Nico Neufeld

Wow… just wow. I thought Halloween Kills was overwrought with it’s heavy-handed exploration of mob mentality and the echoing effects of violence in a small town. But alas, evil did not die tonight nor the next night nor the one after and four years later we rejoin the Halloween franchise to find something even more confounding. Most notably, it is a Halloween movie with so little Mike that his entrance harkens to MSU cameos of yore. Instead we focus on Some Guy ( Owen? Ike? I truly don’t remember his name??) who accidentally yoinks a kid over a balcony, ends up the town psycho, gets jumped on the reg and is for some reason recruited by Laurie to get with her deeply haunted granddaughter, Alison. Shockingly, little mister school shooter energy and lil miss cycles of matrilineal trauma aren’t exactly a match made in heaven. It all goes off the rails from there. There is some attempt to explore how the town makes a monster of Some Guy, treating him like their “new boogeyman” and in the process making him exactly that. But that line of inquiry too is confused, and messy- a blind stab at “””””elevated horror””””that misses the mark and leaves corn syrup all over the carpet. There are some good kills, but the violence feels disembodied in this strange borderlands between Heathers and Hereditary ft. Laurie’s Carrie Bradshaw esq voice over segments ( if you haven’t seen it yet, I can’t possibly explain to you how accurate that description is). My favorite part was watching Some Guy seemingly cum in his pants as Micheal shows him how to kill at his bequest. Again, you had to be there. Two stars just because I feel like this movie would have been great to watch if I was too high to remember how much this franchise means to me.