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Halloween Kills Movie Review

Halloween Kills is a 2021 slasher film directed by David Gordon Green and starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Judy Greer. It is a somewhat unnecessary, but overall solid entry in this franchise.

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“Evil dies tonight“

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The movie continues precisely where the previous film ended and it sees Strode and her family continuing to fend off Myers, this time with the help of the Haddonfield community. The 2018 reboot movie was very strong and successful that it obviously led to a sequel. However, this movie suffers clearly from a middle entry syndrome. As this is going to be a trilogy, most of the important plot points happened before and will happen in the final installment, leaving this one mostly unimportant in the bigger scope of things.

I do see why the critics hated this movie, but I personally side with the audience on this one. Most certainly that feeling of unimportance and unnecessary nature hurt the movie in the long run and the hospital sequences, especially the mayhem scene were silly and even dumb. The mob was at times ridiculous.

But on the other hand, I still appreciated the decision to depict the Haddonfield community going against Myers for the first time ever for the franchise. That was a fresh new take on the franchise that ultimately mostly worked. The final sequence where Michael murdered all of the fools was both disturbing and morbidly fun as is this whole flick.

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Yes, this is by far the most brutal Halloween movie of them all. The body count here is truly enormous and these kills were for the most part not really scary, but they were gory and hugely entertaining due to the versatility and creativity employed in each kill. The fact that we mostly got to meet the people before they became victims also made the movie more emotional and more effective in the danger department.

There is a lot of fun to be had with these kill sequences, but I wish the movie included Laurie at a bigger capacity. Curtis is great, but she was straddled in the hospital bed unfortunately throughout the movie’s runtime. I did like that nod to the previous characters in the 1978 original, such as Tommy for instance. Some of these moments were super sweet and a case of excellent fan service.

The beginning of the movie gave us a surprising new take on the first movie’s plot development, thus making this movie intended more for the fans of the franchise than for regular viewers. The fact that they killed off Laurie’s daughter at the end of the movie made for a chilling final scene, an excellent build-up for the third entry.

Of the other characters, they older gay couple was refreshingly brave and quite amusing in their lines of dialogue. The granddaughter of Laurie’s is also pretty memorable. The movie has too many characters, but most are at least somewhat developed, certainly better than many other previous entries in the franchise.

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Halloween Kills is gory and brutal to the extreme. It wasn’t scary at all, but at least it was fun in the most morbid ways possible. The score is genuinely superb, but the directing and the pacing are quite mediocre and the movie’s script is quite subpar. The story is needless, but the many nods to the original and returning characters deepened the mythology of the series quite satisfactorily.