Halloween Kills

Compared to his successful, well-crafted 2018 reboot, director David Gordon Green's sequel is its opposite: an unshaped, overwrought cacophony of shouting and dozens of tiresomely brutal killings. Green seems to have been inspired by the events of the original Halloween II (1981), which took place late on the same Halloween night as the original Halloween and was set largely in a hospital, where Laurie was being treated and where Michael Myers was heading. While that movie tried to re-create the feel of the original (and partly succeeded, thanks to John Carpenter's help as co-writer, co-producer, co-composer, and possible uncredited co-director), Green goes for an even more chaotic look and feel for Halloween Kills. Rather than an eerily empty, after-hours hospital, Green's hospital is filled with caterwauling, writhing, stacked-up people who must climb over one another to reach the exits.

The angry mob rises unreasonably quickly, so much so that it inspires aggravation rather than sad, weary understanding, and the rage-chanting ("Evil dies tonight!") becomes meaningless in the absence of any real character. (Two of the original actors, survivors of the 1978 movie, reprise their characters here, 43 years later, but the movie does little with them than point them out.) But it's the killings that bring this one down. Rather than a few well-placed, suspense-building deaths, this one lays them on one after another, in the dozens, almost constantly for 105 minutes, with little variation -- and with little to care about. This is less a movie called Halloween Kills and more a movie that has likely killed Halloween.