This is such a weird movie. It’s a direct sequel to Halloween (2018), like direct direct sequel, set literally an hour later. But whereas that movie had a clear vision about what it was about — the aftermath of trauma, and how it shapes people’s lives across generations — this one has no friggin’ idea what it wants to be.

It starts off with like literally an hour of backstory, presented as a total hot mess of random unrelated anecdotes about Halloween franchise lore. It feels honestly like nothing so much as the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, just all a bunch of “hey, here’s what happened to this minor character” and “oh btw, you didn’t know it when you read the book, but this minor character had this elaborate backstory” and so on. It could only appeal to dedicated Halloween fans, and even then I’m skeptical.

But then once the plot gets going it’s even more of a hot mess. If the movie has any theme at all, anything it’s trying to say, it’s about the perils of mob justice. An angry mob hounds a non-jason character to death, and armed jason-hunters end up shooting themselves and others without killing a single jason. So okay, teaming up together as a vigilante mob is bad… except there is literally a masked serial killer out there picking people off one by one, and idk it feels like maybe working together to fix that isn’t the worst idea in the world.

It turns out this is the second movie in a trilogy, and without spoiling anything, if you know how trilogies work, you’ll know that this movie doesn’t entirely wrap up neatly. But overall, the most middle-of-a-trilogy part of it isn’t the ending, it’s the way it’s an unstructured hot mess with neither a beginning nor an end. Maybe this will work better as part of a trilogy when the whole thing is done (though I doubt it), but as a standalone movie it fails.

The one redeeming thing it does have is its random side characters — the Halloween fetishists who bought Mike Myers’ house, the couple that’s like “you want to settle in with some Cheez-Its and beaujolais nouveau?” (a character note that made me instantly identify with them, in a way unprecedented in cinematic history) — but good side characters do not a good movie make. Not really recommended, though of course I’ll watch the end of the trilogy.