TEPID TERROR

MOVIE
Halloween Kills
Director David Gordon Green
Review Ray Chan

The Halloween franchise was rebooted in 2018 with a very solid legacy sequel, directed by David Gordon Green, which showed that a revamped Michael Myers film really could bring forth some intelligent commentary to mix with the trademark gruesome kills.
    It looked at the generational trauma passed down from defiant protagonist Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) to her passive daughter Karen and fiesty granddaughter Allyson, as they came to grips with the terror inflicted by the unhinged serial killer.
    Now Green returns for Halloween Kills, which picks up immediately where that film left off, with Myers apparently burning to death in the firetrap set by three generations of Strode women, and Laurie getting hauled off to the emergency room with a knife wound in her stomach, screaming at passing fire trucks: “No, no, no! Let it burn!”
    Unfortunately, Laurie is unconscious in the hospital for quite a while after that, oblivious to the fact that firefighters did indeed rescue Myers from the inferno, at the expense of getting massacred in the process. It is admirable of Green and his co-writers Danny McBride and Scott Teems to commit to the reality of Laurie’s injury and not have her conveniently, immediately and miraculously recover, but it’s a testament to Curtis’ charisma that the vitality of the film dwindles to a very low ebb in her absence.
    Anthony Michael Hall as Tommy Doyle, the boy that teenage babysitter Laurie saved from Myers, comes to the fore plot-wise instead, and he does a lot of grandstanding and yelling “Evil dies tonight!” as the head of the local vigilante mob — but he’s merely a tedious gascon in the role and definitely no substitute for Curtis.
    Indeed, the formation of the lynch group in a small town appears to be a token effort by Green and Co to instill some sort of meaningful hook to replace the dynamic relationship between the Strodes, which entertainingly carried the first movie.
    The fear over Myers ultimately leads to the frenzied community hunting down an innocent man who they mistakenly believe is the maniac, forcing him to jump to his death from a hospital window.
    It’s a clumsy attempt at a tribe mentality metaphor, aimed at demonstrating how easily people’s opinions can be shaped by charismatic leaders. Here, the townspeople have been encouraged by Doyle to gather their baseball bats, knives, guns and probably pitchforks and torches, as they allow a single evil figure to make them so fuelled by hate, that they become just as heinous.
    And like much of the rest of the movie, it doesn’t really work. There is so much backstory unearthed without spotlighting any particular occurrence: the period flashbacks, with so many story lines involving people who encountered Myers back in the day and lived to tell the tale, weighs down the whole thing.
    The only really grisly parts of this offering are the different ways Myers continues to kill his victims, and indeed they raise more snickers than shock as we see yet another witless innocent – who’s gone on to think he can take on Myers alone – get stabbed, slashed, poked, shot or disfigured.
    It’s been revealed that this movie is part of a trilogy and the conclusion is expected to pit Strode against her immortal nemesis. In that sense, there is no real element of surprise as to how this instalment ends.
    Halloween Kills is less of a sequel than a half-baked interlude before the finale. It is a bloody, violent, chaotic and cynical mess, but if anything, it whets the appetite for the final closure, with viewers intent to see if evil really dies.

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