Halloween Kills Review
My feeling during the 2018 reboot of David Gordon Green’s “Halloween” was that the talented director misunderstood what was working on John Carpenter’s Original and deprived the project of the real tension, despite some good lags. After seeing his follow-up “Halloween Kills,” I think I was right. This Film darkens its whole concept with a strange and unrefined commentary on the crowd mentality, which is simply the worst element of Green’s career and the history of this rocky Franchise (which says something, if you’ve seen, let’s say “Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers”). It’s also a pity, because again, there are lags that work — and these are especially brutal – but the Campy dialogues that attract attention, too much Fan-Service in the reference department, Laurie Strode herself for most of the project and really inconsistent characters lead to a final result that certainly does not kill. It barely hurts.
In a clear allusion to the first sequel, “Halloween Kills” picks up immediately after the end of the 2018 film (and it’s probably no coincidence either that most of them are set at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital). However, it starts with the introduction of a few new/old characters – familiar names for Fans of the old movies, but New Ones for the greens. The most prominent is Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), the boy Laurie kept on that fateful night in 1978. He meets other survivors every year, including Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards, who reprises his role from the 1978 Original), Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens, also from the first two films) and Lonnie Elam (Robert Longstreet, not in the Carpenter film, but the character is). They get together on Halloween to celebrate surviving four decades after the most traumatic night of their lives, but they are really conceived as future victims for anyone who has ever seen a horror movie (which, due to their behavior, is absolutely no one in Haddonfield).
Meanwhile, Cameron (Dylan Arnold) comes across the bleeding body of Deputy Hawkins (Will Patton), who is rushed to the hospital where he will eventually share a room with Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). As the two remember and recover, Michael Myers escapes from the burning house at the end of the first film and begins a really brutal shootout. In this sense, “Halloween Kills” is a much darker Movie than the last, filled with more than a dozen of what Slasher Fans once called “quality kills”.”As Myers heads to Haddonfield, Laurie’s daughter Karen (Judy Greer, who has at least a little more to do here than last time) tries to stop Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) from joining Tommy’s mob to find him. When you sing “evil dies tonight,” you make, say, a few mistakes.
On this point, Roger Ebert wrote in 1981 the following about the first “Halloween II”: “The plot of “Halloween II” obviously absolutely depends on our old friend the foolish, who demands that everyone in the Film behave like an foolish at all times.”It’s almost as if co-writers Green, Danny McBride and Scott Teems have this quote on a whiteboard in the author’s room, because that’s the aspect they understand best when it comes to staying true to the first two films. Everyone in “Halloween Kills” is madly silly, whether it’s the mob that’s all too easily formed by Tommy, the usual Trope of victims who know a killer is on the run investigating the hit instead of just running, and really boneheaded decisions in the final scenes that really stretch credulity. The truth is that if a Movie like “Halloween Kills” works, the audience will ignore the “silly plot”.”Only if you are not invested does it become a problem, and it is the matter here.
There are brief moments when the crafting here makes the silly action easier to ignore. Michael Simmonds shoots the movie with liquid nastiness, and Tim Alverson’s Cut leaves things like broken chinstraps and broken heads. It’s a little surprising that the movie is being released so quickly on Netflix because it’s really the kind of thing that works best with an audience, preferably at midnight, encouraging each new execute.
Although I doubtful that even Hardcore fans of the recent green movie would themselves be disappointed in the crowd. The biggest difference between Carpenter’s and Green’s visions lies in Momentum. The first “Halloween” is lean and mean, while this Film can not keep the focus for more than a few minutes, and therefore it tries to use corny and overheated dialogues to convey a seriousness that lacks rhythm. In particular, Laurie’s monologues are a hodgepodge of nonsense about unstoppable evil. And Fans will be really sad that she barely leaves the hospital, or even influences the plot, which is a surprising decision, given how much the Fans of the last film praised the return of Curtis, to bind Myers and get together before solving it here.
“Halloween Kills” follows the classic formula of “Again, but more so.”There are more Kills, more characters, more references and more general Chaos. However, all this does not cease to distract the Film from the story of a Bogeyman who came to life and became something completely different. We’ve seen so many variations of Michael Myers over the years, from Carpenter to Rob Zombie to all the sequels between these two filmmakers. I am the most frightened that an undeniably talented director like David Gordon has made Green, apart from an impressive rest in the already green-lit “Halloween Ends”, which will be one of the most unforgettable in the Franchise.
