Halloween Kills (2021)

A "kill" isn't over until the camera has come to rest on the blood pooling in the cavity left by, say, a fluorescent tube or a broken stairpost in this especially unedifying 2021 Halloween movie that starts up right where 2018's Halloween left off (Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode is being rushed to hospital believing herself to have killed Michael Myers for good) and ends some time later that same loooong Halloween night after the townfolk of Haddonfield form lynch mobs to hunt Michael Myers (still alive, afterall -- or, well, nevermind...) while Laurie literally does nothing - she gets up from her hospital bed just once, only to get straight back in again to spout some never-before-uttered dubious Michael Myers mythology and that's all.

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★★☆☆☆

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Halloween II (2009)

I thought director Rob Zombie got away with his first Halloween remake, taking viewers inside the head of masked crazy Michael Myers and giving the killer a sympathetic backstory and rationale for his killing in his adult life, but this 2009 sequel confirms the director is trying too hard with his vision for the slasher series - in every scene, Zombie distracts with his communications direct to viewer that what he is doing is arthouse: messages are graffitied on every wall and unlikely posters appear in every room pronouncing cultural subversiveness (a victim of a serial killer has a poster celebrating Charles Manson on her bedroom wall, really?), and even Weird Al Yankovich turns up as Zombie attempts to culturally contextualise what is better suited as a cartoony slasher for teens...and the results are a ridiculous mess: viewers share in the killer's delusory thoughts and are privy to manifestations of his madness in the form of mother, dressed like Legolas, leading a white horse on their journey back to Haddonfield, all the while as a separate movie, a misguided comedy, is spliced in here and there featuring Malcolm McDowell's Doctor Loomis as a whiny fame-whore, suddenly not the Doctor Loomis of previous iterations, in a storyline unrelated to the whole nor relevant to the greater series.

★☆☆☆☆

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Halloween (2007)

John Carpenter opened his original 1978 movie with a single first-person-perspective shot that shows the young Michael Myers' passage around, into and through his family home, telling viewers in just four minutes as much as they are to learn across any of Carpenter's movies about the masked crazy and his motive for killing his older sister, but in this, director Rob Zombie's 2007 remake, that opening scene is extrapolated into a not uninteresting but probably unnecessary hour of backstory that thoroughly unmasks the masked killer; then, the movie becomes a faithful remake of the 1979 original with Malcolm McDowell effective in Donald Pleasence's role of Doctor Samuel Loomis, the psychiatrist who treats Michael Myers in a sanatorium, becomes close to him, and is the only one convinced, after his break out from the asylum, that Michael is heading back to Haddonfield, Illinois to wreak more destruction.

★★★☆☆

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