Halloween Kills — Review Thread

OCT 19, 2021 AT 4:30 AM
Halloween Kills Turns Michael Myers Into a Lobotomized Armored Tank
JOE BOB GOES TO THE DRIVE-IN 10/19/21

By Joe Bob Briggs

NEW YORK—Whatever else you can say about Halloween Kills, it’s ballsy as all get-out.

First of all, it’s got a cast of millions. If Haddonfield, Illinois, has a population of, say, 50,000, then every citizen is in this movie.

And since the writers are so dedicated to maintaining the reality of the 1978 movie, you sometimes have to consult a genealogy chart or a Wikipedia timeline to make sure you’re following along. We’ve got three generations of Laurie Strode’s family. We’ve got the sons and daughters of every character in the original, and sometimes grandchildren as well. We’ve got cops that were there at the beginning and cops that knew cops who were there at the beginning. We’ve got all the kids who were being tended by babysitters on Halloween night 1978, with a huge character arc in this film for Tommy Doyle. We’ve got an Officer Hawkins backstory that plays out in the one hour after the first movie but is not revealed until this movie. They even managed to hire a Donald Pleasence lookalike as Dr. Loomis and convince me it was him.

Most importantly, we’ve got a Michael Myers who is now so indestructible that he runs the risk of becoming the equivalent of a recurring weather event or an earthquake fault, as though Haddonfield rests on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius so occasionally people have to die—and there’s nothing you can do about it.

This idea is actually made explicit in the final “essence of evil” speech by Jamie Lee Curtis when she goes on about how you can never kill “the boogeyman” (used interchangeably with Michael Myers) because brute force doesn’t work on him. She doesn’t say what does work on him, but I have to imagine we’ll find out in Halloween Ends, the upcoming final installment in the David Gordon Green trilogy that began with Halloween 2018.

But the reason I say the movie is ballsy is that this is the first Halloween movie—how many have there been? an even dozen?—in which Michael doesn’t die. I mean, Michael never really dies or there wouldn’t be twelve movies, but usually he appears to die and is revivified in the opening scene of the next sequel. But David Gordon Green is a cruel man. He gives us a fairly decent Michael beat-down sequence with the equivalent of torch-bearing villagers (it’s Haddonfield, they have baseball bats instead of torches), but that’s it. He then goes ahead and gives us the opening scene of Halloween Ends. In other words, he denies us the satisfaction of seeing Michael destroyed. He assumes we’ll just go with it—and we will! He’s created the ultimate cliffhanger here. We all know there’s one more movie. We now know that Michael is indestructible and, according to Laurie Strode, possibly supernatural. It’s gonna take something nuclear and spiritual to close out the trilogy.

Meanwhile, all the most memorable sequences in Halloween Kills feature Michael Myers killing character actors who apparently went to the open call and killed it. Scott MacArthur and Michael McDonald are so totally entertaining as the coolest gay couple ever that we don’t want them to stop talking, and yet we know they’re doomed by their short-sighted decision to fix up the old Myers house and move in. Diva Tyler and Lenny Clarke play an eccentric couple who fly drones around their cluttered house, using their short time on screen to become totally sympathetic before being gruesomely butchered. And there’s a sequence in which a frenzied vigilante mob becomes convinced that a mental patient in Haddonfield Memorial Hospital is actually Michael Myers, and the almost wordless performance by Ross Bacon as the desperate, cornered, wounded and unhinged target of the mob is horrifyingly heart-breaking. It’s the lowest, bleakest, most hopeless moment in the movie, causing Charles Cyphers, as retired sheriff Brackett from the original movie, to say “He’s turning us all into monsters.” The simple presence of Michael Myers in the town now leads to hatred and death.

Once you get the main cast straight in your head—including boyfriends, husbands, almost-lovers from 1978, dead cops, friends of dead cops, cops haunted by not killing Michael when they had the chance—this is a cleanly plotted, nicely structured version of Michael Myers as the psychopath who always enjoys killing, always goes home, and—here’s the new twist—doesn’t care about Laurie Strode at all. It was all the fault of the other psychopath, Dr. Loomis, the dead one. He’s the reason Michael showed up in Haddonfield in the first place. Yes, they threw the dead Donald Pleasence under the bus! (Remember, Halloween 2 doesn’t exist. The only years we’re dealing with are 1963, 1978 and 2018. Michael Myers is 61 years old and has thought of nothing but killing for at least 55 of those years.) I would have liked a little more exposition—and I never want more exposition—about exactly what Loomis did wrong, but the consensus seems to be that he was a lunatic himself and he brought the evil back to Haddonfield.

As a marketing strategy, I don’t know why Blumhouse Productions would announce three movies at a time, because it does make it impossible to kill Michael Myers. My guess is that, since the public already knows there’s a movie called Halloween Ends in the works, the filmmakers went ahead and embraced the “unkillable” theme, which forced them to turn this into an extended second act. The only two people who know where to find the kryptonite spent this entire movie in the hospital—Laurie Strode and Frank Hawkins—and conveniently their gurneys were placed side by side for the final movie set-up. They’re going to come out of the bullpen a year from now, or two years from now, or whenever it’s time to cattle-prod the masses again. Laurie and Frank are going to take care of Michael and they’re not going to use force. David Gordon Green has set a very high bar for himself—and this is another reason I say he’s ballsy—because now it won’t be enough just to kill Michael. He’s got to eliminate evil from the planet. And he’s doing it while satisfying the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action. The story he’s telling takes place in a single time (about 12 hours on October 31 and November 1, 2018), in a single place (Haddonfield, the symbol of bland American wholesomeness), describing a single action (the struggle to understand death). The sun still hasn’t come up in Haddonfield (the beatdown is illuminated by headlights, like spectators at a seven-man football game). When the sun does come up, presumably in the final scene of Halloween Ends, we’re going to expect the carnage to be finished, but more important, we’re going to expect the carnage to make sense. I can’t wait.

I loved this Wild Mouse of a ride, and now I’m ready for the giant coaster.

And those drive-in totals are:

43 dead bodies.

1 dead dog.

Fire-ax hacking.

Chainsaw face-chewing.

1 bleeding stomach wound.

1 motor vehicle crash.

1 death plunge, resulting in sidewalk goo.

Eye-stabbing

Body-stabbing.

Pitchfork to the back.

Stomach-goring.

Mask-ripping.

Fence impalement.

Self-medicating syringe butt-ramming.

Sentimental bloody-cleaver preservation.

Multiple back stabbing with designer cutlery.

Cleaver to the armpit followed by bloody eyeball-gouging.

Razor-blade pranking.

Fluorescent lighting rod to the neck, with twist.

Multiple staircase tumbling.

Brain-bashing followed by neck-snapping.

Hardcore bullying.

Gratuitous singing mermaids.

Gratuitous closeup chest-cavity surgery.

Gratuitous profane ventriloquism.

Gratuitous pumpkin-splattering.

Bloody footprint Fu.

Toy drone Fu.

Baseball bat Fu.

Final-image-of-the-movie confusion Fu.

Drive-In Academy Award nominations for

Will Patton as Officer Hawkins, who says “He needs to die, and I’m the one that’s gonna get him”;

Jamie Lee Curtis, for screaming “Let him burn!” when she thinks the fire department might get to Michael in time;

Diva Tyler as the drone fan who says “There’s a big guy in our bathroom and he’s wearing a monster mask”;

Robert Longstreet as Lonnie, for keeping an arsenal in his truck and rocking the Steve Bannon hair;

Andi Matichak as Alyson, Laurie Strode’s granddaughter, for wanting to kick some ass and saying “Tonight we hunt him down”;

Anthony Michael Hall as Tommy Doyle, the bat-wielding “Kill Michael” community organizer who gets the whole town chanting “Evil dies tonight!”;

Scott MacArthur as Big John, for dancing to Pete Antell’s “Stop, Look and Listen” while imbibing;

Michael McDonald as Little John, for saying “Michael, you’ve come home”;

Ross Bacon as the wrong place/wrong time escaped mental patient;

Judy Greer as Karen, daughter of Laurie, voice of common sense;

James Jude Courtney as the indestructible cyborg Michael Myers has become; and

Scott Teems, Danny McBride and David Gordon Green, the guys in the writer’s room who organized all that “Halloween” lore into a comprehensible tale, and especially director David Gordon Green, for doing things the drive-in way.

Four stars. Joe Bob says check it out.