Halloween Kills is not the first Halloween movie Jamie Lee Curtis didn’t play a part in – but it is the first one where she was in the cast yet never confronts Michael Myers.

Curtis reprises her role as the franchise’s perpetual victim/final girl in the sequel to the 2018 film Halloween, the Blumhouse-produced revival of the series. But in this movie, the middle part of a planned trilogy (Halloween Ends is due next year), her character spends the entire film in the hospital, the one place we don’t see Michael.

Halloween Kills picks up right where the 2018 movie ends, with Laurie Strode (Curtis), her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) leaving Myers caged and burning in Laurie’s basement. 

Laurie is rushed to the hospital with life-threatening injuries, undergoing emergency surgery. She comes to in a recovery room believing she finally killed her lifelong tormentor. 

But, when (inevitably) Michael manages to free himself from Laurie’s trap, the killings continue, always in the most gruesome manner possible. 

Though much of the story from the sequels to the original Halloween (1978) was jettisoned for the 2018 version, this movie brings back characters and actors from those movies, as well as a long list of stylistic callbacks to the older movies, including the masks from Halloween III, a movie that Michael Myers never appears in.

Kyle Richards, Nancy Stephens, Charles Cyphers and Nick Castle all return from the original to appear in this movie, as do the characters of Tommy Doyle and Lonnie Elam, though here they are now played by Anthony Michael Hall and Robert Longstreet. Director David Gordon Green drops in plenty of flashback footage, most shot for this film, so viewers know who everyone is.

Tommy, Lindsay (Richards), Marion (Stephens) and Lonnie have formed a survivors group, which in this movie means they go to a bar on Halloween and freak out the other patrons with their “Boogeyman” stories on open mic night.

An attack in the bar parking lot (not from Michael, but from one of the other mental patients who escaped with Myers in the 2018 movie) leads the gang to asssemble at the hospital where Laurie is recovering. As do all of the other townsfolk who have loved ones who have fallen victim to Myers. The ensuing chaos prompts Sheriff Barker from the 2018 movie to lockdown the hospital.

Doyle provokes everyone trapped in the hospital to rise up against Myers. The vigilante mob, including Allyson and Karen, sets out to hunt Michael down, once and for all. 

Unsurprisingly, it fails, spectacularly. Either because the group fails to stay together once they leave the hospital, allowing them to be easily dispatched, or because Michael Myers is an unstoppable killing machine and nothing is going to change that. The only thing the mob really achieves is hounding that escaped mental patient to an especially grisly death.

As for Laurie Strode, she spends the entire movie in the hospital, rallying briefly in attempt to go get her nemesis, only to be returned to bed shortly thereafter. And unlike Halloween II, which saw a hospitalized Laurie fighting off Myers in the corridors, in this movie they never interact.

This is the middle film in the trilogy, and it feels like it. There’s really no point to anything that happens; despite their chants that “evil dies tonight”, Michael Myers’ killing spree continues unabated.There’s no resolution for Laurie; indeed there’s not much of anything for her to do here. It’s just a chance to watch a lot of people get butchered for what is clearly a filler film before the final (?) Halloween movie comes out next year.