Slasher films are my least favourite of the horror genre. I find them terribly problematic and rarely ever done well. While I feel the horror genre has a lot to offer, the slasher subgenre rarely rises to this challenge. The Halloween series, one of its defining pieces, is a good example of what the subgenre can try to be and also how it often fails.
Following in the footsteps of 2018's sequel which erased all the other sequels' continuity and follows the 1978 Halloween directly, Halloween Kills does something right and a lot wrong. It does right what its predecessor did, mythology building and raising the stakes in terms of film making quality such as performances, script, production value, something the genre is not really known for. The film does a lot of setting up who its characters are and their relationship to the story, investing in us enough to care about them before they are brutally murdered. Often this step is skipped over so it's nice to see it here.
But then the film falls into all the same old traps of characters doing everything the Scream franchise wittily tells you not to do so Michael Myers is able to kill everyone he comes across mostly because they set themselves up for it. There is a great parody moment in the brilliant animated horror film Paranorman where the characters are watching a film where a woman stands still screaming until the slow moving killer catches her and this film is filled with moments just like that. It's also filled with a lot of gore, brutal ways the killer takes out each character
Halloween Kills (yes... terrible name...) very much stinks of a middle chapter. It is an interlude between the planned first and last chapters in a new Halloween trilogy that is planned to end next year with Halloween Ends (yes you read that right). So a lot of what is here is stalling tactics until we get to the good stuff. This isn't the Empire Strikes Back of the series it's just filler. The film does manage to take an interesting turn as it explores how the fear of Michael Myers turns the town into an angry mob of the likes that killed Frankenstein in the classic film. The film hits us over the head with this, and there is little to no finesse in how it pulls this off, but at least it does give us something to think about as we wait for the final chapter.
Disappointingly Curtis is mostly relegated to a hospital room for the majority of the film. She carries most of the emotional weight of the story so seeing her sidelined, waiting for what will be the big conclusion in the next instalment is a let down. There were enough moments to make it not completely disastrous for me but not enough to keep me from wanting something better.
So overall the Blumhouse take on the Halloween story remains a mixed bag which isn't giving me a great deal of confidence in next year's final chapter.
Halloween Kills
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, James Jude Courtney, Nick Castle, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Will Patten, Anthony Michael Hall, Kyle Richards, Nancy Stephens
Director: David Gordon Green
Writers: Scott Teams, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green
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