Halloween Ends is a 2022 horror-thriller that is the concluding chapter in the neverending battle between Laurie Strode and Michael Myers.
Evil ends tonight. Three years ago, Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) ran roughshod over the community of Haddonfield when it tried to defend and eradicate itself from The Shape. In those three years since, Michael has vanished without a trace, but the pain Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Allyson (Andi Matichak) are left with as a result of losing daughter/mother Karen (Judy Greer) remains.
Laurie and Allyson attempt to move forward, with the former writing a tell-all book that serves as closure, and the latter working as a nurse with a newfound interest in Corey (Rohan Campbell), something of a pariah after an unfortunate incident. The elder Strode sees something…off after spending more time around Corey. If anyone knows evil, it is her. And evil never dies, it only changes shape…
How did we get here? If you’re reading this, you probably already know. No, I’m not talking about from 1978’s classic to now, but from 2018’s rebooted sequel follow up to Halloween Ends. “Halloween,” while not great, is as fun and electric as a mid-sized budgeted slasher horror can be, a good back-to-basics revisiting with enough tweaks to be a modern-day slasher classic (even with the hilariously bad Dr. Sartain twist). Yet, history repeats itself, and the issues that plagued so many of the sequels following John Carpenter’s original are ones writer/director David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride succumb to as well in Halloween Kills and now, Halloween Ends.
One better thing about Ends (there are a select few)? It has a hot opener; arguably the best or at least second-best scene of the feature. None of the film’s trailers hinted at what ultimately goes down, so it is an opportunity for Green and McBride along with another pair of co-writers in Chris Bernier and Paul Brad Logan to have some fun and keep the audience guessing and even subvert our expectations a bit. From a pure presentation end, the latest Halloween movies have mostly been crafted with technical care, often leaning on the greatness of Carpenter’s score and the inherent eeriness of Haddonfield to create nifty scenes. Ends doesn’t quite feel as hooking or slick (nothing tops the bathroom scene or the one take tracking kills in Halloween 2018), but direction is not a super weak point here.
Halloween Kills was widely criticized for its shoddy script and brain dead characters, as well as the rough decision to leave Laurie sidelined for the entirety of the movie in the hospital. Good news! There’s more Laurie present than what was in Kills—though that isn’t a hard bar to clear. Bad news? They completely minimize and sideline her nemesis for…Corey?
Ends is, no lie, a bona fide love drama for the entirety of the first act. Nary a kill or a mention of The Shape. It is totally alright and encouraged to take some storytelling risks, but when trying to tie all loose ends and close the trilogy, ideally these risks were taken in the first and second films, not the capper. The character of Corey could work in this narrative if he were introduced earlier, perhaps as a quaternary character in 2018 and then someone who has more interaction with Allyson in Kills while getting more of his backstory revealed. As it is in Ends, he’s fast tracked to a level where so much revolves around him and we don’t quite have the investment to care. And Michael Myers himself loses whatever unstoppable entity status he was built to in the prior feature. Sure, it is on the writers who backed themselves into what was a corner with no viable exit, but to go out like this as essentially a feeble old man in long stretches? To call the main characters’ writing as inconsistent would be generous at best.
The inconsistent writing translates into performances that don’t pop, and the promise the generational Strodes showed in Halloween 2018 never materializes like it should. Curtis is solid, but even her character and acting work in this new trilogy clearly peaked with the first. There’s just not a lot of interesting places where Laurie could go, particularly as she’s not quite connected to Myers. The saddest lack of progression is from Allyson, distilled here to someone who operates with no agency and little street smarts. Corey is interesting in theory, not in execution and by proxy, Campbell just feels unnecessary. Lastly, Will Patton and Omar K. Dorsey were both set up as cool/important law enforcement characters in the other two movies, and neither does anything remotely interesting or impactful.
Halloween had a clear sense of why it existed and executed its existence with mostly acute precision. The same couldn’t be said for Halloween Kills, but at least that had some notable energy as a mindless and ultra-violent slasher. Halloween Ends…is none of those things. If there’s one thing we’ve seen in 40+ years, The Shape endures. This movie probably will not.