Harefooted Halloween: Halloween Kills

What I Liked: Michael Myers takes on a group of people twice which is something I don’t think we’ve seen before, at least not like this.  In Halloween 4 he fights a mob of vigilantes while racing down the road in their truck and then gets shot by them shortly after.  But here Michael goes up against several opponents simultaneously on the ground in the open like in an action movie.  While this is a fun novelty thing to do the character definitely works better as a menacing figure when he engages in one on one or even two on one combat.

Michael looks and moves pretty well.  The singed mask from the fire at the end of the previous film (and beginning of this one) adds a cool bit of weathering to remind you he’s been through some shit.  James Jude Courtney (Soccer Dog: The Movie) gives a slightly stiffer performance than last time from what I can remember but he can still lunge and quickly dispatch anyone standing in his way.  Although at points they may have pushed it a touch too far (we’ll dive into this a little later).

John Carpenter, his son Cody and frequent collaborator Daniel Davies (Dave Davies’ son and Carpenter’s godson!) return for another solid soundtrack.  Maybe the choral additions to the main theme aren’t the best but the rest of it is good heart pumping atmospheric tunes.

There are more nods to the previous pictures for fans to pick out.  Michael hops on top of a car and smashes a window with his hand from the original, eating candy embedded with a razor blade from II, the Silver Shamrock masks from III, the raging mob from 4, skewering someone with a pitchfork through the back from 5, and I’m sure there are others.  Oh and is the baseball bat that grown up Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall (Edward Scissorhands)) picks up from the local bar to use against Michael a reference to Silver Bullet?

What I Didn’t Like: They had no idea what to do for this movie.  It follows the tradition of the ’81 and 2009 Halloween II in that we pick up right where the last film left off on Halloween night and there’s a lot of hospital stuff.  But it’s simply Michael continuing to kill people.  We don’t know why and there isn’t a driving force to anything.

A whole bunch of times someone tries to shoot Michael with a gun and except for one instance it never goes well.  Either they miss, are out of bullets or Michael is so fast he swats the gun away at the last possible second.  It’s so noticeable because of how often it happens, like to the point where it becomes comical.  The filmmakers seem to want to emphasize that Michael is lightning quick in this one but really it’s slick editing and people being terrible shots.

The narration at the end is cheesy and unnecessary.  It’s about how Michael isn’t human but made up of pure evil which we know.  We’ve known that since 1978, Loomis told us.  That’s just ham fisted filmmaking.  And there’s another example of this earlier in the picture when a good chunk of the town has been whipped into a frenzy because not a single person has been able to stop Michael so naturally they’re frustrated and extremely pissed off.  They chase after a completely different escaped mental patient and want to kill him because they erroneously think he’s the killer.  Then some character has the out loud realization that Michael has turned the good citizens of Haddonfield into monsters.  Yea, we can see that.  Thanks for knocking us over the noggin.

Jump scares galore and they can all go fuck themselves.  I will be eternally hopeful that one day we will move past this bullshit as a society but today is not that day.

None of the humor lands.

Overall Impressions: I wasn’t the biggest fan of the 2018 Halloween but it had a few neat ideas like Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis (Beverly Hills Chihuahua)) becoming a paranoid survivalist who’s convinced Michael will return one day and attack her and there were some impressive showcases of Michael dispatching his victims (the one long tracking shot following him through different houses, the flood light in the yard turning on and off so you never know where he’ll pop up next, etc).  This installment has almost nothing to cling onto and keep you engaged.  The only scene I really dig is Michael vs a team of firefighters during an actual fire.  The concept is weird enough and executed well enough that it made for some entertaining imagery.

Even with all of that said my main issue might be that there’s a mean spiritedness to this film that I don’t care for.  A lot of innocent people die and in horrifically grisly ways and it’s like why?  I mean one poor bastard gets his head pounded against a wall and three or four knives stuck in his back.  And he wasn’t setup as an asshole or gave us any reason to dislike him.  If the filmmakers were trying to remind us that Michael is the devil and to not root for him they went about it the wrong way.  Good guy characters need to be built up so we have a connection with them and then you can kill them off for an emotional gut punch.  But to murder too many random folks who are just minding their own business is a fundamental misunderstanding of storytelling in my opinion.

Additionally, massive crowds of folks blinded by fury attacking an innocent mentally ill person isn’t the most enjoyable aspect either.  There are so many people they take over practically the entire hospital.  This and having Tommy Doyle recruit townsfolk all over Haddonfield to hunt down Michael feels sorta out of place.  In Halloween 4 it was a handful of guys but here it’s like half the damn town.  It bogs down the movie and leaves you with very few characters to get behind.

On top of this there are technical problems that don’t add up like characters inexplicably teleporting in scenes or Michael putting on music after posing the victims’ bodies which seems amazingly out of character.  All this shit is annoying but also incredibly tedious so I’ll just leave it at that.

Oh man, the more I think about it the worse this movie gets.  It’s very violent and not really in a fun way.  And while it initially may have seemed awesome that they’re doing two sequels back to back they don’t appear to have a roadmap on where they’re going.  What the hell is the next one gonna be like?