Halloween Kills Turns Michael Myers Into a Lobotomized Armored Tank
By Joe Bob Briggs
NEW YORK—Whatever else you can say about Halloween Kills, it’s ballsy as all get-out.
First of all, it’s got a cast of millions. If Haddonfield, Illinois, has a population of, say, 50,000, then every citizen is in this movie.
And since the writers are so dedicated to maintaining the reality of the 1978 movie, you sometimes have to consult a genealogy chart or a Wikipedia timeline to make sure you’re following along. We’ve got three generations of Laurie Strode’s family. We’ve got the sons and daughters of every character in the original, and sometimes grandchildren as well. We’ve got cops that were there at the beginning and cops that knew cops who were there at the beginning. We’ve got all the kids who were being tended by babysitters on Halloween night 1978, with a huge character arc in this film for Tommy Doyle. We’ve got an Officer Hawkins backstory that plays out in the one hour after the first movie but is not revealed until this movie. They even managed to hire a Donald Pleasence lookalike as Dr. Loomis and convince me it was him.
Most importantly, we’ve got a Michael Myers who is now so indestructible that he runs the risk of becoming the equivalent of a recurring weather event or an earthquake fault, as though Haddonfield rests on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius so occasionally people have to die—and there’s nothing you can do about it.
This idea is actually made explicit in the final “essence of evil” speech by Jamie Lee Curtis when she goes on about how you can never kill “the boogeyman” (used interchangeably with Michael Myers) because brute force doesn’t work on him. She doesn’t say what does work on him, but I have to imagine we’ll find out in Halloween Ends, the upcoming final installment in the David Gordon Green trilogy that began with Halloween 2018.
But the reason I say the movie is ballsy is that this is the first Halloween movie—how many have there been? an even dozen?—in which Michael doesn’t die. I mean, Michael never really dies or there wouldn’t be twelve movies, but usually he appears to die and is revivified in the opening scene of the next sequel. But David Gordon Green is a cruel man. He gives us a fairly decent Michael beat-down sequence with the equivalent of torch-bearing villagers (it’s Haddonfield, they have baseball bats instead of torches), but that’s it. He then goes ahead and gives us the opening scene of Halloween Ends. In other words, he denies us the satisfaction of seeing Michael destroyed. He assumes we’ll just go with it—and we will! He’s created the ultimate cliffhanger here. We all know there’s one more movie. We now know that Michael is indestructible and, according to Laurie Strode, possibly supernatural. It’s gonna take something nuclear and spiritual to close out the trilogy.
AND SEE JOE BOB IN PERSON AT THESE EVENTS!
* 10/22-10/24 Monster-Mania, Oaks, PA. Tickets
* 10/30 Scarefaire, Victorville, CA. Tickets
*11/13 How Rednecks Saved Hollywood, Atlanta, GA. Tickets
* 11/19-11/21 Preserve Halloween Festival, Irving, TX. Tickets
©2021 Joe Bob Briggs | NY, NY
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