Bad reviews didn’t stop Director David Gordon Green’s “Halloween Kills” from doing killer business at the box office, where it is headed for the biggest debut of the pandemic era for a horror film or a movie opening simultaneously on the big screen and a streaming service.
“Halloween Kills” is projected to earn $50 million this weekend. These are staggering numbers especially since audiences also had the option to watch it on Universal’s sister streaming service Peacock.
Green was, at some point in time, a filmmaker I respected, but he’s now gone so far off the deep end in Hollywood claptrap that, I’m not afraid to say it, he’s sold out.
Once upon a time, the 46-year-old filmmaker was heralded as the heir to Terrence Malick with his first four films, “George Washington,” “All the Real Girls,” “Undertow” and “Snow Angels.” Then the business changed, there were less opportunities for independent visions to thrive and Green went the mainstream route, albeit, at first, successfully with “Pineapple Express,” and the underrated comedy “The Sitter.”
Green has since dabbled here and there with more-then-decent indies (“Joe,” “Stronger,” “Prince Avalanche”), but now he’s become a full-on whore for Blumhouse. “Halloween Kills” is cheap, exploitative and not scary at all. It’s even worse than Green‘s 2018 reboot of the franchise. The acting is also quite bad, even, and I’m sorry to say this, Jamie Lee Curtis turns in a terrible performance.
This is an especially concerning film from Green since it comes out at a time of exciting daring for the horror genre (Ari Aster, Jordan Peele, Robert Eggers, Jeremy Saulnier, David Robert Mitchell). In fact, he’s made exactly the kind of cheap sequel that ruined the franchise in the ‘80s and ’90s. He hasn’t reinvented anything, he’s just using cliched slasher tropes and two-dimensional characters to nab a lucrative paycheck.
You don’t believe me? The third and final entry of the rebooted franchise, “Halloween Ends,” will be released next year. After that, Universal and Blumhouse have hired Green again to reboot “The Exorcist” for yet another potential trilogy.
Is “The Exorcist” truly the greatest horror film ever made, or has time crowned a new champion of fear? Maybe it’s “The Shining,” ‘Texas Chainsaw,’ “Psycho,” or something entirely unexpected that still keeps you up at night.