Shea Wellington

It takes a bold filmmaker to just make the Babadook, but worse. Struggling mother with a child who has ASD. A children's book that lets a monster into their lives. It even steals the "why can't you just be normal?" line and does it worse. The movie isn't bad, it just has no original ideas and executes the ideas it does have far worse than the things it took those ideas from. The "too much screen time" message is half-baked and can be actively harmful to children with ASD (who, the film points out, sometimes need screens to communicate). The film does a poor job of conveying that the monster uses electricity to travel and so the characters instantly figure it out and then have to explain it to the audience. The design of the monster is generic and boring. It just doesn't do anything exceptionally well. It's a boring movie, and that's almost worse than an actively bad one.

I've been a long time fan of the Halloween movies, and I truly wanted this one to be good. However, at the end of the day, this film is a hot mess. Spoilers ahead. There are too many characters introduced, or reintroduced, and none of them get a chance to shine before being unceremoniously killed off. Half the movie is just characters posturing about how they are for sure going to kill Michael this time, or waxing poetic about how evil he is. It's like every character is Dr. Loomis from the original. Count how many times you hear a variation of "he's haunted our lives for forty years" or "we have to kill him tonight". There's like 20 lines of dialogue and all the characters just take turns repeating them at random. A lot of the lines are just lines from the original, repeated often, regardless of how little sense they make in context, like some kind of Halloween madlib. Characters frequently make just boldly idiotic decisions, even the ones who know how dangerous Michael is. There's one insane scene where a mob of people at the hospital chase down another escaped mental patient thinking he's Michael, even though he is so clearly not Michael it hurts. He shows up in the lobby asking for help, and everyone just assumes he must be Michael even though he walks by like 5 people and doesn't hurt anyone. They drive him to jump out a window of the hospital in a scene that the filmmakers want you to think is poignant but is very much not. Anthony Michael Hall's character, Tommy Doyle from the original, even asks if they can be sure he's not Michael because Michael always wears a mask. I don't know Tommy, maybe the fact that this guy was at least a foot shorter and a completely different build might have tipped you off. You've seen Michael before, you bumbling idiot. I get that there's a message in the scene about mob mentality, but they could have at least made it believable. Finally, the whole film just feels like nobody who was making it knew what they wanted it to be. There's no real plot, it's just people doing random things with no connection. The kills are fun, and there's lots of fan service, but after Halloween 2018 this just feels like a let down.