Halloween Kills review – slasher sequel is fatally hamstrung by its middle act

John Carpenter’s theme for the original Halloween is an all-time triumph in the art of horror movie-making, which makes its deployment in Halloween Kills feel all the more hollow and cynical. This middle child of director David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride’s kinda-reboot trilogy arrives stuck in a painfully obvious holding pattern, setting up next year’s finale without having anywhere near enough of its own story – or the scares – to fill out its runtime.

Picking up pretty much immediately where the (surprisingly good) 2018 Halloween left off, Kills finds Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) hospitalised after the showdown with Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) that she assumes has left him for dead. Of course, you can’t keep a franchise boogeyman down, and Myers emerges from the flaming wreckage of Laurie’s formidable compound pretty much unscathed, slaughtering a team of fireman in the film’s goriest set piece. News of his survival breaks out while Laurie is comatose, leading to mass hysteria in the town of Haddonfield, with Tommy Doyle – the kid Laurie was babysitting in the 1978 original, played now by Anthony Michael Hall – leading a mob to catch and kill Myers.

It’s in this plot strand that Kills finds its downfall. For huge chunks of the film we’re with neither Laurie nor Myers, and instead following Tommy’s enraged crowds as they chase down an escaped mental patient they incorrectly believe to be Myers. It’s dull, undisguised filler, and Green and McBride’s attempts to make a poignant point about fear turning “normal” people into the real monsters is laughably executed.

Even when Myers does show up, it’s not enough of an improvement, despite a sky-high body count and a couple of genuinely tense close-quarters showdowns. This version of Myers is not much of an imaginative killer, generally just slamming and slashing. It’s why he, as a monster, works best at the smallest possible scale, and seeing him cut 12 throats instead of three doesn’t really up the thrill count. His massacre of the firefighters is genuinely powerful, but most of his later victims die stupidly, suffering from the horror-movie affliction of being genetically incapable of aiming a gun, unlocking their own doors, or running more than a few metres without falling over.

Even as it embraces these old cliches, Halloween Kills seems to expect to be taken quite seriously, as two separate “sweeping music, emotional revelations” scenes attest, all the way to an ending that is mostly just annoying. Middle chapters are hard, but the good ones find ways to disguise the groundwork, a basic courtesy that Kills simply doesn’t bother with. As a 20-minute prologue to 2022’s Halloween Ends, this story would work well – as a 105-minute feature, it’s rarely more than a bloody slog.

Halloween Kills is now showing in UK cinemas.