The Artist Formerly Known As The Shape

Hey, read this Halloween 2018 thing first!

Halloween Kills (2021): I wanted very badly for everyone who dunked on this movie to be wrong.  I wanted a sequel to Halloween 2018 that justified that film’s somewhat awkward existence by moving the story forward in an insightful and original way while still scaring me.  Finally, I wanted it to make me hungry for the planned third film.

I got literally none of that.

What I did get was an unbelievably misguided and unnecessary fan-service attempt in the form of grown-up versions of the two Haddonfield, IL kids we remember from Halloween 1978 and then also a third one who was basically a glorified extra in that film.  Oh, right, and the nurse whose hair Michael Myers touched for like a second and a half while escaping the asylum.  Which was 150 miles away from Haddonfield, so… why is she here?  Oh, right.  Fan-service.  Because Halloween 1978 is a movie that requires fan service, apparently.

What I also got was the continued de-scary-ifying of the OG scary masked murderer that kicked off literal decades of genre filmmaking.  You know what’s scary?  A silent guy in a white mask just standing there, slightly out of focus, in the background, that when you turn around, isn’t there anymore.  You know what isn’t scary?  That same guy, front-and-center, mass murdering packs of civilians all at once while getting shot and stabbed, multiple times, and surviving, AGAIN.  One needle sticking out of a pincushion looks like art.  Multiple needles sticking out of a pincushion looks like it’s its job.

And it makes our antagonist look like Jason Voorhees, not Michael Myers.

Which was what I thought they were trying to avoid with these Halloween Timeline 2.0 films.  But, as it stands now, it’s looking like they’re just remaking the sequels they were trying to erase, but fancier.

I don’t know what else to say.  Yeah, they tried to do a statement-y thing with adult Tommy Doyle riling up a local mob to find and kill Myers that gets way out of hand… which would have been interesting if it wasn’t so half-baked and repetitive (and yeah, they storm a government building, so something something Capitol riot something, or whatever I’m supposed to say to make it seem like prescient filmmaking, or whatever).  They force feed you, again, the quite literally unprejudiced murder selection of Michael.  But this time it’s by showing you that no one is safe, regardless of race, age, gender, sexual orientation, or, you know, general disposition.  And they blatantly force what will likely be the climax of this planned trilogy by having Will Patton’s character, somehow surviving a stab wound to the jugular in the last film, and Jamie Lee, stabbed in the gut, in a hospital room together, on dual navel-gazing duty about who’s more to blame for this predicament.  Because I guess if you’re a “good guy” who’s just as focused and driven as an evil murder machine, you too can be a pincushion and survive like it’s your job.

I dunno.  I’m trying not to be a grump here, but I have always been of the mind that OG Halloween was a movie that had a perfect ending and should never have gotten a sequel.  But if you absolutely HAVE to do it, you’ve got to come up with something as rich in originality, subtext and self-confidence as it had.  I’m not against flashy, loud, violence-envelope-pushing filmmaking, but if doubling-down on the brutality means hobbling the scary, then maybe hedge your bets on the former a bit and focus more on the latter.  And hey, maybe somehow Halloween Ends will bring it all into focus in such a way that I’ll come back and eat some serious crow about all of this.

You know, just like Revenge Of The Sith did for the prequel tril…

…oh, never mind.

Make Michael Myers Scary Again (#mmmsa).