Bodies pile up in yet another sequel
Halloween Kills Cert TBC, 105min
★★★★★
Dir David Gordon Green
Starring Anthony Michael Hall, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Dylan Arnold, Robert Longstreet, Jamie Lee Curtis
Eyebrows were initially raised when it was announced that the 12th entry in the Halloween slasher franchise would be premiering at the Venice Film Festival. But perhaps the rampaging serial killer Michael Myers is the ideal mascot for a Covid-proof gathering: for all his faults, he’s one of the most diligent mask-wearers around.
It’s been 43 years since this lumbering loon first pulled on his rubbery disguise, reached for the knife block and went after Jamie Lee Curtis’s teenage babysitter Laurie Strode. And Curtis is presumably the main reason David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills is at Venice: she’s this year’s recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
Yet disappointingly, the actress is largely sidelined in this instalment: Laurie spends almost the entirety of the film in hospital, recovering from a stab wound to the gut. Said injury was sustained in 2018’s Halloween, the slate-wiping sequel also directed and co-written by Green that threw out every prior entry except for John Carpenter’s still-peerless original.
The hospital at Haddonfield, Illinois, is filling with bodies and frantic next-of-kin, and Myers is still on the loose, despite having seemingly been packed off to hell by three generations of Strodes – Curtis’s Laurie, her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) – in the last film’s fiery climax. Appalled by the failure of local law enforcement to put a stop to Myers’s spree, a group of concerned citizens decides to scour the suburbs for this overalled angel of death, who busies himself with yet more indiscriminate slaughter as the night wears on. (In an age of heightened twitchiness around mental illness being exploited as a plot device, Green and his co-writers Danny Mcbride and Scott Teems judiciously frame Myers as straightforwardly evil, eschewing any talk of diagnosis or motive.)
The leader of the posse is a familiar face. Anthony Michael Hall, a veteran of the 1980s coming-of-age movie scene, is Tommy Doyle, one of the traumatised youngsters under Laurie’s care back in 1978 – and to the extent the film has an active hero at all, he’s it.
But Tommy’s appetite for swift mob justice is his only substantial character trait – and the film doesn’t have much to say on that subject beyond disapprovingly sucking in its cheeks, observing that mass hysteria is bad, actually, and suggesting that even in apparently clear-cut cases, due process always makes sense. (In what could generously be described as a deeply unfortunate coincidence, a second, completely innocent escaped lunatic also happens to be prowling around Haddonfield that same night.)
What Halloween Kills lacks in ideas it partly makes up for in gruesomely authentic slasher texture. From cinematography to editing, casting to oozy prosthetic gore, Green and his crew have recreated the feel of the Carpenter original with an almost academic diligence. The rhythms of the kills are just right, too: the idiosyncratic details that make the victims memorable; the terrible decisions that leave them vulnerable; the unnecessary hesitation when the death blow could have been dealt. (I loved the gay couple who, on hearing a creak from upstairs, arm themselves with knives from the cheese board.)
For some fans, this will be more than enough: Halloween Kills certainly feels like more Halloween. But the game board is left exactly as it was found in readiness for round 13; the only thing that advances is the body count.