I guess it’s over now…

This franchise is pretty messy.  From a nubile young Jamie Lee Curtis as the babysitter in 1978, to the most recent trilogy starring her as a grandma (2018, 2021), this has been going for a while.  And there’s another nine films besides… I have no idea if I’ve seen any of those.  But it’s clearly got legs.  This one was pretty good.

Firstly, the opening sequence has you so tight and set up for some Michael Myers action from the get go and I loved the wrecker of a kid with his great line “Michael Myers doesn’t kill kids, he kills babysitters.”  And our poor babysitter, Corey, is in for a world of hurt.  

The timeline gets a bit shifty after that and there was a good five to ten minutes where me and the person next me kept turning to each other trying to figure out if we’d flashed forward or backward in time… and they were using labels but not clearly enough, clearly.  Maybe they wanted the ambiguity.

Jamie Lee introduces her grand daughter to Corey, seeings as they’re both town misfits.  Also, I guess it was the Mum who died in Halloween Kills (2021)… I really thought it was Jamie Lee’s character and I’ve been puzzled about how this current film exists for ages.  Anyway, Corey and grand-daughter Allyson hit it off.  This sets us up for a really weird vibe of rom-com descending evil.

Corey is also hitting it off with a mysterious being in a stormwater drain.  So most of this film is a kind of tug-of-war between good and evil, love and the stabby-stab-stab.  I won’t tell you which one ends up winning.  But I will tell you that Corey (Rohan Campbell) should get a special shout out for some really interesting acting.  He also has a super interesting face, with a touch of the cleft-lip like Joaquin Phoenix.  I can’t find anything that says he actually had a cleft-lip… but if you’re one of those people who finds it attractive you might like to know this detail.

There’s a lot of things to keep you guessing in this film… turns out Jamie Lee is writing a book about her time dealing with Michael Myers, and from time to time you almost feel that maybe this whole entire franchise was just her writing.  Sometimes she’s good, sometimes she’s evil, sometimes she’s suicidal.  I quite liked a few times where there was some almost revisionist history lumped onto her story… turning her into the bad one who started the drama.

There’s some pretty gruesome gore.  Some pretty creepy killings.  A surprisingly limited amount of Halloween trick or treating though… I was super surprised about this.  I think the ends wrap up tidy enough… or do they?

J* gives it 4 stars.