I wish I could say it was rare to see a movie as atrocious as Halloween Kills, but sadly, it’s an all-too-familiar experience for audiences in the 2020s: movies you endure, waiting for them to end if you don’t have the moral courage to walk out midway, because they’re achieving no other effect than boredom.

This film is so botched, it’s bewildering. There are a number of abysmal performances, and at certain points, the editing is so inept that a potentially frightening moment is nullified by sheer visual confusion. But the main thing is: How did director David Gordon Green ever agree to go forward with his own rotten script, which was cowritten with Danny McBride and Scott Teems, almost the same team that gave us the far better Halloween of 2018?

At the end of Halloween Kills, there’s a long, windy voice-over by Jamie Lee Curtis that I assume was added late in the process, maybe after the rough-cut screening, when the filmmakers realized how much pure nothing they had up there on the screen. You can imagine them thinking that maybe if Curtis, still beloved in her star-making role as Laurie Strode, gassed on at the end about the indestructible Michael Myers as the “essence of evil,” then perhaps the movie would be given a pass by a tolerant public. Especially so near Halloween!