there’s not sticking the landing and then there’s teetering & flailing for a frankly uncomfortably long time before flopping straight on your face, and the halloween legacyquels opt quite decisively for the latter.
i spent the first half or so of halloween ends thinking, “okay, i sort of see what they’re setting up, i’m not sure i like it but i guess we’ll see what they do with it” and i kept waiting. and kept waiting. and kept waiting. and it became increasingly clear that they weren’t going to “do” anything with any of this, it was just sort of stuff happening, man.
like, in basically every technical aspect of filmmaking this movie is beyond competent, so it’s easy to be lulled into thinking it’s a perfectly serviceable movie by its solid moment-to-moment entertainment factor, but it just doesn’t add up to anything.
despite never really “losing interest” per se, i turned on this movie hard about halfway through it when i realized it was just thoroughly wasting my time, and subjecting me to plenty of unpleasant bullshit in the process. all while acting like it was a Serious movie with Things To Say.
you know what would’ve actually made a good ending? the first movie in this reboot sequel trilogy. like i know the filmmakers swear up & down that this was always intended as a trilogy, but it just super doesn’t feel like it? halloween 2018 was a resoundingly good ending for this franchise, and then they made two more.
you might remember that i thought the second movie was actually super good when it was just trying to be a dumb slasher movie but thoroughly awful when it was trying to Say Stuff. this is like they just made an entire fucking movie out of the bad parts of the second movie.
the closest i came to thinking it was all worth it and we were getting a good movie was when corey woke up to find laurie sitting in a chair and she gave him one last chance to stop the path he was on, and warned him that she was going to defend herself and (especially) her granddaughter with whatever force she needed to. in isolation this was a signature moment for laurie, showing us exactly how much of a stone cold badass she’d become over the years.
i’m frustrated on allyson’s behalf that the femboy who cheated on her was apparently far & away the best person she’s ever dated, considering she followed him with a cop and fucking michael myers jr.
i’m doing absolutely zero research to back this up, but the impression i got from directly reading the film was that corey & michael’s relationship was meant to be some kind of clumsy allegory for the way disaffected working class white guys have been radicalized by fucking donald trump & fox news, and when i say it was a clumsy allegory i mean clumsy.
again i may be overthinking this, but it really clicked for me when they were parading myers’ body through the streets like some fucking deranged dictator does to his political enemies and then fed him to a woodchipper that this is fucking exactly what the democrats think they did by beating trump in an election. laurie starts talking about how “now haddonfield can heal,” and we see allyson moving out of town which she & laurie should’ve done IMMEDIATELY after the second movie, fucking HELL.
look i’m not even getting into the weeds here, guys. and those weeds are fucking thick with shit like unexamined racism. like you bring the black cop from the second movie back so he can rubber stamp them lynching michael, presumably because someone along the way realized that was kinda a little uncomfy. but you give him exactly zero lines???
every single other black character in this movie is super victim blamey or a conspiracy theorist, and for the crime of being kinda annoying i guess? that one black radio dj gets the most brutal murder in the entire movie and for added thematic flourish his fucking tongue gets cut out? and spins on the record making it skip? and just… are you kidding me with this shit? you have really no idea how bad of a look that is?
or how about the fact that allyson’s nurse coworker who gets promoted over her just has to be depicted having an affair with their doctor boss? and they have to go out of their way to make her seem like the bad guy as much as he is, and not have it be pretty fucking clear that he is clearly the asshole in this situation? and also she gets the more dramatic & brutal murder out of the two of them?
just. fuck, guys. this is a spiteful movie. i kind of just genuinely hate it.
and having the triumphant ending of the damn movie be a public defilement of a dead body, no matter what michael myers is guity of, is just wild. like, this is one of the few things that basically everyone, everywhere agrees is pretty fucked up, and we’re acting like it’s some kind of resoundingly triumphant moment?
this should have ended with the first movie. i was wrong at the beginning of this review. well, not wrong exactly, but i left some things out. what this series did was stick the landing perfectly, then go “oh shit i have two whole movies left to go,” hop back onto whatever gymnastics equipment it was using in this metaphor, do some awkward flips & shit, and then fall flat on its face like i said earlier.
what a complete waste of everyone’s time. c-rank
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