The Halloween franchise is a blood-splattered morgue piled high with some early genre defining material, though an overwhelming heap of mundane attempts to recapture our attention with unfulfilling and unsatisfying sequels. 2018 brought us back to Haddonfield, exploring Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode and her PTSD from 40-years prior and how this has affected her family relationships. It was a surprisingly strong comeback with a reunion between Laurie and Michael that promised to usher in a new era of Halloween terror. However from the beginning it was, aggravatingly enough, the first in a new trilogy, despite offering a perfectly satisfying conclusion. Its sequel Halloween Kills was by and large a haphazard mess with too many characters, too many plots and too many stupid moments, and an innately frustrating amount of repeated dialogue: “It’s been 40-years!” and “evil dies tonight!” we are reminded. Constantly.
And now, of course, Halloween dies tonight! Well, sadly a lie. But at least David Gordon Green’s reign of terror has finally come to an end. Just remember: evil never dies… and neither do money making franchises.
Jeremy: You’re scared because you know Michael Myers is still out there
Corey: Boogeyman’s going to get you
Jeremy: He’s not going to get me. Michael Myers kills babysitters, not kids
To its credit, Halloween Ends starts strong, with a return to the classic When a Stranger Calls-esque opening that introduces us to Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), this film’s co-lead. Within this opening sequence, parallels are drawn between our favourite final girl Laurie Strode and newbie Corey, a young man similarly charged with babysitting duties on Halloween night (a dangerous job in Haddonfield, for sure), with strong college prospects and, being the goodie goodie he is set up to be, a preference for chocolate milk over beer. Straight away we are drawn to his innocence and moral compass, even while his babysitting gig takes a sharp nosedive – literally for Jeremy, whom he is meant to be babysitting, where an accident leads to the child’s gory death, falling face first over a stairwell. Not being too fond of blood on Halloween night, in the wake of The Shape holiday murders, the Haddonfield community instantly takes to branding him a murderer; conveniently for the sake of the plot, skipping any form of court hearing. “Easy money” Corey is told, as if babysitting in Haddonfield has a track record of being anything but…
For the majority of the film, we follow Corey and Allyson, granddaughter of Laurie Strode and survivor of Michael Myers, as their relationship grows around the traumas they have suffered and their understanding of what it’s like to be treated as outcasts. Corey’s inner struggle coping with the traumatic babysitting event and Haddonfield’s reaction to Michael’s last killing spree lead to an escalating series of events, inviting us to examine how the trauma suffered by the Haddonfield community has lead them to mutate the evil they sought to destroy into a vicious, violent cycle.
Given the parallels between Corey and Laurie and the branching paths they follow, however, it is a shame Coery Cunningham’s character arc wasn’t told from the beginning of Green’s trilogy as a B-scenario to the Strode-Myers A-story, especially given the predictable direction Allyson and Corey’s bond takes as it inevitably mirrors that of Laurie and Michael’s. The result of introducing, developing and concluding his story here, in the final entry, is that Halloween Ends feels robbed of serving as a satisfying conclusion. Even worse, despite this being a Halloween film, you spend a good portion of it wondering where Carpenter’s iconic Shatner mask wearing psycho killer might be, as it takes nearly an hour into the films runtime before he even turns up.
“I’ve run from you. I have chased you. I have tried to contain you. I have tried to forgive you. I though maybe you were the Boogeyman. No. You’re just a man who’s about to stop breathing”
Having turned Halloween’s final girl into the kick-ass, prepared for anything heroine of 2018s Halloween, spending much of Halloween Kills in a hospital bed, Laurie Strode changes her tune this time round becoming the surrogate mother to Allyson and leading a more normalised lifestyle, writing a memoir that deals with her experiences. Considering recent events, it seems a little at odds with Laurie’s development arc to see she’s taken steps to move beyond her past, despite Michael still being out there, even if Jamie Lee Curtis is impossible not to love. Nonetheless, the script has its (limited) hits and (mostly) miss moments, presenting us with an almost otherworldly counterpart to our beloved Myers hunting heroine.
Granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), meanwhile, is less likeable as a more angsty rebellious teen, which feels in contrast to the character set up before – not to mention her motivation is deeply confused in this entry, instantly falling inexplicably for Corey and immediately siding against Laurie, who according to some Haddonfield residents provoked Michael into his attacks. Meanwhile with each escalation, Rohan Campbell offers a lot of potential as Corey, though the jaw-dropping pacing and poor “oh yeah, we need to bring Michael back into the fold” structure are a huge hindrance where Corey’s story and the themes it wishes to convey somehow manage to undercut Michael completely.
So fine. Haddonfield is plagued with an infectious evil that has the power to corrupt even the most innocent and Michael Myers is the super-spreader. In some ways Halloween Ends is reminiscent of Halloween VI: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), which for those who have seen it is a massive red flag. His story feels bizarrely tacked on, considering it’s his mask on the promotional poster, with Corey being the main focus even when he is reintroduced. And in a sewer, of all places. A poetic discarding of a franchise, perhaps. As the final chapter, it is of course expected that there will be a final rematch between the two eternal holiday rivals, which despairingly leaves an unsatisfactory impression during the film’s climax. Notably, while Michael is portrayed as a super-strong, near indestructible killing machine in both 2018 and Kills, also by far the most brutal in the series where he is shot multiple times at point blank and still gains the upper-hand, Ends succeeds at making him a complete pushover in one scene and is more interested in exploring its incredibly poorly expressed ideas about “evil” than it is with Michael, despite this being the definitive conclusion to the Myers-Strode story.
“The truth is evil doesn’t die. It changes shape”
Messy dialogue where characters discuss Nietzsche with vague references to “staring at the abyss” give the impression that the writers want to come across as clever, but ultimately the film simply isn’t as smart as it wants to sound with misused references and sloppy delivery, thereby missing out on delivering the Halloween slasher horror experience we would rather see. Kills had similar difficulties, where trying to write a socio-politically charged commentary on hysteria and misinformation overshadowed other aspects of the film and here it only makes you appreciate the simplicity of 2018s Halloween more, which embraced the core horror elements of its genre.
