Review | Venice 2021: Halloween Kills movie review – Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer in latest sequel to John Carpenter’s classic slasher film
- Gore hounds will be happy with this latest sequel as director David Gordon Green and his co-writers have peppered the script with a procession of violent deaths
- It also harks back to the original film by casting Anthony Michael Hall as the grown-up Tommy Doyle, the boy who was stalked by Michael Myers in the 1978 movie
3/5 stars
The white-masked boogeyman Michael Myers was last seen trapped in the burning home of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the one-time babysitter he terrorised four decades ago.
When Green’s new film opens, Laurie is being rushed to hospital with a knife wound (“it’s a paper cut,” she nonchalantly says), under the belief she finally has banished this demon to hell. But the mythic Myers escapes the flames, savages the firefighting crew and heads out into the gloom of Haddonfield, Illinois, to continue his merciless rampage.
The townspeople, including Laurie’s daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), set out to end this collective nightmare.
One of the pleasures of Green’s 2018 film Halloween, which smartly ignored the numerous post-Carpenter sequels, was seeing Curtis return to her most famous role, all guns blazing, but here she’s largely sidelined, dispensing pearls of wisdom like “the more he kills, the more he transcends into something else” from her sick bed. That’s a mistake, although Greer, who rarely gets a chance to kick ass, takes up the Curtis mantle with aplomb.