Halloween Kills (2021)

“If they don't stop him tonight, maybe we'll find him tomorrow. Or next Halloween, when the sun sets and someone is alone. You can't close your eyes and pretend he isn't there. Because he is.” – Laurie Strode

Originally, this film was intended to follow the release of Halloween (2019) exactly a year later – but life had other plans and substituted our planned Halloween horror with the all too real horror of a global pandemic that wiped out hundreds of thousands of lives. But even Covid-19 couldn’t keep Michael Myers down, it just delayed him for a year.

Halloween Kills is the middle part of the trilogy intended to close the series off once and for all. So, we know from the start that it’s not going to have an actual conclusion, otherwise where do we go with the third part? We also know that Myers is still alive because if he wasn’t, why are we here waiting for the film to start.

To get back to the point, knowing that Myers is still alive (we heard him breathe at the end of the last film) and knowing there’s still a movie left so there’ll be no resolution this time, is there really a point to this one? Well, yes there is. This particular timeline is better constructed and paced by far than any of the ones we’ve previously seen. And there’s a lot to absorb in Halloween Kills that elevates it above mere padding in between the more meaningful bookending entries.

Interestingly, the film opens with a flashback to 1978 – showing parts of that fateful night that we’ve never seen before. In a really well executed reconstruction, we see the Haddonfield police scour the area where Myers has slaughtered his babysitter victims. Two of the cops find him at his old abandoned childhood home, and in a mishap, one of them fatally shoots the other, while Myers gets away. But he doesn’t get far, and is apprehended outside the house by Dr Sam Loomis and the other cops – in exactly the same place as Myers was caught by his parents in 1963.

Before I go any further, I have to tip my hat to Tom Jones Jr, the film’s art director. It was spotted that he bore an uncanny resemblance to Donald Pleasance, and with some prosthetics on his face, looked virtually identical to the late actor. Spoken dialogue by Pleasance impersonator Colin Mahan was dubbed and the illusion is stunningly complete.

During these flashbacks, we also see young Lonnie Elam, the bullying kid who tormented Tommy Wallace (the boy who Laurie Strode babysat in ’78) himself become victim to bullies. And I found that oddly satisfying.

Moving to the present day, which is still Halloween 2018, we catch up to now middle-aged Tommy Wallace (now played by Anthony Michael Hall). It seems he’s never quite gotten over the trauma of his narrow escape from Myers 40 years ago, and is telling his story to an audience in a bar. In the audience are Loomis’s assistant Nurse Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens again in the role for the fourth time) and Lindsey Wallace, the little girl also under Laurie’s eye forty years ago, played once again by Kyle Richards.

It's the return of these originally peripheral characters and their ongoing arc as they try to move along with their lives which adds authenticity to the saga at this point, and it’s something that this film does so well.

But we need to catch up with Laurie (Jaime Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) who are in the back of a pickup, having hitched a ride to the hospital while Laurie’s house burns down, with Michael Myers still inside. To Laurie’s dismay, they are passed on the road by firefighters on their way to attend the blaze. She wants the place burnt to the ground, along with its current occupant.

What about the current occupant? Michael is still alive inside, having sheltered behind a wall and is inadvertently rescued by a firefighter before he goes on another rampage and kills every last responder.

As soon as news of the slaughter reaches Haddonfield, Tommy organises a lynch mob to take matters into their own hands and the civilised veneer of society quickly crumbles in Haddonfield. This begs the question what is REAL horror? A boogieman wearing a mask, or the all-too realistic spectacle of a crazed mob baying for blood? I’d say the latter, especially as we had seen the reality of a mindless mob storming the American Congress earlier in 2021 with equal bloodlust in their eyes.

What the mob don’t know is that there’s another inmate from Smiths Grove Sanitorium who wandered away from the crashed bus that allowed Myers to escape. And he’s harmless.

Okay, so we’ve caught up with everybody apart from Officer Hawkins (Will Patton) who was the officer on the scene the night Myers was caught in ’78. He prevented Loomis from executing Myers on the spot and has felt the weight of guilt ever since. (Well, that AND the fact it was him as a rookie who accidentally shot his partner that night.) We had presumed Hawkins dead, stabbed in the neck by Dr Sartain, who wanted to see Myers fully operational, as it were. But no, he’s survived and is wheeled into the same hospital room as Laurie, whose stomach wound has been attended to. Wisely, Laurie spends this movie in the hospital, much as she did in Halloween 2 (1981) which gives much needed screen time to the other cast members to fully flesh out this new timeline.

While the vigilantes are out trying to clean the streets of Myers, and while Myers picks off victims with relative ease, Laurie and Hawkins believe him dead (that doesn’t last long). Eventually the mob realises that Myers may well be headed to Haddonfield Memorial to finish what he started. Unfortunately, it’s also where the panic-stricken other inmate heads, seeking help. One thing leads to another, and the mob who haven’t actually SEEN Myers chase the innocent guy, driving him to jump to his death out of a window several storeys up. What’s truly terrifying here is not only the running down of a completely innocent man, but that leading the mob are doctors and nurses - people we depend on for compassion and care, and the fact that in their haste to execute their instant justice, the mob even trample some of their own members to death. This is despite Laurie and Karen trying to tell them that the guy they’re after isn’t Michael Myers – they are, after all the only ones on the scene who’ve seen him. In another cameo from the original, Charles Cyphers reprises his role as Bracket – now ex-sheriff, but working security at the hospital.

Laurie tells Karen to work with Tommy to track Myers down, but Allyson is already ahead of them, having tracked the killer down to his original home, where he’s already hacked and slashed the current owners. Myers is closing in on Allyson when Karen arrives and makes the save, tearing off his mask, she taunts him, luring him away from her daughter and to the mob, who’ve followed.

In a scene that made me feel sorry for him, despite being a mass murderer, the mob attack Myers, seemingly beating him to death. I guess I should feel guilty that I was rooting for him when he’s seen to be merely stunned and as the mob disperses, he kills the remaining ones – including Tommy and returns home, where Karen is investigating. He stabs Karen to death in his sister’s old room.

Meanwhile, Laurie is still in hospital and calls Karen for an update. Michael answers, but just breathes. Now, despite their paths never having crossed in this film, they each know for sure the other is still alive

Laurie picks up a knife and heads for the hospital exit with the last line;

“I’m coming for you, Michael.”

Having watched this in close proximity to its predecessor, rather than with a couple of years gap I find that I appreciated this film and its continuity and recreation of the events on 1978 more than I even did on my first viewing – and I thought it was one of the films of the year then. In fact, I placed it at #4 on my list.

I’ll go further, I’ll state here and now that it’s the best cinematic middle part of a trilogy since The Empire Strikes Back and Back to the Future 2. There, I’ve said it.