Director: David Gordon Green
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Will Patton, Thomas Mann, Anthony Michael Hall
Screenplay: Scott Teems, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green
105 mins. Rated R for strong bloody violence throughout, grisly images, language and some drug use.

Happy Halloween! Today, for the final (as of now) Halloween review, we’re going to celebrate (and, in my case, openly defend) the best Halloween sequel, Halloween Kills. EVIL DIES TONIGHT!

Picking up immediately following the 2018 film, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything Everywhere All at Once) is en route to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital with her daughter and granddaughter to treat their wounds following their home defense and revenge-killing of Michael Myers, but when firefighters arrive at Laurie’s compound to put out the blaze, they find a very real and very much alive Michael who escapes the trap and begins making his way across Haddonfield, heading for home. When the residents of the town, led by a very angry and vengeful Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall, The Dark Knight), learn of Michael’s return, they take to the streets, and a town that has held peace begins to eat itself alive. Halloween night is far from over.

Halloween Kills is the type of film that I can love despite the flaws, and make no mistake: I can see some of the flaws that so many of you rail on, but they don’t bother me nearly as much as they bother you. For me, the David Gordon Green trilogy is a group of films that have high promise but end up making a number of the same mistakes that previous timelines have made, but they are technically more proficient which is a win. I was always a bit against the idea of ignoring all the sequels except the original, but I’ve come around more on in in recent years, understanding that the general audience is who these films are for, not lifelong fans as much as potential new fans. This is a 40-year-old franchise as of this point, and they need to gain new fans to stay alive at this point. Hell, even the long-running Godzilla and James Bond franchises have understood the need to reboot from time to time to stay fresh.

Green’s biggest strength in his films is the realization of Haddonfield as a community. I love how some of the small background characters of Halloween 2018 like the doctor/nurse couple and Sondra the graveyard caretaker make new appearances this time around. There’s never been a cohesive version of Haddonfield with so many studios and directors wanting to put their stamp on the town, and Green having three films to depict the community allows it to be the main character of the film, sidelining Laurie for the time to show a town consuming itself with rage and fear. For those saying that these people make stupid choices, welcome to being in a horror movie; horror characters have made terrible choices for decades, and when in a stressful or deadly situation, human beings are not the best at thinking straight and making competent choices when in such a situation. This Haddonfield is its own enemy, and they unknowingly hold up at the hospital thinking that Michael is heading for Laurie, based on the very incorrect information provided by Dr. Sartain’s deception in Halloween 2018. They are hunting in the wrong place and end up attacking a sick but not dangerous individual. Again, I can understand laughing at the situation with the EVIL DIES TONIGHT and the fact that the patient they confuse for Michael looks nothing like Michael, but it also seems to me like most people didn’t even see the other patient; someone says he’s over there and the entire community acts like they got him without even seeing him.

Sidelining Laurie is a result of choices made in Halloween 2018, and there’s not much that can be done about it, but it does make me laugh that Green’s trilogy decanonized so many sequels only to play out similar stories to them anyway. Here, though, she takes on a Loomis role, waxing poetic on the nature of evil and providing enough strong atmosphere to the film without having too direct a role. I also love that putting the strong member of the Strode family out of commission gives the spotlight more to Karen (Judy Greer, 13 Going on 30) and Allyson (Andi Matichak, Son) in order to show their individual growth and challenges without Granny Protector. While Karen has an opposite approach to her mother, Allyson seems to follow a similar path to what Laurie likely would’ve done in this situation, and Andi Matichak is just lovely here with an intensity and a passion to end the night victorious. Her character growth across the trilogy is so wonderful to see.

It’s clear that the creative team of Green and Danny McBride have a love for the original film, and going back to that film’s aesthetic with an extended flashback early on is an excellent idea. It further ties this trilogy to the original film and allows us to add a few pieces of the new characters into the 1978 timeline in order to align the narrative into a singular story. I loved the 1978 flashback sequence and how they replicated Carpenter’s atmospheric language and costuming. I audibly gasped back when I saw the film in theaters in 2021, and it still hits me after many rewatches.

I never expected Lonnie Elam to make a reappearance, but I was happy to see him paired with Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace (played by a franchise returning Kyle Richards). Really, the only disappointed return for me was Nancy Stephens, who played Marion Chambers and just has nothing to do here, resulting in a return that feels like a major step down from her last appearance in Halloween H20.

I reject that this is a film for Halloween fans that are only here for the kills (never been too important to me as a horror fan), but the carnage of Halloween Kills is intense, thrilling, and shocking. Michael Myers is so mean in this film, and yet he retains the catlike look of curiosity, like when he tries out different kitchen knives in a still-breathing victim’s back to see which one he likes the most. This is a cruel killer on a singular path across town, and we’ve seen a number of films this month with similar trajectories (like Panic and The Being), so they just outline why this one works so well. Green never skipped on the bloodshed.

Green’s trilogy has similar issues to the Star Wars Sequel trilogy in that these last two films especially had no plan and yet the filmmakers keep telling us that they had ideas for where the story would go. I don’t believe Kills or Ends were planned from the jump, but even they could’ve benefitted from a cohesive plan, like putting Corey Cunningham into this film so that his inclusion wouldn’t have felt to out of place in Ends.

For me, the only true disappointment of Halloween Kills is the very specifically-edited sequence in the climax where the town seems to have surrounded Myers. The cinematography was organized to artistically show the back-and-forth between Myers and the residents, but it isn’t clear how any of this was accomplished with a lot of singular shots of swinging weapons and people’s reactions all set to Laurie’s monologue. A valiant attempt, but I hate the way this scene plays out, and it is very much integral to the climax and finale of the film, the lingering moments that sit with you as the credits roll. It’s so anticlimactic and really puts a poor stamp on the final minutes.

Halloween Kills doesn’t get it all right, but I love that this feels like a flipside to the Halloween 2018 coin, with an unleashed Michael Myers on an unstoppable path, his return fully realized. Sidelining Laurie works to the benefit of Karen and especially Allyson, who is really the focal point of Green’s trilogy, and it also makes the main characters of the film Michael himself and the town of Haddonfield, which acts as a singular protagonist of its own, consuming itself from within. It’s bloody and mean and features heightened performances of people making poor choices given a stressful and frightening situation, and it left me in a place of complete uncertainty, horrified for the town and where the final installment would bring us. Halloween Kills is a near-perfect sequel that swings for the fences and mostly succeeds, the best installment since the original. I said what I said. Happy Halloween.

4½/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

• For more Halloween: Halloween (1978), Halloween II (1981), Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, Halloween: Resurrection, Halloween (2007), Halloween II (2009), Halloween (2018), Halloween Ends