HALLOWEEN KILLS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Halloween Overkills, more like. This new randomly titled sequel to the confusingly titled reboot that acted as an actual sequel to the 1978 original (while erasing the rest of the franchise from Rick Rosenthal's okay Halloween II to the same director's atrocious Halloween: Resurrection, and ignoring Rob Zombie's worthless brace entirely) is a disaster: whatever it thinks it might have to say about vigilantism and mob rule is just lost in all the senseless slaughter that betrays everything the original Halloween was. There's no subtlety, no restraint, no art and no craft; in other words, there's no John Carpenter, just a mindless succession of graphic kills that's never scary and quickly becomes dull. Halloween Bores, more like.

Picking up straight after the 2018 Halloween, in which three generations of Strode had trapped Michael Myers in the basement and set the building ablaze, its first "really?" contrivance is to have the fire brigade turn up immediately and put it out again, only to discover (very briefly) that Myers had survived the inferno by hiding in a cupboard and is now ready to kill literally everyone he encounters, including all the firefighters. Grandmother Laurie was badly wounded and ends up in the hospital while Mom Karen frets and worries and daughter Allyson goes off on the Haddonfield citizens' hunt for Myers with the rallying cry "Evil Dies Tonight!!!".

The 2018 film was mainly about Laurie Strode forty years on; Halloween Kills concerns itself with a stack of other characters including the former Sheriff Brackett (now head of security at the hospital) and Tommy Doyle, the kid Laurie was babysitting in 1978 who now becomes the head of the angry and out-of-control lynch mob that simply places innocent people in Myers' path and inevitably gets them killed. Having started with a bloody massacre (of the firefighters), it climaxes with another one before bumping off a significant character in a meaningless and nonsensical way, making you wonder who's left to face off with him in next year's Halloween Ends, a film which is less eagerly awaited than it was before I watched this one.

As much fun as it might be to watch a bloody and violent slasher film, merely slashing, stabbing and impaling about thirty people isn't interesting if it isn't remotely plausible or beliveable and this absolutely isn't. Myers was always a remorseless, unstoppable boogeyman but he was still a biological human being; now he's a completely indestructible force of nature and could take on two Terminators and a Tyrannosaurus Rex without breaking a sweat. A mob of middle-aged normal people, armed with handguns, kitchen knives and baseball bats, have no more chance against him than they do against a tornado. And even when they've found him and soundly clobbered him, no-one thinks to dismember him, decapitate him, or at the very very least PICK THE BIG KNIFE UP THAT'S LYING RIGHT BY HIS HAND, YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOTS. The resultant carnage is hardly surprising to the extent that it's practically self-inflicted.

Moments please, but not enough of them. It's nice to hear that famous 5/4 theme again, it's nice to see Will Patton in anything, and it's nice to see Jamie Lee Curtis again, but this is unworthy of her and of John Carpenter who was always a mood and atmosphere director rather than a mere body count man. This has little mood, it has little atmosphere and very little to commend it to anyone.

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