Halloween Kills Movie Review: A sorry sequel bloodbath

A still from Halloween Kills

Halloween Kills
Dir: David Gordon Green

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, James Jude Courtney, Nick Castle, Will Patton.
Rating: 2/5

David Gordon Green rebooted John Carpenter's 1978 horror classic which released in 2018 and it wasn't much of a seat warmer but hey …that did not stop him from attempting a sequel. And it's one which he hopes will make you forget all the sequels to the original. So he goes bloodier and sillier trying to re-fashion a small-town (Haddonfield) legend of a bogeyman that doesn't say die. Derived from John Carpenters' famous Michael Myers and Laurie Strode saga, this one once again casts Jamie Lee Curtis as the crazy old woman aiming to crush the bogeyman who wiped out many from her family and small town on Halloween. Laurie Strode(Jamie Lee Curtis), at the end of the previous movie, believed she'd put an end to the recurring nightmare for her -by burning her own house down with Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) in it. But while she is in hospital recovering from a knife wound inflicted by Myers, the town gets bloodied further as firemen, residents, cops medical professionals, odd couples, and many more get slaughtered on yet another never-ending Halloween night.

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‘Halloween Kills' puts a lot of emphasis on getting the done-to-death history into focus. So we have an opening sequence that goes back several years before cutting back into the present and then back again in time. Flashbacks include the late Donald Pleasance digitally inserted as Dr. Loomis and references include revisits to the childhood bullying that tied in with Michael's murderous rampage, Tommy Doyle's friend Lindsey and Dr. Loomis' assistant Marion as older people and Hawkins, the now injured cop who had once arrested Michael after his initial murder spree. Incidentally, Doyle, a greying older version now, is the kid that Strode had rescued way back in 1978. It's a long wait for those looking for Laurie Strode to get back into avenger mode. But before that can happen we have to sit through Doyle organizing the town's residents into a lynch mob, with the killer as their target.

It all seems so ridiculous and unreal - you have victims lying in wait to be slaughtered and bloodthirsty Haddonfield folk taking vigilantism to a self-annihilating level of foolishness. Despite several deliberate references to the original classic, this one fails to jack-up the chills and ends up looking rather limpid and careless - where fashioning a bloodbath became more important than retelling of a fearsome urban legend. The film lives up to its moniker. The kills are a lot more brutal, graphic and off-putting. And there's so much blood, gore and pieces of body parts scattered through the narrative that you'd be horrified anyway. David Gordon Green's sequel prefers to spill buckets of blood rather than build suspense or genuine scares. Halloween Kills is a bloodbath whichever way you look at it.