Halloween is one of the most confused franchises to me. The original film is a masterpiece of a slasher movie that works perfectly fine as a standalone movie, but after being such a profitable movie, of course it had to have sequels. The second movie was a decent follow up and conclusion to the Michael Myers character, so the studio’s original plan was to for an anthology route by making every new entry follow a new story that still takes place on Halloween. Halloween 3, while having a concept too over the top, it was still an underrated gem with some interesting ideas and a great score. Of course the lack of Michael Myers made audience immediately reject it, so the dropped the anthology concept and instead continued the Michael Myers story. There are too many sequels to go over, but the idea overall is that the series would go downhill very far with several reboots and alternate timelines.
This is what brings us to this new series of films that ignore every Halloween movie, except for the original. The last movie from 2018 was a solid 40 year later follow up, but was also the beginning of a new trilogy. This new movie, Halloween Kills is kind of a rough link between the beginning and end of this trilogy. Taking place directly after the last movie, on the same night, Michael Myers is shown to have survived the ending of the previous one and continues to kill as many people as possible. There are plenty of gruesome kills throughout and it is overall a good looking movie, but for the story itself, there are many plot points that feel like they go nowhere.
The movie constantly cuts back to new footage of Michael’s attacks on Halloween night in 1978, but even though so much time is spent with these scenes, there ends up not being a worthy pay off to it. Scenes like this are what make the movie not feel like it stands out on its own and just feels like filler in preparation for the last movie. It’s more disappointing seeing that Jamie Lee Curtis have hardly any screen time in this, because she was easily the best character in the previous movie. Another thing is in the 1978 and 2018 movies, it is implied that Michael is invincible after surviving gunshots, but is always left uncertain. In this one though, they went full on supernatural by showing him be unharmed to nearly everything and even explaining that he becomes stronger the more he kills. Even after all these aspects I don’t like, I’m still interested in how they’re going to cap off everything in the final film.