Halloween Kills (2021)

The twelfth entry in a franchise that has been rebooted, discarded, and rebooted again, Halloween Kills arrives with the grim confidence of a series that has stopped worrying about coherence and started worrying about volume. The premise is simple. Haddonfield, having spent forty years processing nothing, forms a mob. Michael Myers kills the mob. The film's real interest lies in the vigilantes, not the mask, which is a defensible artistic choice and also a tidy way to fill ninety minutes between stabbings.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a modest performer. A few Black actors occupy supporting roles, among them a sheriff and Laurie's neighbor, and a gay couple owns the old Myers house. Their relationship is stated, never explored, and they are dead within a scene. Three generations of Strode women survive on paper, though Laurie spends most of the running time in a hospital bed while the film hands its momentum to Tommy Doyle and a chorus of furious men. The matriarchal lineage has nothing to do. Race, climate, wealth, body image, neurodivergence: none of it registers. Haddonfield is a town with exactly one problem, and he wears a mask.

The film does gesture at a thesis. Vigilante rage is a machine that consumes its operators, and the mob's true failure is its certainty. This arrives as slaughter, not sermon, which keeps the lecturing to a minimum. A viewer hunting for a moral will find one, but nobody will hand it over with a pamphlet. It is a lean, mostly apolitical exercise in seasonal mayhem, and there is a certain honesty in that. The vintage is thin, the tannins are blood, and the finish is a pitchfork. We grade it accordingly.