Susan Granger’s review of “Halloween Kills” (Universal Pictures/Miramax/Blumhouse)
This eleventh installment in John Carpenters fabled, if fragmented franchise picks up where 2018’s “Halloween” concluded – in the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, where three generations of Strode women are battered and exhausted.
After an extensive prologue filled with grisly flashbacks and gnarly footage recalling Michael Myers’ grim history – from how he initially killed his six year-old sister to his escape from a psychiatric hospital 40 years later – he’s once again on the rampage in his iconic white mask.
Now a grandmother, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) suffered a debilitating abdominal stab wound, so she is hospitalized post-surgery. While her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) is reasonably determined, it’s her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) who is now resolute to wreak revenge.
Several characters return from the 1978 original, including Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), Tommy Doyle (now played by Anthony Michael Hall, replacing Paul Rudd), Lonnie Elam (now played, as an adult, by Robert Longstreet), and Lindsay Wallace (Kyle Richards). And this is the sixth time Jamie Lee Curtis has embodied Laurie Strode.
When interviewed on Sirius XM, Curtis noted how the story resonates with protests and riots that swept the country after George Floyd’s death: “This movie is about a mob. It takes on what happens when trauma infects an entire community, and we’re seeing it everywhere with the Black Lives Matter movement. We’re seeing it in action.”
Working from an incoherent, dumbed-down, over-populated script he co-wrote with Scott Teems and Danny McBride, David Gordon Green has once again revived John Carpenter’s ‘curse’ involving Michael Myers as the terrifying psycho-slasher in a trilogy which he intends to conclude with “Halloween Ends!”
The title sequence opens with 12 pumpkins with flames shooting out of their eyes – with the last one indicating “Halloween Ends!” as the 12th installment in the franchise, now set for release in October, 2022.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Halloween Kills” is a ferociously savage 3 – simultaneously in theaters and streaming on the Peacock Network.
