Michael Myers interrupts a couple’s viewing of Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) in David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills among many other things: gets arrested in a discomfitingly collected fashion, knife-decorates a person’s deceased body steadily, reveals his cute path of animalistic habit, one on elevens a group of firefighters — hey, that’s one of the most admirable professions; what a dick! — and punks a perfectly good toy helicopter too in the process.
If this is what makes up a satisfying Halloween movie… is up for you to decide.
Haddonfield tearing each other apart in a moshpit frenzy to murder Michael Myers may be the franchise’s wisest concept in quite some time — f**k wait Halloween 4 (1988) — yet it’s disappointing to see it executed under possibly one of slasher cinema’s most spurious inciting incidents. For a movie that needs to constantly and verbally remind us that our leading characters at large are traumatized by the infamous Carpenter event that transpired 40 years ago, it makes sense: no town without a desire to harangue us 24/7 about the night he came would be THIS obsessive over some killer that even most third generations couldn’t name unless they wikipediaed it. For once, erasing the timeline of all the previous Halloween movies except for the original and the immediate previous makes no sense; over 10 movies of recorded history of Myer’s frequent impact on the town and the writers thought that including it would convince us less of them rebelling against poor police involvement? The giant timeline gap just does not work in the context of the mob mentality that arises in Halloween Kills.
But it’s not just the logic that rudely invades Green’s sequel to a reboot sequel of a sequel to an original — lol — it’s his failure to inspire new leading characters that are engaging since Laurie is now comatose for more than half of the movie. *Returning* or introduced characters: Tommy, Lindsey, Lonnie, Marcus, and Vanessa? Dry, dry, dry tack-ons to the pointlessly done-over continuity and guileless piling of emotional relevance; the desperation for content and weight in this movie is depressing! Solely due to the film’s dense plethora of abruptly spelled-out expositional and thematic lumps of dialogue, I haven’t seen a script this comically aggressive with what it wants to say in quite some time. But then every so often you’ll see Myers do something like slam a car door into someone’s gun causing them to shoot a f**king bullet into their own head, and you’re like, okay, maybe I CAN dig this, up until Gordon follows it with another trip off into his loolooland sentiments or window peeps into his stereotypical characters for ten to twenty tedious minutes of pretentious filler in a MORE than vivid attempt at stretching this scrappy content out into another sequel.
But, c’mon: chainsaws, chainsaws, CHAINSAWS! Why has nobody thought to use a chainsaw yet and just cut this kook up into a bunch of tiny pieces and then idk cremate them after? Blow him up even! You say he can’t be killed physically yet this man bleeds and gets momentarily knocked out from a couple of bat swings; y’all are tweakin’.
Glad to see Gordon is trying to make zooms in horror movies normal again nonetheless, even though they aren’t particularly anything special or even good in this. I appreciate the attempts regardless. Kudos!
Verdict: D+
“Halloween Kills” is now playing in theaters and available to stream on Peacock.
Burning the Celluloid 
Published by