Halloween Kills

I was looking forward to the new Halloween even after the mixed reviews from Venice. I thought the attendees of that festival just couldn't appreciate a simple, blunt, but fun, brutal and atmospheric slasher ride. The whole campaign, after all, had been hyping that Halloween Kills would be mean and evil; the biggest Halloween ever with a massive body count. And that’s what dominates even in the responses here: that it's decent carnage and that the main problem is the illogical behaviour of the characters. That, for me, it’s just the bullshit that the campaign has drilled into our heads. Halloween Kills is awfully boring and very poorly constructed conceptually. It tries to psychologise the collective trauma of Haddonfield and spends an incredible amount of time with annoying characters that no one has ever cared about or can care about. And Laurie is stuck in the hospital the whole time, doing nothing. The kills are fine, but they don't take up much screen time, and I certainly don't think Myers is on screen more than in other instalments of the series. If only! At the expense of Tommy, Lonnie and those other annoyances. With each successive "Evil dies tonight!" I wanted to throw the monitor out the window more and more. (16/10/2021)

Is it so much to ask for a slasher film to have at least a basic plot, character interaction and a touch of logic? Nothing big, just basic elements that won't make you tap your forehead every five minutes wondering what the hell those smart guys have come up with. The same old song, Myers, who dodges bullets, who doesn't get burned by fire and who miraculously manages to survive his death by stabbing, burning and shooting for the umpteenth time, wanders from house to house, killing whoever comes his way. Isn't that exactly what we saw in the last episode? Yes, it is! This one is exactly the same without the slightest innovation or addition! The stupidity of the characters knows no bounds and I can safely say that I have never seen a worse film in terms of character behaviour, and the dialogue is absolutely stupid and appalling. Die-hard fans of the franchise and slasher aficionados will gush about how awesome Halloween Kills is, but aside from the occasional juicy gore (which, by the way, could have been a class better and more original) and John Carpenter's soundtrack, there's nothing worth mentioning. You can polish a turd, but it’s still a turd, there's no better way to sum up this film, and I'm sick of what filmmakers are able to unleash on the world and what some viewers are able to eat up. Huge disappointment, awful and I'd rather throw my money out the window than go to the cinema to see this. I don't think I'll be watching the next one. (15/10/2021)

Halloween Kills is a problematic movie, which suffers from the second-movie-in-a-trilogy syndrome (it lacks a beginning and an end). It also suffers from the chosen scenario, where the plot is spread too thin because of having a lot of newly introduced supporting characters. It also looks slightly "padded out" with too much filler. Plus, with the enormous fan service and countless (and unnecessary) flashbacks, the movie’s makers overdid it. In other words, it is a bit chaotic. I do not mean to be horrible about it at all, I had a good time watching this movie, however, I have some concerns as to whether the creative team around David Gordon Green actually knows in which direction the whole trilogy is heading (other than simply making more money go to their own wallets). (19/10/2021)

The worst Terminator sequel ever. Slashers have always flirted with a certain supernaturalness to their evil, and Carpenter's first Halloween was a pioneer in this regard. But he used the apparent inscrutability of Myers as a mysterious framework to which he cleverly subordinated the style, staging and behaviour of the desperate characters. In Halloween Kills, everything is turned upside down, the mysterious killer becomes nothing but a ripoff of Terminator, the focus is on brutality instead of atmosphere, and the story of vulnerable teenage girls is turned into a community-wide uprising, ending with a twist straight out of old sci-fi. If you don't look at it as just another Halloween, you're at least left with a fairly brisk and bloody slasher that occasionally tries to stylistically reference the classics, but even then it's no picnic. Laurie is just a number and the attempt to spread attention among a dozen characters fails miserably. 45 (19/10/2021)

A film as pointless as Mynář's press conference. It doesn't bring anything new to the genre, a soup reheated so many times that it’s inedible, and when it does come up with something unusual, which I consider to be the "popular uprising" of Haddonfield residents, it's as silly as Ovčáček's tweets. And Michael Myers here strikes me as an immortal cyber version of the T-1000 from Terminator and not a flesh-and-blood creature. (19/10/2021)