You’re six weeks pregnant. That means six weeks ago an egg and a sperm met, did the happy dance together, and got the baby ball rolling in your uterus, right?
Wrong.
Pregnancy weeks are measured in a strange way, but it appears to be the most consistent method of measurement considering the varied reality of menstruation. (A 28-day cycle between periods is common, but many women have longer or shorter cycles, and some have totally irregular ones.)
A Twitter thread from NBC News’s Ginger Gibson explains that pregnancy is measured from the first day of a woman’s last period, which is generally approximately two weeks before an egg would ever get a chance to meet a sperm.
So technically speaking, in the first couple of weeks of pregnancy, there is no actual pregnancy. Weird, right? But that’s how the “XX weeks pregnant” calculation works.
Three weeks is generally the earliest that the actual pregnancy (meaning a fertilized egg being implanted in the uterus) would exist, pregnancy is measured retroactively to the first day of the last period.
And at three weeks, you wouldn’t know you were pregnant. Neither would an at-home pregnancy test.
At four weeks, you might notice your period is late. Then again, you might not, because some people bleed even when they’re pregnant. Also, periods can be few days late or irregular for a whole host of reasons.
At this point, a pregnancy test might tell you you’re pregnant.
That gives someone a two week window from when they may realize they’re pregnant to when they could no longer get a… https://t.co/EzM3KVSJ8Z
However, a 2018 study found that the average woman in the U.S. detects pregnancy at 5.5 weeks, and many don’t know they’re pregnant until after six weeks. Texas’s abortion ban would maybe give people two weeks after finding out they’re pregnant to make a decision, but likely much less time.
So Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s assertion that the law “provides at least 6 weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion” (in response to a question asking why he would force a victim of rape or incest to carry a pregnancy that stems from sexual assault) is categorically false. You can’t make a decision about something you don’t even know exists, and it’s virtually impossible for the average person to know they are pregnant until they are already at least four weeks along.
What’s stunning is that this is just *one* *very basic* misunderstanding of how pregnancy works among a host of others that have been shared by people who are hot on legislating pregnancy. If someone misunderstands the basics this badly, what business do they have making laws about it?
While flying may not be the most out of the world activity for many, for Travis Barker’s it’s quite the feat. Last month, the drummer took his first flight in almost thirteen years after vowing to never fly again after surviving a tragic plane crash in 2008. The incident killed both pilots, his personal assistant Chris Baker, and security guard Che Still. It also left Barker with third-degree burns on 65 percent of his body, which required him to spend 11 weeks in the hospital. But some 13 years later he finally got back in an airplane, and he has his girlfriend Kourtney Kardashian to thank for it.
In a recent profile with Nylon, Barker talked about joining Kris Jenner, Cory Gamble, and Kourtney on vacation in Cabo, Mexico, which required getting on a plane. “I made a deal with her that she had just said to me, ‘I would love to do so much traveling with you. I want to go to Italy with you. I want to go to Cabo with you. I want to go to Paris with you. I want to go to Bora Bora with you,” he told the publication. “And I said, ‘Well, when the day comes you want to fly, I’m telling you I’ll do it with you. I would do anything with you. And just give me 24 hours’ notice.’ And that’s what she did.”
He then admitted that Kourtney gave him the courage to overcome his fears. “It’s still something very new to me, but having something that gives me the strength and hope to be able to overcome things that were so traumatic in my life, it just says a ton,” Barker said. “She’s definitely that for me. I’m invincible when I’m with her. It’s like I never dreamed, I never even considered flying again.”
You can read Barker’s full profile with Nylon here.
Blink-182 is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Joe Biden is coming up on nine months since taking office, and he’s still cleaning up whatever Trump effluvia that’s still lurking around. On Wednesday he found some more dirt that needed scrubbing: As per CNN, the president’s administration has asked 11 officials appointed by Trump to a military advisory board to resign or be dismissed. And the news couldn’t help but inspire people on social media to summon one of Trump’s signature catchphrases — one American voters already told him nearly a year ago.
Among the Trump appointees who will soon vacate their positions are former senior council Kellyanne Conway, former press secretary (and ex-Dancing with the Stars competitor) Sean Spicer, and former national security advisor H.R. McMaster. They currently serve on advisory boards for, respectively, the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy, and West Point.
But not for much longer, they won’t. Some of them made a stink about it, tweeting that they would stand their ground, i.e., wait until the Biden administration gave them the boot. One of them was Conway, who made public a letter she sent to Biden himself, demanding he resign, not her.
But Conway’s symbolic stubbornness was not admired by many on Twitter, who instead treated her and the other Trump appointees to their appointer’s most famous line: “You’re fired.”
Current White House press secretary Jen Psaki addressed the manner with her usual deadpan, telling reporters, “I will let others evaluate whether they think Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer and others were qualified, or not political, to serve on these boards, but the President’s qualification requirements are not your party registration, they are whether you’re qualified to serve and whether you’re aligned with the values of this administration.”
“I will let others evaluate whether they think Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer and others were qualified or not political to serve on these boards” — Jen Psaki pic.twitter.com/aBJ0Mz1Jyj
You might have heard it said before but it bears repeating: Xbox Game Pass is, hands down, one of the absolute best deals for gamers. I don’t say this as anyone trying to sell you anything or as someone who has “sworn loyalty” to one console over another because, frankly, I find the very idea laughable when just about every console has qualities that set it apart from the rest. No, I say this as someone who loves games and wants you to find the ones you love, too. And one of the greatest ways to discover new games right now just so happens to be Game Pass.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Game Pass, just think of it like Netflix for your Xbox. For $14.99 a month, you gain access to over a hundred different titles — both new and old — that you can play whenever you’d like. Of course, games come go every so often, but for the most part, a lot of these games are staples of this big library you can freely choose from. While you might already know Game Pass comes the ability to play all of the Halo, Dishonored, Yakuza, Mass Effect, Gears of War, Destiny, Battlefield, Dead Space, DOOM, Dragon Age, and a good chunk of the Final Fantasy series (and if you didn’t, yes, those are all included), there are also a lot of hidden gems listed on the service. Here are ten you might want to try if you’re feeling a bit burnt out and are looking for something new.
Microsoft
1. Viva Piñata
If you enjoy simulation games and haven’t played Viva Piñata yet, you’re missing out. In Viva Piñata, you take on the role of a gardener intent on restoring your own slice of paradise to its former glory, and while that all might sound a little Stardew Valley, rest assured the way you go about it is entirely unique. To expand and reinvigorate your tiny sanctuary, you need to attract animal piñatas by planting flowers and terraforming your plot of land to meet their needs. While you start out attracting “whirlms”(worms) and other cutely named insects and woodland animals, you eventually attract larger animals that might feed on your smaller critters or have seemingly outlandish requirements you must slowly work your way up to. Overall, the game is a vibrant time sink folks of any age can appreciate, with adorable animal appearances and nonstop challenges keeping you going even when you start hitting 40+ hours of playtime.
2. A Way Out
While online multiplayer-only continues to soar in popularity, finding a great couch co-op game has gotten increasingly more difficult. Luckily for those of us in need of a great game you can play on the same tv as the person sitting next to you, a new game developer — Hazelight Studios — has taken an interest in creating titles specifically made for local multiplayer. A Way Out is Hazelight’s second game, following 2013’s Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and just ahead of 2020’s surprise hit It Takes Two. A Way Out follows a pair of inmates who decide to escape their sentence through a good ol’ fashioned prison break out. The action-adventure game is intense, tells a compelling story, and is filled with puzzles that demand cooperation and strategizing to get through. If you’re looking for a great game to play with a friend, family member, or even your partner next date night, you can’t go wrong with it.
3. Spiritfarer
A recent indie darling, Spiritfarer is a management-simulation-meets-sandbox-action game that will most likely make you tear up a lot. The game follows a woman named Stella after she takes over for the Greek god Charon as the ferrymaster of the undead. With the help of her pet cat, Daffodil, Stella begins her work of guiding the souls of the recently departed to the Everdoor, thus granting them safe passage to the afterlife. As you progress through the game, you can craft and slowly expand your ship, enabling you to pick up different passengers who will regale you with their colorful and oftentimes incredibly heart-warming stories. As the whole game is centered around death and those we leave behind, it can at times be a tough one to play — especially when the time comes to lead your favorite characters through the door to the “other side.” However, despite how grim that might seem, Spiritfarer emanates a tender warmth that makes it so worth playing.
Nintendo
4. Katana Zero
If you’ve ever longed to play a game that feels just like a Tarantino film (or find yourself wanting to now that I’ve mentioned it), Katana Zero is a must-play. The neo-noir and hyper-violent action-platformer follows a katana-wielding assassin named Subject Zero who, to put it lightly, is not completely sound of mind. Zero is given bounties by their psychiatrist, who also supplies them with a drug called “chronos” that enables them to slow down time and is implied to be keeping them alive. As your progress through the story, things slowly become more and more unhinged, until time loops, unreliable narration, and madness take over. When it comes to gameplay, Katana Zero is all about stealth and strategy, as merely one hit will kill the assassin you play as. Therefore, to survive you must scope out an entire 2D area before making any bold moves, and always stay conscious of your next move. Katana Zero a challenging game that oozes style, and is a must-play for folks who like that Hotline Miami feel.
5. Psychonauts (and 2)
When you think of classic, late 90’s and early 2000s platformers, your mind probably goes to Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, Banjo-Kazooie, Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper, and quite a few other furry friends. However, one of the most overlooked platformers is none other than Double Fine’s Psychonauts, and it’s a real shame because the game packs a whole lot of fun and charm. Psychonauts follows a young boy named Raz who, after discovering he has unique psychic abilities, runs away from his life in the circus to sneak into a gifted summer camp where attendants will be trained to become “Psychonauts,” or spies with psychic abilities — and that’s only where the story begins. Now, back when the game was released back in 2005, it was widely regarded as a commercial failure despite good reviews and attracting a cult following. However, the empathetic game recently got a second chance at life when Psychonauts 2 was released earlier this year, and, luckily for us, both games are available on Xbox Game Pass right now.
Nintendo
6. Darkest Dungeon
If you like grueling strategy games, horror, and art that looks like it was done by comic legend Mike Mignola, Darkest Dungeon is calling your name, and most likely in some horrific manner. Darkest Dungeon is a gothic roguelike turn-based RPG that delves into the psychological effects of seeing unimaginable horrors. In the game, you must manage a party of character who can — and most likely will — permanently die if you’re not careful with them. From ensuring your team has food and supplies, to managing their stress level, vices, and fears, there is a lot of elements at play here and a lot of attention to detail is demanded from the player if you wish to successfully dungeon crawl with your party and cleanse the estate you inherited at the start of the game of all the evil that roams around it. Whether you’re more of a vampire horror person or are deeply into Lovecraftian horrors, the game has a bit of terror for every fan of fright.
7. River City Girls
Sometimes, games don’t need twists and turns and darkness to be a whole lot of fun. Sometimes, you just need to run around as high school girls kicking ass. Sometimes, you just need River City Girls. River City Girls is a beat ’em up, brawler (think Streets of Rage) that follows two high school girls — Misako and Kyoko — as they undertake a quest to rescue their kidnapped boyfriends. It’s a straight-forward premise with pretty straight-forward controls, but it doesn’t stop the game from being incredibly exciting, with a colorful, Japanese-inspired look and a killer soundtrack that keeps your adrenaline pumping. On top of all that, it’s another one of the games on this list that has local co-op, meaning you and a friend can search for your missing loves and pummel some dudes together.
Ikenfell
8. Ikenfell
If you love old-school, pixelated RPGs, the combat of the Paper Mario series, and shows such as Steven Universe and Netflix’s She-Ra, you’ll most likely adore Ikenfell. The game follows an “ordinary” young girl named Maritte as she sets off on a quest to find her extraordinary sister after she goes missing from the magical university she attends named Ikenfell. However, as she begins to track down her sister, she awakens her own powers, finds herself surprised by what she learns about her sister’s life, and is thrust into a much bigger adventure. While the game is fun in itself, what makes Ikenfell truly shine, at least to me, is the lengths developer Happy Ray Games went to to make sure it’s fun for everyone. The game boasts an incredibly charming and diverse cast, touches on sensitive topics with kindness, implements trigger warnings to protect players, and has a ton of accessibility options in its start menu to help players of all abilities play. If you’re looking for a soft, kind, and pastel-colored game that feels like a warm hug, look no further.
9. Haven
Another multiplayer game, Haven is decidedly a bit more romantic than the other games on this list, making it a great date night choice. A third-person survival RPG, Haven follows two lovers, Yu and Kay, who escape an oppressive society called that forces its citizens into arranged unions regardless of their feelings. Upon escaping their former home, the pair head to an uninhabited lost planet called Source. Once they land on Source, Yu and Kay must gather materials for their ship — the Nest — and craft and collaborate in order to survive. The sci-fi game has been compared to the PlayStation classic Journey, albeit with a romantic twist and survival elements. If you’ve got someone to cuddle up against and play this with, it’s definitely worth trying.
10. Signs of the Sojourner
This indie game might be one of the more unusual ones on this list for those more aquatinted with AAA titles, but it’s incredibly smart, sentimental, and definitely worthy of your time. Signs of the Sojourner is a game concerned with how our language, customs, and way of thinking changes as we travel and interact with different people. The game is a deck-builder, meaning you interact with folks using cards you obtain through your travels. However, your deck can only have a certain number of cards, meaning some must be lost in order to pick up new ones. Each person you interact with has their own unique way of communicating — whether it be brutally direct or more cautious of emotions — as well as their own values. While you might be tempted to grab as many cards as you can to talk to the new folks you encounter, doing so results in you losing the cards you once had, meaning when you return home, you might find even your best friend feels like a stranger to you. It’s a game that examines the preservation and loss of culture, and reinforces the idea that there is no singular, correct culture, but rather hundreds simply trying to know one another.
Studies show that from the moment a child is born, people begin to praise them based on their gender. Young boys will be praised for being “strong” and young girls for having “soft features.”
The problem is that the more time we spend talking to a child about certain qualities, the more important they become. “When we comment on a girl’s cuteness more consistently than anything else about her, we suggest that her appearance means more than her other qualities,” Renee Engeln Ph.D. writes in Psychology Today.
Siera Bearchell, a former Miss Universe contestant, and mother of a baby daughter, Lily, has gone viral for sharing how people talk to her daughter based on whether she’s dressed in boy’s or girl’s clothes.
“Once I realized it, it blew my mind,” she starts her video. “I don’t care that people think she’s a boy sometimes. But what I care about is that I realized people talk to her differently when they think she’s a girl versus when they think she’s a boy.”
Bearchell says that from the moment they are born, women are judged based on their appearance, whereas men are judged on their actions and “what they do.”
In the end, Bearchell believes that we should be more conscious of how we talk to little girls “because they need to know they’re more than pretty.”
The vaccines have made a lot more people feel safe enough to go out and socialize. However, everyone is getting back out there at their own pace and with the Delta variant raging, many still feel like staying at home.
“Late Show” host Stephen Colbert says that after a year and a half of the pandemic, he’s “running out of excuses” to avoid certain social situations.
To help people blow off their friends and family members who want to hang out, Colbert, his bandleader John Batiste, and the Stay Human Band made a funny song listing all sorts of bizarre excuses.
Surely you can get out of anything if you claim to be possessed by a ghost, trapped in a dark well, or stuck in quicksand, right?
(The song may be funny, but the real highlight is Colbert’s stick-on soul patch.
Stephen Colbert’s “Excuses Song” feat. Jon Batiste & Stay Human
The video is fun but it also has a deeper message. If you’re still feeling uneasy about going out, you’re not alone. There are a lot of people out there who are slowly dipping their toes in the social waters to see if it feels right. While others are waiting for the Delta variant numbers to drop before making the scene.
Your health is your choice and if you don’t want to risk it, just tell them that your hands were turned into stumps by a witch. That should do the job.
Over the past decade, activists have been fighting for the U.S. to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. The $15 threshold, which is more than double the federal minimum wage of $7.25, is seen by many as a “living wage.”
Some states have higher minimum wages than the $7.25 standard, with California being the top at $14. However, 21 still linger in the $7.25 zone.
Given such paltry wages, it’s no wonder why the U.S. is currently having a “labor shortage.” Maybe it’d be more appropriately labeled a wage shortage?
A dramatic new report from Dean Baker, the founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, shows that if the federal minimum wage had kept up with U.S. productivity, it’d be at a staggering $26 an hour.
Baker is an economist who received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, London Financial Times.
The federal minimum wage was first established in 1938 and Congress repeatedly raised the amount to correspond with U.S. productivity. In 1968 it was the equivalent of $12 in today’s dollars. However, since 1968, U.S. productivity has dramatically increased, but the minimum wage has remained relatively stagnant.
“Furthermore, a minimum wage that grew in step with the rapid rises in productivity in these decades did not lead to mass unemployment,” Baker wrote. “The year-round average for the unemployment rate in 1968 was 3.6 percent, a lower average than for any year in the last half-century.”
If Congress had kept the minimum wage to match productivity we’d live in a much different world.
“Think of what the country would look like if the lowest paying jobs, think of dishwashers or custodians, paid $26 an hour,” Baker speculates. “That would mean someone who worked a 2000 hour year would have an annual income of $52,000. This income would put a single mother with two kids at well over twice the poverty level.”
However, Baker argues that such a dramatic, overnight shift would result in an economic disaster because we’ve “restructured the economy in ways that ensure a disproportionate share of income goes to those at the top.”
Baker cites several examples of how the economy has been restructured, including “government-granted patent and copyright monopolies” that have inflated the cost of drugs, medical equipment, and software which would “all be relatively cheap in a free market.”
Baker says that CEOs are vastly overpaid because “the corporate boards that most immediately determine CEO pay are largely selected by the CEO and other top management.” So a lot of the company’s money is wasted in CEO compensation when it could be spread amongst the rest of the employees.
He also believes that the financial sector benefits people who make “little or no contribution to the productive economy.” Specifically, he says that the banking industry charges people tens of billions in fees when we could just as easily have digital bank accounts with the Fed.
Baker thinks that we can get back to a country where wages match productivity and the changes we’d need to make to get there are worthwhile.
“It would be a great story if we could reestablish the link between the minimum wage and productivity and make up the ground lost over the last half-century,” Baker concludes. “But we have to make many other changes in the economy to make this possible. These changes are well worth making.”
Yesterday, Nick Jr. did the best (or maybe the meanest) thing ever. They brought Steve from Blue’s Clues out for a personal video chat, and in a mere two minutes, got millions of millennials chest deep in their feelings.
It’s been 25 years since Blue’s Clues came onto the kids’ educational programming scene, and those who enjoyed the original show are fully in the “adulting” stage of life now. Those who grew up with Steve remember when he left the show to go to college, and he just popped into everyone’s timeline to let them know that he remembers them, too.
But the simple message from Steve goes deeper than that. It touches on the challenges of adulthood, especially for millennials who are in the thick of the career/family stage and navigating that stage through severe economic, environmental, and social upheaval. And it does so with the unique and cozy comfort only our childhood icons can provide.
Even as a Gen Xer who didn’t grow up with Steve as part of my own childhood, when he said, “I know you know,” I felt that in my bones. Yes, Steve, I do know. This adult life stuff is hard.
But ultimately, it’s the wrap-up that got everyone. The uplift. The encouragement. Phew.
So about that time Steve went off to college… #BluesClues25 https://t.co/O8NOM2eRjy
The reaction to the video was swift and overwhelming. In less than 24 hours, it racked up nearly 1.5 million likes and 23,000 comments—most of which are eye-welling, lip-quivering acknowledgments of how much grown-ups need this kind of comfort right now.
Blues Clues Steve is proud of me and says i still look good so you can’t tell me SHIT for the rest of the week
Even when we know that it’s a one-sided relationship, it certainly doesn’t feel like it. (No one can tell me Mr. Rogers didn’t truly like me just the way I am, so I totally get it.)
Me: Parasocial relationships can be extremely problematic.
Steve from Blues Clues tells me he’s proud of me: https://t.co/fiCy5GNuGN
Whether Nick Jr. knew what they were doing or not, they hit a collective nerve with this one.
Everyone 25+ out here crying at work over Steve from Blues Clues collectively right now.. damn Nick Jr. ya’ll got us 😭
— Breana Williams @ tired (@breanimator) 1631048299.0
Seriously, Steve. I’m not sure whether to thank you or curse you for the cathartic cryfest you just unleashed on an entire generation already clinging desperately to the end of their rope. Clearly, it was needed, though. Well done.
There’s a new kind of star on the rise and they come straight from the land of smooth camera panning and 30-second song samples that linger around your head for weeks. With more and more frequency, TikTok creators are making the move from the app on to music labels and television streaming services, bringing with them a whole lot of creativity and massive fanbases. Among these stars is Addison Rae, the third most popular user on the platform with a whopping 83.3 million followers and a whole lot of talent.
Just in the last year, the 20-year-old Louisiana native has released her first single, “Obsessed,” was nominated for an award at 2021 MTV Movie and TV Awards, and starred in her first Netflix original film: He’s All That, a gender-swapped remake of the 1999 high school romantic-comedy She’s All That. Now, less than a month after Rae’s acting debut, the actress has announced she has entered a multi-picture partnership with the streaming service. While both Rae and Netflix have yet to reveal the names of any films this partnership entails — or even the number of films they landed on — both parties have stated they are “thrilled” to work together once more.
“Getting the opportunity to work with Netflix was such a pinch me moment and now to be able to continue the relationship is beyond my wildest dreams,” Rae said. “I’m thrilled to be able to collaborate with this incredible team and am excited to develop projects while continuing to strengthen my skills as an actress.”
Netlifx’s director of family film, Naketha Mattocks, also released a statement on the union, remarking “Addison’s Rae’s charm and promise is undeniable as evidenced by He’s All That and her already passionate fan base.” Mattocks then added that the streaming service is “thrilled to be part of this next phase of her burgeoning career as an actress.”
According to Variety’s exclusive report on the deal, Netflix estimates more than 55 million households will watch He’s All That within its first month of release, making it a pretty sizable success for the service. Already the film has reached #1 on the Netflix in 78 countries, including Brazil, France and Saudi Arabia. Here’s hoping Rae and Netflix’s collaboration leads to even more success for the pair and maybe even a few good TikToks.
Like the recent Candyman, 2018’s Halloween didn’t just revive an old IP. It was a direct follow-up to the first, cancelling the many, many rote sequels that came after. It tried to summon the bold craft of the John Carpenter original. Could its own sequel (the first of two) keep that going? The first reviews say: maybe, possibly not.
Halloween Kills bowed at the Venice Film Festival, but the reviews, even the good ones, did not treat it as some cinematic work of art. Returning director David Gordon Green, writes The Hollywood Reporter, has made exactly the kind of witless, worthless sequel that bled the franchise dry in the 1980s and ’90s”:
“Evil dies tonight,” shout the inflamed townsfolk of Haddonfield, Illinois, more times than you can count in Halloween Kills. Or maybe it’s “A franchise dies tonight?” I might have misheard. Either way, this latest installment is like a latex ghoul mask so stretched and shapeless it no longer fits.
The sequel picks up where its predecessor — like the original, also called simply Halloween — left off, with Michael Myers (of course) not quite dead in that climactic house fire, and quick to take out the arriving first responders. Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode, a bundle of PTSD in the last one, is “basically sidelined in post-surgery recovery,” THR says.
The attention instead shifts to the populace of Haddonsfield, including the now-grown kids being babysat in the 1978 original, including Anthony Michael Hall and Robert Longstreet. Learning that Myers is back in action, they take to the streets, turning into vigilantes demanding his hide. But, Deadline argues, that doesn’t make for a thoughtful horror pic:
Never was there a film truer to its name. They’re sliced up with kitchen knives, hollowed out with a fluorescent strip light, bisected with a chain saw and impaled on banisters. The body count is phenomenal. We love this stuff. You know we do.
And if this bloody entr’acte, whose title addition works as both noun and verb, has little to offer but a jacked up body count on a bed of fan service, it serves both with panache, charging forward as an almost elemental slasher outing unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. To paraphrase Ian Holm in that other late ’70s touchstone that spawned an unkillable franchise, you do have to admire its purity.
Halloween night may be Michael Myers’ masterpiece, but “Halloween Kills” is no masterpiece. It’s a mess — a slasher movie that‘s almost never scary, slathered with “topical” pablum and with too many parallel plot strands that don’t go anywhere. Green, as clever a job as he did on the first film, wastes no time cutting back to where the “Halloween” series ultimately landed: in a swamp of luridly repetitive and empty sequels, with Michael turned into such an omnipresent icon that his image gets drained of any nightmare quality. He’s more like someone who belongs on a lunchbox. Curtis, so good in the last one, is mostly wasted this time (you can feel the film trying to think up things for her to do), as Laurie’s daughter (Judy Greer) and granddaughter (Andi Matichak) do most of the heavy lifting.
What tension can there be when there’s a killer who is virtually unkillable and absolutely ubiquitous? It’s genuinely striking how few fake-outs or red herrings or surprises there are. Whenever someone hears a floorboard creak, Michael’s in the house. No matter which car they get into, Michael’s in the back seat. The shadow at the window? That’ll be Michael. Every back door that’s mysteriously ajar? Why, hey there, Michael. Green’s tactic in 2018 was to make a sequel to the 1978 film that simply ignored the fact that nine other “Halloween” films happened in the meantime. This was the best choice he, along with co-writers Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride, could have made because all of those films are, to use the correct critical term, shite. But out with the bathwater, this time has gone the baby; in an effort to remake and refresh the mythology of the franchise, the writers (this time minus Fradley and plus Scott Teems) have strayed dangerously close to getting rid of it altogether, virtually destroying the one relationship of any substance at all, and the only one we really give a damn about: that semi-mystical, weirdly symbiotic link between Laurie Strode and her eternal faceless nemesis. Of all the things “Halloween Kills” had to kill, why that?
But as far as franchise installments go, Green and co-writers Danny McBride & Scott Teems show far less interest in checking off familiar signifiers for fan service. After proving they could relaunch “Halloween,” they depart a bit from the formula to exciting and energizing effect. It’s a worthy series entry that manages that tricky balance of providing enough of what long-time fans expect while also bringing a unique reflection and perspective to the well-known property.
But “Halloween Kills” is no mere gore-fest — it’s about the generational trauma bestowed upon Haddonfield. The action sequences are more than just action sequences; in Green’s social allegory, they are a way for citizens to confront their trauma, their rage, their oppression, and to reclaim their power and agency through revenge. We see Haddonfield not just as a victim of a masked assailant, but also a victim of larger forces who will stop at nothing to dehumanize their community.
The Guardian‘s Jonathan Romney, however, seems to think it’s just fine, writing “ in contrast with George Romero’s zombie films, where political allegory is the whole point – we’re really here for the slaughter, and the reliable repetition.” He even sees fatigue taking over its longtime baddie, whose “featureless mask has now taken on a slightly rueful expression, as if he knows he’s likely to be on carving duty for a very long haul yet.”
Halloween Kills hits theaters October 15.
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