Halloween Kills: first reviews arrive after festival screening

Director David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills, the latest sequel in the Halloween franchise, won’t be reaching theatres until October 15th, but reviews and reactions are already arriving online after the film was screened at the Venice Film Festival – where star Jamie Lee Curtis was given a lifetime achievement award. While Halloween 2018, Green’s previous contribution to the franchise, is “certified fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes with 79% positive reactions, the first reviews of Halloween Kills are more mixed; as of right now, its score is 53%.

Variety’s Owen Gleiberman says the film “will feed your nostalgia… for mediocre slasher sequels”:

It’s a mess – a slasher movie that’s almost never scary, slathered with “topical” pablum and with too many parallel plot strands that don’t go anywhere.

The Wrap’s Asher Luberto called it an “effective sequel”,

For all the deep and troubling psychoanalysis of this film, it’s also a textbook “Halloween” movie.

The Hollywood Report’s David Rooney said,

This latest installment is like a latex ghoul mask so stretched and shapeless it no longer fits.

IndieWire’s Ben Croll gave it a C+ and felt that it had “little more to offer than a jacked up body count on a bed of fan service”:

An almost elemental slasher outing unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

Leila Latif of Total Film gave it a 4/5 review and, keeping in mind that we already know a sequel called Halloween Ends is going to follow, said the film “does exactly what a middle chapter should do”:

Green delivers a smart, sturdy second chapter. Low consequence, perhaps, but still highly entertaining.

Noting that the movie will make “gore hounds” happy, James Mottram’s 3/5 review in the South China Morning Post says

it’s a story about how violence begets violence, though whether anyone will buy this among the grisly bloodletting is another matter.

Nicholas Bell of IONCINEMA felt that Green overextended himself on the sequel and gave it the middle of the road score of 2.5/5.

If the last installment gave us some thoughtful subtexts on grief and trauma, all characters in this sequel, across the board, feel extremely futile.

Savina Petkova of AwardsWatch gave Halloween Kills a B and said

…enlarging the more private, generational pain into a sociological phenomenon for the whole town, seems a viable device to keep the story growing.

The film got a C from The Playlist’s Jessica Kiang because

The writers stray dangerously close to getting rid of the one relationship of any substance at all: the symbiotic link between Laurie Strode and her eternal faceless nemesis. Of all the things “Halloween Kills” had to kill, why that?

Joining Total Film’s Leila Latif in giving Halloween Kills its highest score of 4/5, Discussing Film’s Ben Rolph said the film

takes the slash in “slasher” up to a thousand and it’s all the better for it.

The Daily Telegraph’s Robbin Collin gave a 2/5 score, saying Halloween Kills “feels like Carpenter’s original, but only the body count has advanced”:

Halloween Kills certainly feels like more Halloween. But the game board is left exactly as it was found it in readiness for round 13; the only thing that advances is the body count.

Screen International’s Wendy Ide felt that the sequel was “competent and generally pretty entertaining”:

But what’s interesting is the idea that Myers’ evil is too big to be contained by just one man, even one as relentless and formidable as Michael. It seeps out into the broader community, manifesting itself in the fear and fury which shapes the town’s response. … There’s something genuinely disconcerting about it – the dehumanising effect of blood lust and the desire for retribution. It’s perhaps here that the real horror is to be found.

Guardian’s Jonathan Romney felt it was “efficient” enough to earn a 3/5 score:

Forty years after John Carpenter made the defining slasher movie, director David Gordon Green has made a creditable stab, as it were, at reanimating the title.

The lowest score so far has come from Time Out’s Philip De Semlyen, who felt Halloween Kills was only worth a 1/5.

It all feels so rote and old-school, especially during such an exciting era for the genre.

Adam Solomons of HeyUGuys gave it a 3/5, calling it

fittingly scary and absurd

Halloween 2018 (watch it HERE) ignored all of the other Halloween movies except for John Carpenter’s original (which you can watch HERE). Scripted by David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, and Scott Teems, Halloween Kills is set on the same night as its predecessor.

Minutes after Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) left masked monster Michael Myers caged and burning in Laurie’s basement, Laurie is rushed to the hospital with life-threatening injuries, believing she finally killed her lifelong tormentor. But when Michael manages to free himself from Laurie’s trap, his ritual bloodbath resumes. As Laurie fights her pain and prepares to defend herself against him, she inspires all of Haddonfield to rise up against their unstoppable monster. The Strode women join a group of other survivors of Michael’s first rampage who decide to take matters into their own hands, forming a vigilante mob that sets out to hunt Michael down, once and for all. Evil dies tonight.

The Rotten Tomatoes score will change as more reviews come in, and in just over a month we’ll all have our chance to have our own reactions to Halloween Kills. It’s just interesting to see what the first critics to see it had to say. If you want to read the full reviews, the links can be found on Rotten Tomatoes.