As the nights grow longer and a chill hangs in the air, one would hope the season of spooks would bring us thrilling tales of terror to share. Unfortunately, "Halloween Kills" does little to keep the candle in the pumpkin lit. Like the trick-or-treat bag with more tricks than treats, this slasher sequel might leave viewers perplexed with its scattering of baffling choices and characters who seem to have left their common sense in the costume box.
Now, to carve into the meat of the pie – the woeful tale of the inhabitants of Haddonfield. We return to the fierce trio of Laurie Strode and her kin, hoping for a triumphant narrative that lives up to their storied legacy. Laurie, played with earnest intensity by Jamie Lee Curtis, is a beacon of courage amidst chaos, but she's confined to the sidelines like a sidelined quarterback in the biggest game of the season.
But let's not get too caught up yet in our protagonist's plight without addressing the ghoul in the room. Michael Myers, the masked boogeyman, who defies the sense of finality once more as he extricates himself from certain doom with the ease of a child removing a stubborn Halloween costume. Once free, Michael proceeds with his trademark rampage, an expected snooze fest of savagery, only this time, it's as if Haddonfield's residents attended a seminar on 'How Not to Survive a Horror Movie.'
The townsfolk, it seems, have taken several leaves out of the book of horror clichés. The characters in "Halloween Kills" stagger about with the decisiveness of a deer in headlights. One might hope to root for these fledgling vigilantes, but the narrative famine leaves the audience hungering for just one person to display a modicum of sense.
Instead of clever survival strategies, we bear witness to a smorgasbord of decisions so outlandishly poor they flirt with comedy. There's an air of inevitability nudging our characters further down the well-trodden paths of their forebears, those unfortunate souls who yelled at cinema screens to "not go in there" or to "turn around." It is an act of cinematic sacrilege that treats the audience’s intelligence as absent as the head of a Jack-o'-lantern.
The film attempts to spin a yarn of collective trauma and crowd-sourced justice as the town bands together chanting, “Evil dies tonight!” Yet, this mob mentality serves only to spread the idiocy more thickly, as strategic thinking and coherent planning are replaced with misdirected zeal and a stunning lack of forethought that feels contrived within the already stretched believability of the Halloween franchise.
Throughout the movie's storm of mindlessness, the viewer is left numbed to the violence, uninvested in the one-dimensional prey, and taken aback by the lack of any evolved character arc or even the faintest hint of evolvement in their predatory nemesis. As if a jackpot of jumbled jump scares and buckets of blood can band-aid over the gaping plot wounds and absence of any coherent tactical thought amongst Haddonfield’s finest.
"Halloween Kills" scores a meager 3/10 on this critic's scale – a score reserved for films that stagger lifelessly into the abyss of the forgotten and serve as a reminder of how not to craft a suspenseful thriller. For those seeking a Halloween scare, perhaps it's best to stick to the haunted houses and eerie escape rooms; at least when you face the monsters there, you're not left asking, "Why would you do that?"
