Lorcan Coen ’25
Halloween Kills is a 2021 dumpster fire following a man in a white mask killing characters so forgettable I guarantee you forgot their names halfway through the movie. Scoring a 38% (69% audience rating) on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 5.9 (42 metascore) on IMDB that makes it worse than both Halloween 2018 and Halloween 1978. For this review I will be referring back to these movies so when I say “2018”, I mean Halloween (2018), when I say 2021 I am referring to Halloween Kills, and when I say “1978” I am referring to Halloween (1978).
Before we get to what is bad about the movie, of which many things are, let’s talk about the good. Having the soundtrack composed by John Carpenter is always a “yes” from me. He’s a brilliant composer and director, which leads into one of the bads which is the fact he isn’t directing this movie. The greatest thing in this movie is the gore and violence. This movie does a great job at selling you the point “Michael is an unstoppable force”.
This movie went away from horror focusing mainly on gore and “shock-value”. 2018 did a great job when it comes to suspenseful and tenseful scenes. Sadly 2021 did away with this in favor of the most boring way to make suspenseful scenes. They make you know what’s coming, and make the final “reveal” bland and generic. For this I’m going to compare a scene from 2021 to a scene from 2018. In 2021 there is a scene where Michael is in an old couple’s house, they have him make a noise in the bathroom. The bathroom lights are off and the door is closed, the old guy walks to the bathroom, turns on the light, sees Myers and slams the door and runs away. Instead of doing something cool with the reveal, like having Myers pull the dude into the bathroom, they instead go for the boring version. Contrast this to a scene from 2018. Michael is in a yard with one of the characters. The yard has motion activated lights, and the lights turn on when Michael moves, and turn off as he gets ever more still. The scene continues like this with Michale getting closer and closer to the character before he’s right in front of them. That is how you do a suspenseful scene.
Finally, the worst part about this movie is the acting. The acting is terrible. Some actors are over-acting, making the emotions feel too forced, while others are acting to the bare minimum. The pacing is also awful, with some plot-lines being too long or too short, and some scenes being completely unnecessary altogether. All in all this movie was mediocre, it succeeded in the gore department, but failed to give us what it promised in the trailers. My final verdict is a 4/10–too mediocre. The movie’s title perfectly summarized the series, “Halloween Kills- the franchise.”
The Salesian Spectator 