It is Halloween night and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has finally trapped Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) to kill him in a fiery inferno.  As she makes her own escape, the fire department heads to the house to extinguish the flames, much to her dismay.  Michael survives the fire, and he continues on his bloody path for revenge through the streets of Haddonfield in search of Laurie and nothing can stand in his way. 

Halloween Kills is the second part of a proposed trilogy stemming from Halloween (2018), a retconned sequel to Halloween (1978).  Continuing his partnership with Blumhouse Productions, David Gordon Green returns to direct the modern slasher film, released by Universal.  His script, with the help of Scott Teems and Danny McBride, tries to find a balance between homage to the original franchise as well as the conventions of modern filmmaking.  It works to varying degrees, but ultimately the film is a bit of a mess, and not just in regard to the gallons of blood spilled on the streets. 

As a slasher film, first and foremost, Halloween Kills boasts an incredibly high body count and some creative kills.  Myers is as imposing and unshakeable as ever as he instills terror on the town that has mythicized his madness, and with his weathered and distressed mask, he looks great.  In conjunction with Green, stunt coordinator Airon Armstrong creates a multitude of environments and setups that allow Myers to enjoy a wide range of weapons at his disposal.  Coupled with the typical yell-at-the-screen dumb decision-making of the characters, it makes for an at-times amusing, yet always bloody spectacle.   

Where Halloween Kills stumbles is, oddly enough, the same thing that it can be admired most for: its ambition.  The trajectory of the story finds the small-town hospital absolutely inundated with victims, and soon a mob forms in the waiting area prophesizing through their chanting that “evil dies tonight!”  While the citizens of Haddonfield have the luxury of living in a pre-insurrectionist world – Halloween Kills picking up right where Halloween (2018) ends – its audience does not, and to watch Green and his writing team dissect the mob mentality that consumes much of the second act and leads into the third is both uncomfortable and fascinating.  It seems at first a strange burden to place on a slasher movie, but horror has long been used to confront issues that directly impact our society at the time. 

Unfortunately, it is the incredible burden of lore which weighs the film down.  While tracing the lineage of this film back to John Carpenter’s classic can be a bit confusing to begin with, Green tries to expand the world of his reboot by bringing in more ties to the source material while also forging ahead with his own narrative.  It would be hard to say that this film succumbs to some of the greater sins of fan service, but it certainly relies heavily on what came before it in an effort to tie the universe together as it seems like everything needs to be connected in this era of filmmaking we are in currently.   

To do so, it employs multiple storylines, and to Green’s credit he bounces between them competently so that we are never away from the characters too long to forget what is happening in their arcs.  The converging storylines all come back to Laurie who, unlike in 2018, is mostly a supporting character in this installment.  Halloween Kills suffers more than anything from a problem that often plagues sequels – especially middle installments – in that the creative forces know how the final film will end so they cannot do anything too damaging or wide reaching with their storytelling and keep all the best tricks for the grand finale.  What it results in here is a 105-minute film bogged down by flashbacks and world building to tell a largely inconsequential story that pushes side characters into the spotlight so that in Halloween Ends (currently slated for a 2022 release) we can finally have the showdown between Laurie and Michael that has been over four decades in the making. 

Halloween Kills is a frustrating film to watch as it is well made on a technical level but serves no purpose on its own merits.  In the context of the trilogy, it surely sets up the third film, but on its own its arc is very miniscule.  To make up for the lack of story, it is at least a gratuitously bloody affair as Myers makes quick work of the townsfolk.  Perhaps there is more to be gleaned by those more loyal to the franchise as a whole, but as its own entry it is narratively weak and the few times it tries to build up its plot, it is so cumbersomely done that we cannot help but to cheer when Myers slays his next victim because at least those sequences were well thought out during the writing process.