Review Detail

I was absolutely stunned when I saw how well Kills was narratively interwoven with Halloween 2018. It's impeccable and the narrative doesn't miss a beat. I was similarly floored with how well the climax of 2018 was transformed into an impactful sequence but also one that doesn't feel entirely like the climax of the movie. It's more like how the mid-film sequence in a Mission: Impossible movie is probably the biggest sequence but there's still another half of the movie to go.

Narratively, the edits to Kills works pretty well. There's a few elements that I do miss. Laurie is in this version far less than even in the theatrical cut of Kills and that's this edit's biggest issue. She really falls off and doesn't even show up anywhere in the finale, which makes the moment where she takes the shot of painkillers make even less of a point here because she doesn't do anything after this scene.

The finale is too abrupt. There's not a moment where the audience comes down after a pretty great finale switcharoo where the "Michael Survived" is shown as a twist, which is really effective. Perhaps, in order to give Laurie a little more, using the extended edition finale (the phone call) would've helped both of these elements.

Another slight nitpick: since we remove the podcasters interviewing Laurie, we aren't really given an location overview of Laurie's compound. I don't believe we even have a good establishing shot of her house until much later in the film. I did like turning the podcasters into investigative journalists, though. That element worked quite well.