Mask up

A year after its original release date, David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills is finally slashing its way into theaters, and in a surprise move, onto NBC’s Peacock streaming service as well. The direct sequel to Green’s 2018 Halloween (itself billed as a direct sequel to John carpenter’s 1978  horror classic), Halloween Kills suffers from an acute case of sequelitis. The film needlessly brings back countless characters from earlier films in the franchise, and throws them together in a confusing time-jumping narrative filled with vicious and mean-spirited violence and a handful of comedic beats. The end result is an excessively cluttered film that wants to be everything to everybody but ends up falling short on most counts.

Given how convoluted the backstory for Michael Myers has become through the various films, there was a strong case for going back to the original and forgoing all the nonsense that came after (strange familial ties, druids, etc.). Green’s 2018 Halloween mostly did that; it focused on the long-term effects that one night of madness in Haddonfield, Illinois had on Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the young babysitter terrorized by the masked maniac Michael Myers. Still dealing with her deep-rooted trauma from that night, Strode became a sort of survivalist, hunkering down in a booby-trapped compound and waiting for her inevitable next showdown with Myers.

While far from a perfect film, it at least had an interesting premise; what happens to the Final Girl after surviving a horrific attack? Halloween Kills takes that premise and expands it to the entire town of Haddonfield; what effect would a mass murder in their town have on the residents as the decades went on? Would Michael Myers simply be a forgotten local-interest story, or would that fear plant itself into the town’s residents, waiting to be unleashed at some point in the future?

Picture it: Haddonfield, 1978

The film opens on a promising note; we’re back in Haddonfield in 1978, following two young beat cops (including a scene-stealing Jim Cummings) on Halloween, the night the Myers attacks take place. Green and his cinematographer Michael Simmonds manage to make this new footage truly feel part and parcel of Carpenter’s original film; the opening scenes almost look like they could be lost outtakes.

From there, things only get more needlessly complicated. Green cuts between a number of storylines, often without rhyme or reason. We’re introduced to Tommy Doyle (a hulking Anthony Michael Hall), the young boy Laurie Strode babysat that fateful night in 1978, who is now part of a group of survivors from the Myers rampage. Tommy still wants the town to be on alert from Myers’ return, but his pleas mostly fall on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Laurie, her daughter Karen (Judy Green), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) are recovering from their battle earlier in the evening with Michael Myers at Laurie’s compound. While Laurie is hospitalized for her injuries, Karen soon discovers that naturally, Myers has escaped from the fiery inferno they left him in and is likely making his way back to Haddonfield to continue his path of destruction.

#EvilDiesTonight

There is a gem of an interesting movie buried inside Halloween Kills about how fear and trauma can continue to inflict pain on survivors years after their attacks, and the potentially harmful ways that fear can be exploited by others. That said, Green (who co-wrote the script alongside Eastbound and Down’s Danny McBride and Scott Teems) cuts between time, place, and tone so frequently that the film turns into a nearly incoherent mess.

This is a film that repeatedly introduces sympathetic characters only to have them mercilessly slaughtered moments later, while simultaneously piling on jokes to try to diffuse the tension. It creates a bewildering effect that’s only heightened by the reintroduction of numerous past characters while also trying to focus on Laurie and her family’s storyline. Then there’s the notion of the residents of Haddonfield banding together behind Tommy to enact some mob justice on Michael Myers, complete with their own eye-rolling slogan of “Evil Dies Tonight!” (You would think “Kill Michael Myers!” would be a bit more to-the-point.)

Middle-child syndrome

If you’re simply in it for the kills, Halloween Kills delivers. Michael Myers slices his way through countless bystanders in this latest entry, with a level of gore that goes far beyond anything else we’ve seen from this long-running franchise. But in terms of anything resembling a coherent storyline, Halloween Kills is a total misfire. Some of that may be due to the fact that a sequel, Halloween Ends, was already announced even before this movie was released. As the middle film of a trilogy, most of the running time of Halloween Kills is spent building up to a showdown we still won’t see for another year.

Sidelining the incredible Jamie Lee Curtis to a hospital bed while focusing on what feels like a dozen new characters is just one of the cardinal sins of this movie. Green is so enamored with expanding the cast and filling out the mythology (something these films were supposed to do away with) that he misses the central conflict that made the original Halloween so riveting. We’ll have to wait a year to see if Halloween Ends brings the battle between Michael Myers and Laurie Strode to a satisfying conclusion, but as a stand-alone film, Halloween Kills is a scattershot sequel that can’t sit still long enough to let audiences care or follow much of what happens. At least we got a great new John Carpenter score out of this.

Halloween Kills is in theaters and streaming via NBC’s Peacock service now.