Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Will Patton, Anthony Michael Hall, Thomas Mann and Dylan Arnold.
Written by Scott Teems, Danny McBride & David Gordon Green.
Directed by David Gordon Green.
★½
I really liked Halloween (2018), the reboot/sequel that ignored all the other movies except the original Halloween. Halloween Kills picks up mere minutes after the first one ended, and it felt like a hammock movie in all the worst ways.
When the last movie ended, we saw Michael Meyers surrounded by fire and presumably burning to death in the basement of Laurie's house. The movie picks up with firefighters getting to the basement in time, and Michael shows his appreciation by killing all of the firemen and rising to kill some more. Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) is sidelined for a significant chunk of the movie in the hospital recovering from her wounds. Meanwhile the movie introduces Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), the protagonist from Halloween 4 (played then by Paul Rudd; glad he didn't return with this script). So the movie does try to use elements from sequels that allegedly don't exist in this timeline but okay, whatever.
The movie jumps around in choppy fashion from 1978 to 2018, and it started to remind me of the ill-conceived The Fourth Kind, as though the editors lost the story. But there's not much story. There's plenty of gore, but this film falls into the traps the previous film avoided. The movie relies on characters doing really dumb things, and Michael survives attacks that don't even phase him where a normal human would have died. He gets shot, stabbed, beaten repeatedly with a baseball bat, gets a full pitchfork in the back, and still manages to stand up and keep going without so much as a limp. Will we learn in the next film that he's a Mutant?
Very disappointed.
