After a great reboot with the 2018 version of Halloween and its highly disappointing sequel Halloween Kills, I can’t really say I was very excited to see this last film in the trilogy. From the advertisements though it looked to be fixing the problems from the last film and solely focus on Lorie and Michael. The fight looked like it was at least going to be intense and I was hoping it’d be a good conclusion for the series potentially. Even though I wasn’t exactly excited for this film, I had a little bit of hope that it would at least be decent. 

I could not have been more wrong when it came to guessing what this movie would be like. Once again Laurie Strode has taken a backseat in this Halloween story but this is even worse than Halloween Kills because she doesn’t even feel like Laurie Strode throughout the film and could’ve been replaced with just about any other Jamie Lee Curtis character in some romantic drama. I also feel like Curtis’ acting has gotten progressively worse in these movies since the 2018 film and it really reaches its peak of awfulness here. This does not in any way feel like the hero survivor Laurie Strode who survived a serial killer and instead just feels like some random older lady who’s kind of bitter and a bit overprotective of her granddaughter and also might be finding a new lover. It doesn’t help that her own daughter’s death is barely even touched upon so some mother she was even though it was kind of established how she wasn’t the best mother anyway in the first place. Speaking of the granddaughter, played by Andi Matichak, her acting too has gotten worse and every time she gets worked up or yells at Curtis, it’s incredibly unconvincing and heavily forced drama just to make you think that maybe just maybe they’ll actually fall out and stay mad at each other to create more drama in a movie about a deranged serial killer. A new character is introduced here played by Rohan Campbell and he has this backstory where he kind of kills a kid that makes him kind of messed up in the head but also you understand when you see the backstory play out. This guy takes up the whole movie practically and it’s horrible. His character is so poorly written and they try to turn him into the next Michael Myers but it’s so forced and dumb beyond comprehension that you can’t take it seriously. He wasn’t even an intimidating guy even when the switch finally flips and he goes full on crazy. The granddaughter ends up falling for him out of nowhere even though they just met and she’s totally okay with his heinous crime despite him not even having to explain his side. It’s one of the worst forced romances I’ve seen in any movie in a long time and it felt like it was just there to waste time and give you something to have false hope for when it came to Campbell’s potential redemption after he gets beaten up by the most stereotypical bullies you can think of for a horror movie. You know how it took me so long to mention Michael Myers, well the movie seems to forget that he’s even in it for the majority of it and it takes almost an hour for him to even show up for the first time. Even when he does show up, it’s so brief every time and we go back to the uninteresting townspeople or Campbell. It gets worse though because since Campbell isn’t accepted by the town and he becomes crazy, he now wants to TEAM UP with Myers to basically be the new serial killer. When they meet for the first time, Myers shows him mercy which was bad enough but Campbell literally asks Michael to show him how it’s done and I honestly couldn’t believe what I was watching because I was astounded at how awful this story turned out to be. Campbell also tussles with Myers later in the film and he quite easily unmasks him. One of the most famous horror icons who granted has been subjected to a lot of stupid crap, but not like this. This was embarrassing which is saying a lot given the quality of some of the other sequels. When there are actually kills in this movie, it feels like they aren’t even focused on half the time and they’re the background. One kill in particular where Campbell was killing someone with a welding tool, it could’ve been a cool kill but instead they focus on an impaled girl trapped beneath a fallen barbed wire fence even though this movie is RATED R. The dialogue from just about everyone is just terrible and it’s one of the worst written films you could find right now. It doesn’t help that the movie is so incredibly boring. Since the characters in this movie have the personality of styrofoam, the story gets uninteresting real fast especially with very little Michael even though he’s ON THE POSTER. Speaking of false advertising, you know that fight between Laurie and Michael that’s in every trailer? It’s not even until the last 25 minutes of the film so you spend the whole movie waiting for it. When it actually happens though, it barely lasts any time and Laurie just ends up winning and killing him in such an anticlimactic way. The same guy who they said was basically immortal with all of the punishment he took in the last film is beaten by a simple throat slit and some wrist slits and he’s just done. Then he’s just destroyed like it was barely even an inconvenience. Why were we even afraid of this guy if he could be taken out so easily. Everything from the story right down to the technical elements is just done so incredibly wrong that I think the writers went out of their way to write the book on how not to make a Halloween movie. The camerawork in general is just awful. One of the opening shots where Campbell first meets the mother of the kid he accidentally kills is shot at such a weird technique for the scene and it’s one of the first scenes of the movie so it’s bad right off the bat. The editing too is some of the worst of the year because so many of the action parts of the film have so much shaky cam that it’s hard to tell what’s going on at some points. The music in this is really bad too and what they did to the classic Halloween theme was really stupid where they made it feel like heavy metal. Also if there’s any color I associated with Halloween it’s anything but blue but the movie really likes its blue text for some reason. 

Conclusion: I can’t believe that we’ve had such a great year for horror movies and we have this thing mixed in with films like X, Pearl, Barbarian, Scream (2022), The Black Phone, or even Smile. It’s been a long time since I hated a film this much. Not only is this the worst film of the year right now, it might be one of the worst films I’ve ever seen in my life. A film hasn’t made me want to walk out of a theater or have me beating my head off a wall like this film has because it’s been at least a couple of years since that happened. It’s amazing how absolutely nothing was done right in this film. I want to take back everything bad I said about Halloween Kills because that was a masterpiece in comparison to this and I thought it couldn’t get worse. Boy was I wrong though because this film is just a disgrace to Michael Myers, Jamie Lee Curtis, the horror genre, and just movies in general. This doesn’t deserve your money, time, or sight because it is just an abomination that doesn’t deserve your viewing. 

To finish off this review I leave you with a quote from Roger Ebert:
“I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”

LE