So this is the third movie in the trilogy that started with Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills. Except… it’s really not. Because the thing is, those movies set up a story about the relationship between Laurie Strode and Mike Myers — the first one successfully, the second much less so, but either way, both of them shared a subject and took place in immediate succession.

This one takes place years later, and while both Strode and Myers are in the movie, it’s not really about them. It feels like a random sequel where they kinda evolve the protagonist and villain. And I suspect how you react to the movie is going to depend on how okay you are with the “trilogy” not getting a real ending and having its threads dropped. If you’re annoyed at that, well, you’re going to be annoyed at this movie because it just dgaf about any of that. But if you’re okay with a standalone Halloween movie that doesn’t attempt to be a trilogy finale, then I think this one is basically okay.

So what this movie is really doing is kind of universalizing the idea of Mike Myers, to try to turn him from being more than this one (now elderly) dude into a kind of primal force of evil that can infect anyone if they open themselves up to evil.

Sort of. Because the thing is, the movie is messy af, and it kind of implies that, but also that doesn’t really quite fit with what’s happening onscreen, and maybe we’re supposed to believe it’s just a straight-up psychological story about one guy going bad (but then why does Myers not kill him if they don’t have any mystical relationship; eventually you can say that he recognizes a kindred spirit, but the first time?).

The messiness extends to the characterization. Laurie’s grand-daughter behaves in weird ways throughout the movie, with her apparent motivation jumping around from scene to scene, and her attraction to the new jason inexplicable from minute one.

But somehow it still kinda works. And the thing is, it works almost because it’s a mess. There’s a long tradition of horror movies that don’t quite hang together, and which are more about the vibes than the literal plot mechanics, and where even the vibes are sometimes confusing and contradictory. And so this is a movie that fits into that tradition; if 30 years from now, the spiritual successor to Joe Bob Briggs is presenting this movie, and talking about how it was part of this trilogy but you can ignore that because the screenwriter did, and how audiences hated it at the time, and how the guy who plays the villain plays him as a weird nerd who goes from bullied loser to incarnation of evil without even trying to sell the transition… yeah, it just fits right in.

Also, my favorite part of the movie is the very ending, where they kill off Mike Myers in the most explicit way possible: Unmasked while he’s clearly the super-strong murderer guy and then stabbed repeatedly in critical parts, and then fed through a metal scrapper while still unmasked with Jamie Lee looking on. The only way they could have made it more explicit would be to have a medical examiner standing there certifying that according to his DNA results, this is the real Mike Myers and not a clone or life model decoy.

It’s not a great movie, it’s maybe not even a good movie, but it’s an interesting one, and that counts for a lot.