Just in time for 2 weeks before Halloween comes this reboot of John Carpenter’s classic slasher, set 40 years after the original. In it, Michael Myers escapes incarceration and goes on another spree. As in killing, not shopping. He doesn’t need another William Shatner mask.

For those keeping count, this is the 11th Halloween film and the 3rd to be called Halloween. It ignores all the sequels (like the rest of the world) and acts as a direct sequel to the 1978 original, so it’s strange that it’s called Halloween. How can a sequel have exactly the same name as its predecessor? So to avoid confusion, I’m going to call it what it is: Halloween II 3.

In the words of Mary Whitehouse: fuck this piece of shit godawful wankstain of a movie. Jamie Lee Curtis is the only good thing in it and the film focuses instead on her boring family. I guess that’s why they call her JLC: she gets about as much screen time in 2018 as Justin Lee Collins. Meanwhile Michael Myers is as over-exposed here as Mike Myers was in the ’90s. He doesn’t get scarier the more you show him, he’s not Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Considering it’s about as scary as a pumpkin spice latte, one hopes that there might at least be some jokes in Danny McBride’s screenplay. There are none. A plot point involving a pair of true-crime podcasters looks ripe for comedy but nothing happens. Halloween II 3 simply goes through the motions with zero effort. Even the kill scenes are tedious. I think the last time William Shatner’s face bored me this much was during Star Trek Generations.

Oh and if you’re wondering why Laurie Strode would still be living in Haddonfield, they’ve thought of that: she’s waiting for Michael Myers to escape so she can kill him because she’s crazy. Just move to another country, idiot. You might say that wouldn’t make for a very good film, but imagine a movie about The Shape getting on a plane with comedy scenes of him taking his passport photo, setting off the metal detector, eating a Toblerone etc.

When the best that can be said about a film is “I like the way they ripped off Sarah Connor,” it becomes clear that Halloween is one of those movies (like Terminator 2) that probably can’t be sequelised. I would say stop trying, but they did a long time ago.