Review: 'Halloween Kills' is a bloody cash grab that massacres the goodwill David Gordon Green's 2018 version built with horror fans

David Gordon Green’s “Halloween Kills” explores the way a voracious evil destroys everything in its path — and, no, I’m not talking about the masked killer Michael Myers slashing his way through Haddonville, Ill., as he did in Green’s 2018 sequel/reboot “Halloween.”

No, the evil this time is Green himself, laying waste to everything that was good and scary and entertaining about his earlier film — and the franchise that John Carpenter started back in 1978 — in this tediously gory slasher flick.

The “action,” for want of a better word, starts up the night the 2018 film ended, with Laurie Strode — the target of Michael’s killing in the 1978 original, now a vengeance-seeking badass grandma — riding away from her house with her daughter, Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). They have just left Michael in the basement of Laurie’s house, which set ablaze in an effort to kill Michael once and for all.

While Laurie is taken to the hospital for the stab wound in her gut, the firefighters are headed the other way toward her burning house, not hearing Laurie’s desperate plea to “let it burn.” Sure enough — and because the franchise can’t carry on without him — Michael emerges from the flames and messily butchers a bunch of first responders. Then he sets his sights on Haddonfield.

In town, some of the survivors of the ’78 killing spree hear the news of Michael’s mayhem, and decide they’re going to take him out themselves. It will matter to horror fans that some of the actors from Carpenter’s original, including Kyle Richards and Nancy Stephens, are reprising their roles — and that Anthony Michael Hall, who wasn’t in the first movie, portrays Tommy, the kid Laurie babysat back in ’78. It scarcely matters to the story, but those are Easter eggs the truly obsessed “Halloween” fans can seek out.

Green’s first miscalculation here is trying to establish a mythology for Michael’s blood-dripped story, with a little retcon work to put Will Patton’s lawman, Frank Hawkins, on the scene of the killing in ’78 (with Thomas Man as a young Hawkins). Green and co-writers Scott Teems and Danny McBride are “Halloween” obsessives, so they should know such backstory work has been attempted without success through countless sequels and reboots, and they always come off as idiotic and desperate.

As the body count hits double digits in short order, we see Green’s second calculation: Sidelining Laurie, the one character we care about the most, for almost the entire movie. Curtis, her movie-icon radiance still intact, delivers some arch monologues about Michael as a force of evil, which she does with appropriate gravity. But it’s a performance she could have done in a day on set, so removed is Laurie from the story.

Green also tries, and this is miscalculation No. 3, to make some sort of statement — as Tommy riles up the good folks of Haddonfield, their fear turning the citizens into a mob as monstrous as Michael ever was. It’s accidental, no doubt, that some of the mob scenes evoke memories of the Jan. 6 mob violence at the U.S. Capitol (this movie was filmed well before then, and held a year because of the pandemic), but it’s hard to shake the visual comparisons.

The fourth and final miscalculation — the one that turned my feelings about the movie from annoyance to hostility — is at the very end of the film, a final onscreen death that is a crass reminder that Green has one more of these movies, “Halloween Ends,” coming next year to complete the boxed set. Unless the third movie is Green’s filmed apology for 106 minutes, I don’t care what comes next in this grotesque cash grab.

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‘Halloween Kills’

★

Opens Friday, October 15, in theaters everywhere, and streaming on Peacock. Rated R for strong bloody violence throughout, grisly images, language and some drug use. Running time: 106 minutes.