Review: Halloween Kills

I've been catching-up with the Halloween franchise lately, as I had only seen the original up until a few years ago.

On the whole, the sequels have been ok. But there have been some with a few interesting ideas such as in The Season Of The Witch and The Return Of Michael Myers. The only ones I have yet to check out is Resurrection and the two Rob Zombie directed Halloween's.

With 1998's H20 still fresh in the memory after seeing it not that long ago, it was time for the follow-up to 2018's instalment.

I was impressed at the start with the choices made and intrigued to see where they would go with this. It was also interesting to see how gory it was getting. This is probably the goriest Halloween film I've seen. Was it needed? I think so. Was it effective? Yes, it fitted with what it seemed the director was going for. It felt a bit out of character at times. But it certainly kept my interest.

One aspect that I'm usually a sucker for in films, is paying homage or referencing itself. This did so much that I felt it hampered the film from being its own thing. It relied far too much on the history of the franchise, and it managed downgrade multiple parts of the film.

By the end, it was pretty chaotic, the acting was starting to annoy me and some of the decision made at the end felt like a bit of a cop out. But as current series of films is being billed as a trilogy, and this is the second instalment, I am hoping this has a worthwhile pay-off.

There were moments of decent performances, but on the whole, it was not that good. Judy Greer, Andy Matichak  and Dylan Arnold gave solid showings. The rest were either over-acting or showing inexperience.

It's saving grace was the action and the production. The gruesome parts looked great and it an uncomfortable watch in a good way.

But by the end of it, there wasn't enough good to outweigh the bad. There were some interesting ideas with great use of flashbacks, covering topics such as social commentary and it had effective gory action. It just didn't stick the landing to make it the complete package with a quite frankly poor ending. Plus, there was no element of fun. It took itself far too seriously. 

I appreciated the attempt. But I cannot give it a pass. It's predecessor may have given me hope that this franchise could have a solid streak by being its own thing by using inspiration from the previous films. But it remains like every other horror franchise, one strong original, a few surprisingly interesting ideas in between, but on the whole ok or disappointing sequels.

Rating: 6/10