Led by Hall's meathead Tommy, who rounds up his local posse like he's directing plays for the junior soccer team, they're a frightening force in their own right, reminiscent of the old pitchfork-wielding monster movie lynch mobs.Īnthony Michael Hall told The Hollywood Reporter: "There was this great sense I got from David that this was very much a hero’s part and very heroic in nature." ( Supplied: Universal Studios) Instead, the film shifts focus to a mob of domestic vigilantes who – apparently having never seen a horror movie – are determined to hunt down and finish off Myers once and for all. Pretty soon old rubber-face is back on his usual beat, brutally and indiscriminately hacking down anyone in his path – past survivors, random bit players, a gay couple right out of central casting – on a route that appears to be taking him back to his childhood home, the site where he'd inexplicably murdered his teenage sister back in 1963 (oh what a night).īecause this is the middle chapter in a mooted trilogy – Halloween Ends, a statement that we'll believe when we see it, is slated for release next year – there's more than a hint of narrative stalling here, especially when it comes to the series' key protagonist, Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie, who spends a large chunk of the film away from the action, nursing her injuries and grumbling portentously. Halloween Kills is the twelfth film in the Halloween franchise.
While Laurie, her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) have been bundled off to hospital to recover from their duel with Myers, the killer is liberated from the burning basement by some friendly firemen an unwitting mistake that will cost them – at the end of a bluntly-wielded axe – their lives. Their sombre night of remembrance is about to get a whole lot worse. In a local bar, the burly, middle-aged Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) – he's the little kid that Laurie babysat on that fateful night in 1978 – has gathered to mark the 40th anniversary of the Myers murders with fellow survivors: childhood pals Lonnie (Robert Longstreet) and Lindsey (Real Housewife of Beverly Hills Kyle Richards, reprising her role from the original Halloween), and Marion (Nancy Stephens), former assistant to Donald Pleasence's late Dr Loomis. Lee Curtis told Vogue: "Setting the sequel around the aftermath was a brilliant move because the collateral damage of Michael’s reign of terror has finally caught up to the rest of Haddonfield." ( Supplied: Universal Studios)
The new movie picks up – much as the now de-canonised Halloween II (1981) did – right where its predecessor left off, with the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois in the midst of All Hallows Eve festivities, most of the residents unaware that the hulking killer escaped from a prison relocation transport only days earlier. Like cargo pants and global temperatures, however, you can't keep a good movie slasher down, and so masked menace Myers is back for Gordon's sequel, Halloween Kills – despite being trapped by Laurie in a burning, booby-trapped basement and left for dead at the conclusion of the previous film. In trying to bring the weight of trauma to bear on Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode, who as a teenage babysitter survived the murderous rampage of deranged killer Michael Myers, it mostly just demonstrated how easy – and how much more fun – Carpenter made things look by comparison. Genre-hopping director David Gordon Green's hit 2018 instalment, which retconned the series' storied timeline to serve as a direct sequel to the original, was grim and violent but not particularly scary or convincing. Few films have shaped modern horror cinema like John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), a masterwork of spooky economy that cast a long shadow over its legion of imitators and sequels.