“Halloween Kills” is the newest release in the long running “Halloween” movie franchise. It’s the second to last film in the series, and it’s one of the worst. This is going to be a fairly difficult film to review since there’s two ways to look at it. You can look at the film as a typical slasher flick, or you can view it as another entry into the Halloween franchise. If you view it as a typical slasher, it’s pretty good. But not as another entry into the Halloween franchise. This film picks up almost immediately after the previous one. The main plot point is that Micheal Myers somehow lived after the events of the previous film and Laurie Strode and Co. are going to have one final smack down at the climax of the film. At least that’s what the marketing made it seem like. In actuality barely any of that even happened. It’s mostly just Micheal Myers going on a massive killing spree.

        First, let’s dive into the good parts of the film. This film is extremely beautiful. It has some really good cinematography. Especially with some of the scenes in the hospital and various shots of the characters running around Haddonfield (the main setting of the film). Personally I’m a huge fan of gore and I can gladly say that this movie is packed full of some fantastic gore. Almost every kill in this film has great visuals to go along with it. Even some of the off-screen kills have great sound effects to go with them. The AV team put in a lot of hard work for this film and it definitely pays off. I truly hope they get the respect they deserve. Even the new beaten and tattered mask on Micheal Meyers looks great. It also has some great pacing. The film comes to a runtime of one hour and forty-five minutes, and I wasn’t bored for a second of it. Furthermore, John Carpenter returns for the soundtrack of this movie, and boy is it awesome. The Halloween theme has now become a classic score and I was extremely pleased that they didn’t try to alter it in any way. Another nice thing about this film was that they brought back a lot of old characters from the previous movie. No need to worry about them because boy do the writers make them extremely dumb.

        Speaking of things that are dumb let’s get into the negatives that I had for the film. Almost every returning character is extremely stupid. Tommy Doyle is one of the returning characters for this film and his character absolutely blows. In case you need a quick refresher, Tommy was the little boy that Laurie was babysitting during the original film. He has survived an encounter with Micheal before but for some reason he thinks he can get a group of people together to go hunt Myers down. I’ll leave Tommy’s fate unknown for those who are planning to see the film. For the majority of the other returning characters who have survived encounters with the masked man, they act terribly in this film. Thankfully there was some good acting coming from Laurie Strode, Tommy Doyle, and Officer Hawkins. This films greatest downside was that Laurie practically does nothing throughout the film, which is extremely disappointing because Jaime Lee Curtis is an incredible actress. The writers must’ve hated these characters because every single thing they do in the film is stupid. Obviously in the majority of horror movies the characters are dumb and make stupid mistakes for the sake of the plot. Turn all of that up to eleven and then you’ll still not be as dumb as these characters. There is one kill in particular that I wont get into for the sake of spoilers, but it was so dumb that the entire theater burst out in laughter over the scene. There are also quite a few plot holes that can be easily overlooked.

        At the end of the day I’d probably give the film a 5/10. There’s fluctuations to be had depending on how you view the film. If I look at it purely as a slasher flick, I’d give it a 7/10. As a Halloween film, it’d only be a 3/10. For a nice average I went with a 5/10. “Halloween Kills” had an opening weekend of $50.4 Million USD. And you can watch it at almost every Cinema or on Peacock. Even though I rated the film relatively low, I do recommend it to any horror fan that loves fun and creative kills.