Halloween Kills: All My Hopes for the Last Movie
Hello again, it’s your friendly neighborhood horror enthusiast Charles ready to give you a spooky new horror movie review. Imagine this, you are bored on a Tuesday night but then remember that the new Halloween Kills movie is on Peacock. You sign up for the free version of Peacock, only then do you realize you can’t watch the Halloween movie because you have to pay for premium. Well, you pay for the premium, 4.99 dollars by the way, but none of that matters because you are ready to watch the new Halloween movie in the franchise. An hour and forty-five minutes go by and when the credits roll you think to yourself, “What the fuck did I just watch?” Now you’re in the same boat I’m in with a mix of emotions ranging from disappointment to confusion. Buckle up folks because I’m about to tell you the whirlwind that Halloween Kills or, a more applicable title: Halloween Blows.
Let me start off simple and talk about the plot. The movie picks up right where the 2018 Halloween movie left off with Laurie, Karen, and Allison all leaving Laurie’s burning house that they trapped Michael in the basement of. Of course, Michael escapes and the town of Haddonfield goes out on a manhunt for him while Michael continues his murder spree. One good thing I like about this movie is that it makes nods to Halloween II and Halloween 4: Return of Michael Myers by having the setting in the hospital for Laurie while the town hunts Michael which happens in those respective movies. The plot itself isn’t the problem, it's everything else.
The characters in the movie made me shake my head in frustration. In the 2018 Halloween movie, characters were doing smart things most of the time and it never felt like they made characters do dumb things for the sake of plot contrivances but in this movie, it is littered everywhere with it. I first saw it with the black couple who at first wanted to go home and have no part of the manhunt, to then have them join the manhunt for seemingly no reason at all except to add to the body count. Characters were just making dumb decisions all around and it feels like the series took two steps forward in the Halloween 2018 film only to take ten steps back in this film.
The movie also has the town doing “evil” deeds in response to Michael being Haddonfield. I get what the movie was going for but it felt so...forced. The way they went about the town in chaos didn’t feel natural to me. It felt like the director wanted the movie in a certain direction so they kind of forced it to happen.
I guess to end this review on a positive note is that I do like the world-building in this movie. It does add a bunch of lore to the original Halloween movie and have news reporters talk about people from the 2018 Halloween film. We also get to see dead bodies from people who died in the 2018 Halloween film and I loved that aspect of this movie. I also really enjoyed when Michael was on screen doing what he does best...scaring kids and being a homicidal killing machine.
Halloween Kills is not the strongest sequel to the Halloween 2018 film-which was also a sequel to the original 1978 Halloween film. I just really hope the next film learns from this one and does not do what this film did because if this film is anything of what’s to come for the next movie, Star Wars won’t be the only reboot that fans wished they left alone.