Halloween Kills

Picking up where its immediate predecessor left off, Halloween Kills follows the residents of Haddonfield as they team up to stop Michael Myers’ reign of terror once and for all. It’s an admittedly innovative setup that’s employed to periodically successful yet mostly underwhelming effect by David Gordon Green, as the filmmaker, working from a script written with Scott Teems and Danny McBride, delivers a hit-and-miss endeavor that fares best in its striking, engrossing opening stretch – with the movie providing a fairly irresistible look at what happened right after the events of 1978’s John Carpenter’s Halloween (which includes a return appearance by Dr. Loomis!) From there, however, Halloween Kills progresses into a seriously erratic midsection that contains far too many underdeveloped, extraneous supporting characters and a continuing emphasis on palpably misguided plot developments – with the latter certainly reflected most keenly in the silly, unconvincing storyline devoted to the aforementioned residents’ battle against Michael Myers. The far-from-enthralling vibe is compounded by Jamie Lee Curtis’ limited screentime as series hero Laurie Strode and Green’s reluctance to employ the iconic Halloween theme, and there’s little doubt, as a result, that the picture, more often than not, barely even feels like an installment in this seemingly endless horror franchise – which is a shame, ultimately, given that the movie does possess its fair share of appealing attributes (eg many, many appreciatively gruesome kills). By the time the decent (by comparison) third act rolls around, Halloween Kills has cemented its place as a just decent-enough piece of work that probably would’ve benefited from a much shorter running time (ie the movie would undoubtedly be improved if it lost around 20 minutes of that nigh disastrous midsection).

**1/2 out of ****