Halloween Kills, review: More silly than scary
Michael Myers is the perfect frontman for the Halloween franchise: an ageing but unstoppable juggernaut, pulling the same old tricks from all the way back in 1978 to an increasingly bemused audience. It’s no wonder director David Gordon Green wanted to try something new when he took over with 2018’s franchise reboot. Alas the curse of the horror movie sequel strikes again in a film that’s messier than Halloween night at the Myers household.
Written in the wake of the Me Too movement and the Weinstein scandal, it sets its focus on the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators. It’s an interesting idea – a violent film that cycles around every couple of years seems like an ideal vehicle to explore the cycle of violence – but it seems to value being social commentary more than it does being a horror movie. Too much screen time is given over to a sub plot in which the townsfolk of Haddonfield, led by a group of Myer’s surviving victims, are encouraged to mete out vigilante justice upon the man stalking their autumn celebrations. Ironically for a franchise whose object of power is a kitchen knife, Halloween Kills is as blunt as a spoon, its well-meaning message underlined a thousand times and then literally delivered as a voice over in case anyone missed it.
It also suffers from trying to tell an episodic story while wearing the straightjacket of horror movie convention, which states the killer must ‘die’ at the end of each film. Last time around Myers was set on fire by Jamie Lee Curtis’ increasingly superhuman protagonist Laurie Strode (she had already attempted beheading him in an earlier installation, to little success). Alas the flames only served to char Myers’ rubber mask and he immediately resumes business as usual, Green dispensing with any suspense-building in favour of a series of gory but ultimately hollow set pieces. The pacing is virtually non-existent: one of the first sequences involves Myers dispensing with an entire department of firefighters in a John Wick-esque combat-ballet, and from there scenes tumble from the editing suite in an arbitrary fashion.
It’s a shame, because Green has a great eye. The opener takes us back to the night of the first Halloween murders, with the sleepy town beautifully recreated in grainy film stock, and the wonderfully nostalgic aesthetic is carried on throughout. Myers is genuinely frightening, an unstoppable force of pure evil, and the film certainly ramps up the body count: this is the most overtly – at times comically – gory of the 12 Halloween films to date.
It’s well acted by a brilliant cast, including Judy Greer and Andi Matichak as Laurie’s daughter and granddaughter. But while the film’s message is not to let fear and hate control you, by the end I wanted to walk through the screen and put a knife through Myers’ eye myself, just so I didn’t have to sit through the next instalment.