Halloween Kills

Last night, I saw “Halloween Kills,” which came out in theaters and on Peacock (for 60 days) on the 15^th. I decided to check it out on Peacock and not go to the theaters, so I will let everyone know what I thought about it.

Richard Roeper started his review by saying, “For those of you keeping gore, I mean score, at home, Michael Myers a.k.a. The Shape from the “Halloween” movies will be celebrating his 64th birthday in a few days, but the relentless killer behind the white mask remains in remarkably good shape. I guess a steady appetite for destruction and gruesome kills keeps one slim, trim and grim.”

If there’s one thing the residents of Haddonfield, Illinois, should know by now, it’s that about 60 years after six-year-old Michael murdered his teenage sister Judith, 35 years after Michael went around murdering people in the late 1970s and just hours after he killed more than a dozen locals, he has changed into something immortal, something completely indestructible, something as strong as a comic villain. Roeper noted, “And yet when a diminutive, portly, escaped mental patient who looks like an unkempt Wallace Shawn wanders into a hospital where an unruly mob has gathered and the poor soul starts wobbling around, the townsfolk think this guy is the evil entity who has wreaked so much carnage, and they start chasing him around as if they’re in a bad “Frankenstein” sequel.” Come on, mob!

Roeper said, “That’s only one of the head-scratching, unintentionally comedic, ludicrous developments in the thudding disappointment that is “Halloween Kills,” the follow-up to the exciting and clever 2018 reboot/sequel that marked the return of Jamie Lee Curtis and was a direct sequel to the 1978 original.” You can forget about “Halloween II” and “Halloween III” and “Halloween H20” and every other sequel, and consider this the third movie in this alternate universe of the franchise, with many callbacks to the 1978 and 2018 films and many characters who were children back int eh 1970s and almost escaped Michael’s knight and are now adults who are still haunted and want this for of evil to finally end and die.

Good luck with that.

“Halloween Kills” starts right after the events of the 2018 film, where Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) trapped Michael Myers in a safe room in Laurie’s house and set the place on fire. As Laurie is rushed to the hospital with a stab to her abdomen, she sees firetrucks driving to her home and screaming, “Nooooo! Let it burn!” However, emergency responders arrive at the house just in time for Michael to come out of the burning basement and thoroughly take them out, one by one – and he’s once again loose on the streets of Haddonfield on Halloween night, ready to stab, jab, gouge, punch, and kill anything in his path.

With Laurie (and thus the great Jamie Lee Curtis) sidelined in the hospital, “Halloween Kills” changes the protagonist to Tommy (Anthony Michael Hall), who was one of the kids Lauire was babysitting on that famous night in 1978 and meets up with so many other survivors in a bar on Halloween night every year to raise a glass to Laurie and to insist the locals to never forget, or something like that. Another subplot involves a gay couple named Big John and Little John (Scott MacArthur and Michael McDonald, respectively) and get this: They’ve moved into Michael’s childhood home and completely renovated the place from top to bottom. Roeper noted, “On Halloween night, Big John and Little John break out the charcuterie plate, smoke some weed and watch “Minnie and Moskowitz,” I kid you not, and they’re woefully unprepared when Michael comes a-knockin’ on the back door and then the front door.”

As Laurie and other characters give really hard speeches about the true look of evil and how there’s strength in numbers but if the townsfolk aren’t careful, they’ll become as evil and savage as Michael himself, the Masked One carves a bloody path through Haddonfield, killing characters who behave as vacuous as the victims in countless of other typical slasher movies. Roeper said, “Granted, there are some darkly entertaining and strange moments, e.g., when Michael suddenly develops a Hannibal Lecter-like flair for the dramatic, arranging a murdered couple in the same pose they struck for a framed photo on the mantle and dropping the needle on a turntable to play “Can I Have This Dance for the Rest of My Life?” by Anne Murray.”

Now wait, we’ve just heard from a police man who had the chance to kill Miachel in 1978 but missed his chance – and this guy says Michael is a six-year-old boy with the strength of a man who acts like an animal. How did he suddenly get so sophisticated, with the bizarrely arranged corpse displays and twisted musical selection?

It’s almost like “Halloween Kills” is an erratic, chaotic mess.

For a sequel to the 2018 film, which was the best sequel in the franchise, this one just gets an average rating. I was expecting better from the film, but this one just ended up being a disappointment, like many of the other sequels. That is why I do not recommend you to go to the theaters to see this. Instead, if you have the paid version of Peacock, see it on there, since it will be available on there for 60 days.

Happy Halloween everyone! I hope you enjoyed today’s review. Enjoy trick-or-treating tomorrow night. Look out next month to see what I will review next.