HALLOWEEN 2K23 BONUS #2: A Review of "Halloween Kills"

"Alright, which one of you firefightin' assholes want to tangle? You set my house on fire RIGHT AS the Bears were in
the Red Zone, and I missed their game-winning touchdown!"

Happy Halloween my dedicated, loyal social media scrollers. Be sure to leave your candy out tonight, dress up the wee ones in their favorite scary-or-cringy-or-lets-face-it-Bluey outfits and prepare for a trick-or-treating extravaganza. Or hey, if you don't have kids, order a couple of pizzas, kick back in your recliner, and put on some horror movies. You've earned the night off.

"Me and my wig are going to kill Michael Myers, once and
for all."
"No Jamie, this is the middle chapter, there's still one left."
"Oh son of a bit--"

I hope you guys didn't think the literal day of Halloween was going to go without a blog post from me, did you? Well, surprise surprise. Just like your ex, I pop up when you least suspect it to RUIN YOUR DAY with my shit, and I'm not just doing it once this year oh no no no. I'm here for a Halloween 2K23 BONUS double feature! That's right, TWO blog posts today for the price of one. Nothing either way! Hey zero-times-two is still zero, can't say I'm not at least somewhat competent at math.

I stopped blogging citing burnout end of '20 and focus on a personal podcast, but now that the podcast is done, I've picked up blogging again obviously. Probably didn't need told that, I've been at it this whole year! My point is; from end of '20 to now, in that time, TWO new Halloween movies were released. Remember when I first started this blog and wouldn't shut up about Halloween? If it wasn't Star Wars, it was Halloween. Part of Halloween 2K18, I reviewed the first of the Halloween reboot trilogy here, and re-reading it, I think my thoughts on it stand pretty similarly. UNFORTUNATELY, that can't be said for today's FIRST blog post. The 2021 sequel to the '18 reboot, Halloween Kills is a magnificently crafted load of shit. Lol, no really, it is. I had new-movie-goggles on when I first watched it and initially gave it a 'B' level verbal review... but upon rewatching it after a couple of years, good Lord it sucks something awful. It's just so cheesily written, the characters are absolute cartoon characters, the plot is INCREDIBLY outlandish, and it just suffers so badly from middle-chapter syndrome. It is absolutely on par with ass-ness of Rob Zombie's Halloween II, but in a completely different way. Let's take a look. Be sure to read the first movie's post before this to catch yourself up.

...

All good? Let's roll.

"Hands up, Michael. I've got a gun!"
"A gun? Oh no, whatever will I do? Lol jk gtfo here, nerd."

On October 31, 1978, Deputy Frank Hawkins (Thomas Mann) accidentally shoots his partner Tobias (Jacob Keohane) dead while trying to save him from Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney). He also prevents Dr. Samuel Loomis (Tom Jones, Jr... not the singer's son) from executing Michael. Forty years later, on October 31, 2018, after being stabbed and left to die by Dr. Ranbir Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), Hawkins (Will Patton) is found by Cameron Elam (Dylan Arnold), who calls an ambulance. Hawkins regrets allowing Michael to live and vows to kill him.

Meanwhile, Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) celebrates the 40th anniversary of Michael's imprisonment along with fellow survivors Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards), and Cameron's father, Lonnie Elam (Lonnie Elam), having each survived an encounter with Michael in 1978. How does he do that? By taking a fun open mic night and then mentally tormenting everyone there by embellishing a story of three teenager murders from forty years prior. Good Lord. Anywho, firefighters responding to Laurie Strode's (Jamie Lee Curtis) burning house encounter Michael, who slaughters them with their own equipment. Laurie, her daughter Karen (Judy Greer), and her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) are taken to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, where Laurie undergoes emergency surgery, while Michael attacks Laurie's neighbors (Lenny Clarke, Diva Tyler) before walking back to Haddonfield.

Tommy, Marion, Lindsey, and Lonnie learn of Michael's killing spree through an emergency alert. Tommy forms a mob of vengeful Haddonfield residents to hunt down and kill Michael once and for all. Karen is informed that Michael is still alive and withholds that information from Laurie to allow her to recover, while Allyson reconciles with Cameron, her ex-boyfriend, and joins Tommy's mob to avenge her own father's death. While warning the Haddonfield community to stay inside their houses, Marion and bar patrons Vanessa (Carmela McNeal) and Marcus (Michael Smallwood) are killed by Michael. Lindsey escapes and is found alive by Tommy, Lonnie, Allyson, and Cameron. The group map out Michael's path and his victims' location and deduce that he is heading towards his childhood home. Surprise, surprise there. Tommy takes Lindsey to the hospital and reunites with former Haddonfield sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers...dude should've stayed home), whose daughter Annie (Nancy Loomis in Halloween '78) was killed in 1978, and informs Laurie about Michael's survival. Across town, Michael murders the current owners (Scott MacArthur, Michael McDonald) of his home as Laurie prepares to leave the hospital. I'm not sure why, they fixed it up quite nice.

"Michael? It's a Halloween sequel... everyone's entitled to
one good load of ridiculous bullshit."

Lance Tivoli (Ross Bacon), a fugitive convict from Smith's Grove Psychiatric Hospital, who escaped alongside Michael when their bus crashed, arrives and is mistaken for Michael. How? I'm not sure. Michael's over six feet and slender, while this guy looks like Danny DeVito's Penguin from Batman Returns. Tommy's mob pursue him through the hospital like a bunch of idiots before Karen, the only one I guess with a brain cell, realizes that he is not Michael. Despite her attempts to calm the mob and help Lance, he jumps out of a window to his death... way to go, Tommy, you ASSHOLE. Laurie urges Karen to work with Tommy and Brackett to hunt Michael down. Elsewhere, Lonnie enters Michael's home alone, like a complete idiot (noticing a pattern here?) and is killed. Allyson and Cameron rush inside and find his corpse before being attacked by Michael, who murders Cameron. Well... at least you won't have to miss your dad, so much.

As Michael prepares to kill Allyson, Karen appears and stabs him in the back with a pitchfork, steals his mask, and taunts him to follow her. She leads Michael into Tommy's mob... re-doing the "gotcha" bit from the last movie because... I don't know I guess they decided to double-down? Anywho, even that seems recycled. The mob of pajama and costume wearers with blunt objects and a gun seemingly kill Michael. When the mob disperses, Michael awakens and massacres the entire mob, including Tommy and Brackett. Back at the Myers house, Karen sees a vision of a young Michael in Judith Myers's old bedroom and goes upstairs to investigate. Michael appears and stabs Karen to death as Laurie stares out of her hospital room...

Seriously... look at how hard he's trying. He's so ridiculous
that you just can't help but laugh, lol

... and that's how Halloween Kills ends. No, that's not how Halloween Ends, though more on that in today's other surprise. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Good God, Halloween Kills. Let's discuss.

First off, the characters in this movie as I stated are bleedin' freakin' cartoon characters played by way way way too over the top actors. I mean this movie would have the same presentation if everyone was a Looney Tune. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam; I feel these characters would make this a very similar experience. My main gripes fall into one of two categories with Kills: 1) The needless digging up of characters that don't matter anymore, and 2) Characters who over-sell the situation and story, or are under-utilized in the film's crucial points. For 1, Marion the geriatric nurse who drove Loomis to go pick up Michael in Halloween and showed up for a cup of coffee in Halloween II? WELL NO WAIT You can't even count Halloween II so yeah, just the nurse that was Loomis's liaison in Halloween... WHY IS SHE HERE?! What is her importance BEYOND being Loomis's chauffeur? What's that bag-of-bones got for Michael forty years on? What did he do to her? Terrorized her and dragged her out of her car, sure, but spared her and drove off?! Then there's LONNIE ELAM. The kid who bullied Tommy Doyle in Halloween '78 is now his buddy and the father of Allyson's douchebag boyfriend Cameron. What did Michael do to that guy? Grabbed his shoulders and gazed at him before letting him run off and stalking Tommy? What's Lonnie's big vendetta against Michael Myers? WHY IS HE HERE?!

... and then there's Tommy Doyle. Good. God. Tommy Doyle. Anthony Michael Hall must've had his family held hostage, choosing to play this guy the way he did. Tommy Doyle acts like a guy who's back from Vietnam living in Chinatown, New York. He is clearly suffering PTSD after watching a serial-killer in a mask stalk somebody who wasn't even him forty years ago. Now, I get that could be pretty traumatizing for somebody Tommy's age in 1978. I get that. I get why Tommy has some kind of vendetta against Michael. It isn't a HARD vendetta, but it's all he's got. But apparently he must've held on to a lot of the hate and anger from Michael chasing him through his house and again, not targeting him, because he then takes it upon himself to hop on at an open-mic night and ruin the mood and everybody's fun by once again reminding the bar-goers of one time forty years ago where a guy in a mask killed three people... good God almighty. What's worse is once Michael's "forty years later" killing spree (trust me the movie repeats the "forty years" note pretty frequently, it isn't just me) goes public... Tommy takes it upon himself to turn Haddonfield's scared and traumatized citizens into an ANGRY, VIOLENT MOB. The same thing they did in Halloween 4, a superior movie, and that also had a mob that was five-times more threatening/entertaining. Tommy manages to lead his mob into killing the wrong guy in the hospital, and then leads a group of people carrying hardware from their garage as weapons in a mob confrontation with Michael that gets everyone including himself killed. Bravo, sir.

"Dear God, is this idiot ruining everyone's fun night again?"
"He does this every Happy Hour."
"Somebody just got this guy some therapy for God's sake."

On top of that, Jamie Lee Curtis, the literal star of the movie and one-half of the reason these Blumhouse sequels/reboots got made, spends ninety percent of the fucking runtime lying in a hospital bed while all these C-list characters get chased around and of course slaughtered. The movie's kills aren't even that gut-wrenching or brutal, they're pretty run of the mill. Something Halloween Ends did ten-times better were the kills, which considering this movie is literally called Halloween Kills... is pretty hysterical in retrospect.

Now, takeaway the senseless shoe-horning of old-fart characters in for marquee value just to end up slaughtering them again... in some cases for the second time in their careers... and take away the cliff-hanger ending which I thought was cheap. The movie didn't end, it just stopped. The other thing that really grinded my gears was this movie's infatuation with selling you on the horror of the night of 1978. Look, Halloween '78 still is my favorite horror movie. I watch it every year on Halloween, and have since the 8th grade. So if there's anyone out there that will defend that movie's honor, it's me. That being said, the 2018 rebootquel Halloween did a fine job of, well, sort-of minimalizing Michael Myers' impact on that town. Cameron in the previous film (At least I think it was Cameron) had a line that was like "What, three people stabbed forty years ago? So what?"... you know basically saying "three people dying by knife isn't that big of a deal" thanks to the modern day "mass shooter" world we live in today. Halloween Kills on the other hand decides to play it way the fuck back up by pretending that Halloween '78's murders were so tragic... but also acting like every other Halloween sequel/reboot/remake happened in its timeline by having dialogue that makes you think Michael Myers may have killed hundreds of people. Once again, I look to Tommy Doyle deciding to ruin open mic night for everyone as the prime example of this.

I could go on, but I want to also wrap this up. This is getting long-winded enough. Look, Halloween 2018 played it safe, for sure, so they definitely had to gamble on storytelling and scriptwriting with Halloween Kills. I'm sorry to say, to me, they lost. Halloween Kills is one big dud, but it's at least entertaining. It's the horror movie that makes you laugh at times, and that's not really what you should do with your horror movies. No, it's not Resurrection levels of laugh-out-loud mockery, but you will probably find yourself shaking your head here and there going "What in the absolute fuck". I'd say skip it, but you kind of need it to view today's other bonus post movie... check it out!

Nuts to Halloween Kills. Check out my review of the sequel and trilogy conclusion, Halloween Ends, here! Happy Halloween, everyone!