Halloween Kills
Spoilers for Halloween Kills to follow.
I am a living, breathing human, so obviously I love John Carpenter’s original Halloween. I was beyond excited when I learned that director David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride (!) were making a direct sequel to the 1978 classic that would ignore all other sequels and timelines. When I saw the movie opening weekend with friends, I found it incredibly disappointing. Not bad, just not what I was expecting. What was I expecting? Truthfully, I don’t 100% know, but the movie that played before my eyes wasn’t it. Months later I watched it again at home and was able to adjust my expectations and enjoy it much more, and recently a third viewing in anticipation of Kills clenched it, I now loved Halloween’18. I was finally on the same page with what David Gordon Green and company were trying to do, and once again my expectations for the follow up started to rise.
I’ll tell you right now, after two viewings, I fucking love Halloween Kills. The gore and kills in the film are the best and most extreme of any Halloween yet, and best of all, Michael Myers feels legitimately frightening here. However, Green and company also add an insane amount of melodrama that often threatens to take away enjoyment from this otherwise wildly entertaining slasher flick.
There are a lot of declarative statements made in this movie (if you take a drink every time someone says “Evil dies tonight” you will not live to see the end of the movie), so much so that they often take the place of any real dialogue between characters, which means most of the film is just “He needs to die, and I’m going to kill him!” or “He’s terrorized this town for 40 years!” or the aforementioned “Evil dies tonight!” Or when there is actual dialogue, it’s often quite terrible. Just characters saying back and forth to one another that something needs to be done about Michael. MICHAEL!
None of that bothers me though, because Green seems to be more interested in playing with the myth of Halloween, and turning Michael Myers into something truly terrifying and unstoppable, and in my opinion is so successful in doing so that it completely overshadows anything else.
The first time we see Michael in the present day (the film briefly flashes back to 1978) he takes out an entire squad of firefighters with ease, shoving axes into faces left and right, and Green captures all the spectacular gore beautifully. It’s a mission statement for what’s to come, as the movie is wall to wall with grisly kills and outrageous practical effects (there is one particular eye gouging that is an all timer). This version of Michael tiptoes on the verge of superhuman (he’s shot and stabbed multiple times and barely flinches), but the film never veers into supernatural territory. It simply declares Michael as Pure Evil, an unstoppable force, plain and simple. For me, this makes him all the more terrifying. No cult controlling him or ghostly shenanigans, just a person with nothing but murder and mayhem on the mind.
Halloween Kills does attempt to play with some big ideas, specifically the nature of mob mentality. Anthony Michael Hall plays Tommy Doyle, the character that Laurie Strode was babysitting in the original film, and he has turned into the kind of dude who loves to work up crowds with misinformation and a self declared sense of justice. It’s exactly what it sounds like and Hall plays it to perfection, but the film doesn’t seem to have any real interest in exploring the reasons why people become so reactionary in times of chaos, and instead quickly moves on to the next kill. But once again, that doesn’t bother me! Yes, I do think there could be plenty of interesting ways the movie could have taken a moment to play and dig into those themes, but I feel like Green and company didn’t want to slow things down and wanted to focus on the mayhem, and I’m so not mad at that. Plus, there is always the possibility that the next (and supposed final) entry could take the time and deal with the fallout of the events in Kills. For now, I’m just happy to have a gnarly AF Halloween flick.
Hey now! What about the Queen Jamie Lee Curtis or the equally awesome Judy Greer? Well, they’re in it! They don’t have much to do, but they are definitely there! Honestly, Jamie is confined to a hospital bed for most of the movie, but she brings everything she has every moment she’s on screen.
Halloween Kills is far from perfect, but I found it to be an enormously entertaining slasher, and I adored the idea of having a Halloween movie that mostly focuses on the pure brutality of its masked icon. No insight, no reasoning, just an entire movie of Michael doing what he does best, and I could not be happier.