“Halloween Kills” is the newest movie in a series that chronicles the residents of Haddonfield, Ill., and their attempted escapes from Michael Myers, a serial killer who rampages throughout the movies.
The series’ most recent installment picks up right where the last one left off — directly after Deputy Frank Hawkins was shot in the neck, Michael Myers is inflamed in the basement and Laurie Strode, along with daughter Karen and granddaughter Allyson, is en route to the hospital.
“Halloween Kills” offers more gruesome chaos than sheer terror or psychological insight. The movie is simply bloody, violent and gory, and doesn’t bring much else to the table.
Laurie Strode, the hero of the series’ previous installment, really has nothing interesting to do this time around. Instead, she is confined to her hospital room for most of the movie, where her main task is to recover from the injuries she incurred in the last movie.
While Laurie Strode’s recovery may be somewhat realistic, it is certainly not exciting.
However, the writers make decent use of the element of flashback. The movie reflects back to the events of 1978 on multiple occasions. The first of these constitutes the opening scene of the movie, where Hawkins fails in his attempt to kill Myers. Other minor characters from the first movie who somehow avoided Myers’ knife are brought back into the second movie.
Tommy Doyle, the young child Laurie babysat back in 1978, has returned to this movie, and this time around he leads a support group for his fellow Myers survivors. They all gather at a bar to pay tribute to Myers’ victims on Halloween night, but they soon find out that Myers is back in town and on another rampage.
Tommy rallies a mob with the motto that recurs throughout the movie: “Evil dies tonight.”
This installment of the series begs the question of whether normal people, or all of humanity, are the real monsters. While this might seem like a thought-provoking theme in theory, it’s really ineffectual in practice. It might work if we cared about the characters at all, but without that element of psychological intricacy, it’s rather difficult to build an emotional connection to the characters.
Aside from Laurie Strode, few of the characters are actually interesting, aside from the couple that now lives in Myers’ old home, spending Halloween night smoking marijuana and eating a charcuterie board. Disappointingly, they don’t last long in the movie.
Overall, the film is figuratively and literally a mess. If I wanted to watch that kind of bloody gore without any element of plot or intricacy, I’d simply swing by the butcher shop.

ANNA MALESIEWSKI

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