By Rylee McDonal ~ Copy Editor
The movie, Halloween Kills, premiered nationally on Oct. 15, 2021. The movie picks up immediately after the Halloween movie in 2018. This new addition to the franchise makes the very idea of the masked killer quite ridiculous.
It plays off the idea of mob mentality, with the entire town banding together to take down Michael Myers, who miraculously survives a house burning down around him, while also killing 12 firemen in the process. I personally can’t believe it took them this long to realize they should stay in groups when facing a killer like this.
As a slasher film lived up to what everything is meant to be, it is meant to be full of kills that make you want to throw up.
Also, the movie brings in characters that we have not seen for a couple of movies. Some of these characters were side characters that had no real role in the events of the previous movie. We see a recast of Tommy Doyle, played by Anthony Michael, and Lindsey Wallace, played by Kyle Richards. Both characters were children when Michael first attacked Laurie Strodes, played once again by Jamie Lee Curtis.
The movie also focuses on Easter eggs that tie into earlier movies, including a brutal and somewhat disrespectful killing by Michael Myers. He kills a nurse named Marion Chambers, who he also attacked in the first movie, and two side characters, all being murdered and strung up on a playground. Each one of them wore a different mask from the third Halloween movie, Halloween III: Season of the Witch. While this was a fun nod to the movie, it was odd that Myers had these masks on hand already.
However, it seemed as though there were very few characters who had common sense. One of which was Karen Nelson, played by Judy Greer. She attempts to keep her daughter from leaving the hospital to hunt Myers, attempts to stop a mob from killing a mentaly ill man, and eventually plans an actual trap for Myers. There was no other person in this movie that had any rational thoughts aside from attempting to organize together, which didn’t work until Greer’s character got involved.
The most ridiculous part of the movie, however, was the fact that Myers was shot, stabbed, beaten, and overall attacked with a number of different objects, and was still able to get back up again. By the end of the movie, the town has banded together to defeat Myers. At some point, the mask Myers wears is taken by Greer’s character to about a street away, where the mob is waiting for him. Myers places the mask back on for some reason, and the mob then begins to attack him.
Before that, Myers had been stabbed several times by the daughter of Karen Nelson, Allyson Nelson, played by Andi Matichak. Viewers in the theatre, including myself, were gasping at the amount of times she stabbed Myers before he stopped her. When the mob attacks him, he is again stabbed, shot, and beaten with a number of blunt objects.
By the time the police get to the Myers house to help Allyson and Karen, the mob is still attacking Myers. However, he eventually gets back up again and starts to kill the mob. There is no real explanation to how Myers did this. At the time, Laurie Strode is talking and saying that he feeds off fear. The director, David Gordon Green, has even stated, “I believe he is flesh and blood.” The director continues on and states that the idea of Myers is bigger than his human body.
After Myers kills the mob, he somehow makes it past the police cars and ambulances and to his old house to kill Karen Nelson in the same room he killed his sister. How he does this is beyond comprehension. He walks extremely slow and is a grown man wearing a pale faced mask covered in blood. As well, he was about a street or so away from his old house, with the front of the house being blocked off by law enforcement. Hence, the only way into the house was through the back door. This means he walked all the way around and past his house to get past the officers. Also, he killed a mob of people and walked that far in the same amount of time it took Karen to walk upstairs to be killed by him.
The movie itself wasn’t awful, but it was definitely confusing to watch. The way Myers works doesn’t make sense at all, and there just seemed to be a few plot holes that affected how much I liked the movie. Hopefully, Halloween Ends, set for release in 2022, will explain what Myers is and how he can do what he does.
