So I guess the deal here is that after two movies about Mike Myers, the Halloween braintrust was like “hey, it’d be cool to make this an anthology series, where every entry features a different horror, just all with a Halloween theme!” They abandoned the plan after one movie, but… this is that movie.

And so this has literally nothing to do with any other movie in the franchise. There’s no Mike Myers, there’s no iconic musical theme, the closest it gets to any tie-in is that at one point someone in the movie sees a TV commercial for the original Halloween movie.

And so I think part of the reason why this didn’t kick off a successful anthology series is that… it’s not that good? Like, it’s not bad, exactly, but it’s kinda just… there.

So as we start in medias res, an old guy knows something and he wants to reveal this truth, but before he can do so, he’s attacked and killed by mysterious assassins. He manages to whisper a cryptic, nearly-meaningless phrase to his doctor before he dies. The rest of the movie is that doctor getting together with the dude’s (adult) daughter to figure out what’s going on.

The main characters are weird. The doctor dude is kind of an asshole, and absolutely an alcoholic, but while that’s all set up, it never pays off in any way. The woman ends up sleeping with him for no obvious reason (the perils of casting an unattractive and unlikable dude is that if you want your leads to have gratuitous sex scenes, it’s super implausible) as they pretend to be a married couple while investigating things.

The big reveal of what’s going on is mind-blowingly stupid. Like just incredibly wtf no why would you do this stupid. I actually forgot one key element of the plot (the one that it shares with Spinal Tap) before I wrote this up, presumably because my brain was trying to protect itself. But it’s not too big of a spoiler to say that it involves cheap (but American-made!) rubber Halloween masks, commercials for which we see throughout the movie, complete with phenomenally annoying jingle.

The more I think about this, the more I think my “not bad” assessment is off-base, and actually it kinda just is bad? Still, I didn’t hate it, maybe because of how off-kilter it is in places. A better-made version of this movie would ironically be duller and worse.