Halloween Kills

I hated Halloween 2018. It was a miserable, insufferable, masturbatory piece of shit that reveled in fan service but failed to understand what made the source material so good. It was strikingly tone deaf, stunningly unpleasant, and for all the talk of repudiating the “bad sequels”, its entire existence was created by strip-mining those “bad sequels”. It is my most hated movie of the franchise by a country mile, and of the Big 3 of slashers, my most hated movie too. But I will give it this. It told a story, front to back. It was a shit story, but it was a story. There was a beginning, middle, and end. There were story arcs. Scenes flowed together to form a narrative. It functioned like a movie should function. Halloween Kills does NONE OF THAT. It fails at the most basic purpose of a movie, which is to progress a story, as it has no story. It fails as the middle chapter of a trilogy, as it nothing is resolved, advanced, or set up. It is a treadmill, giving the illusion of movement without actually providing any. Every new character it introduces, it kills. It introduces no new revelations or developments; Michael is alive, he kills indiscriminately, Haddonfield is scared. A middle chapter in a trilogy should raise the stakes and put the protagonists in a more dire situation than in which the installment started. There is none of that here. But it’s made worse by the fact that the movie doesn’t even hint that it’s trying to do that. If there was a failed attempt, it would still suck, but at least you could say it was trying, and maybe part 3 would redeem it in retrospect. This is the most painful example of the “more of the same” slasher sequel mentality. And it’s also terribly disjointed. There are too many plot threads going on, even though none of them have much content or do anything beyond fill time. The movie whips back and forth from obvious red shirts to Laurie in the hospital to a mob to Michael to an escaped mental hospital patient, and nothing feels connected, only stitched together. And it doesn’t help that everybody speaks like they’re delivering lines for a trailer. Halloween 2018 and Halloween Kills are the bottom of this franchise. I still have to give the nod to H18 for being such a middle finger to the franchise and the fans. But the difference is razor thin. H18 was an utterly bankrupt movie that relied on fan service to paper over its total misunderstanding of the original. HK is just an empty, pointless mess.