Halloween Kills (2021) How quickly this rebooting of the legendary horror film franchise came full circle......
The clever conceit of the 2018 reboot was pretending all those crappy 'Halloween' sequels from the past never happened.....(even the gore-drenched Rob Zombie ones....)
And now, sorry to report, we'd like nothing better than to do the same thing to this direct sequel to the 2018 film......let's pretend it never happened.
Horror fans might well have forgotten what made John Carpenter's original 1978 the scare classic that movie buffs now revere like the Holy Grail.
Simple. It was effin' scary. It's one and only agenda was to make an audience cringe, shake, cower, jump and scream........which it did.
"Halloween Kills" also has an agenda. Scaring you is not on its list. One thing and one thing only weight heavily on this movie's mind.
The body count. A huge one. Maybe the highest in slasher movie history......(we don't count the zombie movies, since zombies get routinely cut down like wheat ....)
Immortal boogeyman Michael Myers slaughters 31 people before "Halloween Kills" finally grinds to a halt. How do we know that for sure? The DVD featured a special feature which conveniently recaps them all, with a counter on top of the screen totaling them up.
Maybe they should've done that in the movie itself, since the filmmakers here only want to impress us with the formidable pile of corpses they accumulate.
Jamie Lee Curtis, who began this franchise at age 20 playing a teenager. returns as Laurie Strode, now a haggard, hysterical grandma painfully recovering from stab wounds suffered during her last 2018 mano e mano whoop-de-doo with the monstrous Michael.
Meanwhile one of the kids she babysat, now grown into a thuggish loon (Anthony Michael Hall), has whipped up the townsfolk into a bloodlusting frenzy, chanting "Evil dies tonight!" with the same commitment as Trumpanzees screech "Lock her up!".....
And Michael Myers, as impervious to bullets, bombs and pitchforks as a Marvel superhero, methodically goes about his business.......depopulating the town at a record level with whatever implement sit conveniently in front of him,,,,even the broken end of a lengthy florescent light bulb.
Not a single scare to be had in the entire running time, but the film does encourage the audience to both gasp and guffaw at the ingenuity of the kills........(including one poor dude who gets a knife up his nostril and out his eyeball.....woo-hoo...)
By the time the credits roll, you come to realize what a dubious achievement the filmmakers accomplished here......
........by making a 'Halloween' sequel that's the same kind of lifeless, soulless, clumsily produced cash grab as all the previous 'Halloween' sequels it deliberately ignored.
A third and final entry in this version of the franchise is threatened.
Maybe they should pretend "Halloween Kills" never happened.....1 star (*). Fit only for basement-dwelling geeks who cackle to each other about the guy who got the knife up his nose coming out his eye......
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