can get out of bed to join the fight.

Tivoli shows up at the hospital looking for help. Mistaking him for Michael, Tommy’s mob pursues Tivoli through the building. Laurie reinjures her wound in the fray while she and Karen futilely try to tell everyone that Tivoli isn’t Michael.

Returned to her room, Laurie tells Frank she blames herself for bringing Michael back to Haddonfield. Frank takes the blame instead by revealing he stopped Loomis from executing Michael in 1978. Another flashback shows how another cop helped Frank cover up the truth about him accidentally killing McCabe.

Karen tries to shield Tivoli from the angry mob. Once he becomes surrounded however, Tivoli jumps out of a window to his death. Realizing they went after the wrong man, Brackett notes that Michael has turned their town into monsters.

Laurie tells Frank that Michael is hunting her. Frank explains it was actually Dr. Sartain who brought Michael to Laurie. Frank instead theorizes that Michael intends to return to his childhood home. Suspecting the same thing, Lonnie, Cameron, and Allyson go to the Myers house to search for Michael.

Tommy apologizes to Karen for riling up the mob to go after the wrong man. Karen asks Tommy to take her to the Myers house.

At the Myers house, Michael brutally kills Lonnie and then Cameron. Michael prepares to stab Allyson when Karen unexpectedly arrives and thrusts a pitchfork into his back. Karen removes Michael’s mask and uses it to lure Michael outside, away from her daughter.

Karen leads Michael into a trap by placing his mask in the middle of the street. Tommy and Brackett’s posse surrounds Michael. Michael puts his mask back on. The mob shoots Michael several times and clubs him to the ground with baseball bats. Karen recovers Michael’s knife and stabs him. Michael seemingly becomes incapacitated. Karen leaves to reunite with Allyson as authorities arrive at the Myers house.

As Laurie tells Frank her belief about Michael being inhuman back at the hospital, Michael rises from the ground. Michael viciously slaughters Brackett, Tommy, and the rest of the mob.

Leaving Allyson with police and paramedics outside, Karen enters the Myers house to look out of an upstairs bedroom window just as Michael and McCabe did many years ago. Michael appears behind Karen and violently slashes her to death.

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Review:

A couple of days before “Halloween Kills” premiered, a critic who can be considered reasonably known in genre social circles tweeted a spectacularly terrible take on “Halloween 2018” (review here). In speaking about how much he was annoyed by that film’s first 15 minutes, he asked, “why would these podcasters possibly care about a dude who killed five people forty years ago and has been in custody ever since? He’s no enigma.”

Ignoring the obvious counterpoint that there are plenty of true crime podcasts focusing on single deaths or men who only murdered one person, that’s about as laughably awful as any assessment of Michael Myers can possibly get. Um, what? Is someone really wondering why people would be fascinated by a serial killer who murdered his sister when he was six-years-old, stopped speaking and hasn’t uttered a word since, escaped a sanitarium, terrorized a town while wearing a freaky Halloween mask, ate a dog for sustenance like some sort of savage, strangled another dog, and brutally butchered a mechanic and three teenagers before leaving a babysitter and her two wards with nightmares for life? How is that a serious question that could possibly dumbfound anyone?

The dictionary definition of enigma is “a person that is mysterious, puzzling, or difficult to understand.” If that doesn’t describe Michael Myers, what does? He’s called ‘The Shape’ for a reason. An enigma to the nth degree is exactly what Michael is and, through a harrowing series of inhuman encounters accompanied by brutally violent slayings, “Halloween Kills” promotes him to a pedestal perfectly fitting for the embodiment of pure evil John Carpenter always wanted. In “Halloween Kills,” Michael Myers truly becomes the ultimate boogeyman.

Even before screenwriter Victor Miller’s lawsuit against producer Sean Cunningham put Jason Voorhees on ice indefinitely, “Friday the 13th” fans were already frustrated with the false starts that repeatedly promised a new film for years only for nothing to come from any of those attempts. They grumbled, “How hard is it to make a movie about a masked maniac simply stalking some teens?”

Be careful what you complain about. Michael Myers may not be part of the same franchise, but if you just want to watch a heavyweight horror icon going for broke in a classically customary slasher, “Halloween Kills” serves up that feast on a splattery silver platter. This is what those people demanded whether they realize it or not. No messy mythology, just a stripped-down stage for precisely what the title promises.

“Halloween Kills” fills up on fan service for the franchise faithful. After only one viewing of the movie, I can’t quite tell if that service is too on the nose or smooth enough that longtime fans of the series will see plentiful winks without constant callbacks getting in the (admittedly limited) narrative’s way. Pretty much every actor who played someone still alive at the 1978 film’s conclusion shows up, albeit to not do much other than take a blade to their face or their belly. In addition to cameos from the trio of “Halloween III” masks, we also get a lengthy 1978 flashback to fill in a few blanks we never knew existed, and a return to the infamous Myers house too, faithfully recreated right down to every detail from the busted gutter to the banister.

As is their predictable prerogative, moaners will of course moan about this, that, or the other. Online uproar about “Halloween Kills” being condescendingly campy reminds me of a somewhat similar furor over Shane Black’s “The Predator” (review here). What I mean is, it seems like those pouring hate on “Halloween Kills” are getting bent out of shape because they’re comparing it to rose-colored memories rather than to how those previous movies play without the patina of nostalgia.

Sure, maybe we don’t need former sheriff Brackett finding a place to say, “Everyone’s entitled to one good scare” for a second time. But is the mob mantra of “Evil dies tonight!” really any hammier than Dr. Loomis hysterically shouting, “He’s gone! The evil is gone!” in the original? Are the residents stalked in their Haddonfield homes really any goofier than Mrs. Elrod in her curlers asking her husband about mustard on his sandwich? Is Laurie, relegated almost to a nonentity here as she undoubtedly waits for “Halloween Ends” to take another turn in the spotlight, any more passive than the part she played throughout the bulk of “Halloween II” (review here)? Why should “Halloween Kills” be held to any standard of seriousness that doesn’t apply to the other films?

That last example does lead into less arguable criticisms about “Halloween Kills” however. Namely, this sequel very much plays like Act Two in a trilogy as opposed to a self-contained movie. Side stories such as Tommy Doyle’s mob mistaking the wrong man for Michael Myers act like stalling tactics of a sort. When you arrive at end credits, you can look back and reasonably wonder, how far did these 100 minutes actually advance the ongoing arc? And, as much as I’ve grown used to director David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride’s injections of humor whether the scenes warrant them or not, one too many come-and-go appearances from recognizable comedians try their hardest to take viewers right out of the imaginary immersion.

Regardless of which gripes are justified and which ones are not, I still can’t imagine why a franchise fan would, let’s say, prefer “Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers” (review here), often cited by many as their favorite sequel, to “Halloween Kills.” “Kills” hits for par on the same course in terms of scope, deaths, and even silly plot beats that aren’t likely to age well. Better than that though, “Halloween Kills” showcases Michael at his bloody best: a juggernaut murder machine shoving knives into skulls and twisting heads at the spine. And if chewing up a firefighter with a buzzsaw, thrusting a jagged fluorescent tube into someone’s throat, and decapitating an unlucky little trick-or-treater aren’t the kind of grisly actions you want to see from Michael Myers, then what is?

Review Score: 75

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