HALLOWEEN ENDS (2022)
Updated: Dec 10, 2022
The Iconic Series Reaches a Disappointing Conclusion
Grade: D-
Halloween Ends is the third and final chapter of director David Gordon Green’s trilogy based on the famous series of slasher movies. It kicked off with Halloween in 2018, which was a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s legendary 1978 original, also titled Halloween, ignoring the events of every other movie in between. There are a number of simple adjectives that could be used to describe Ends, but not many of them are good: convoluted, confusing, weird, and kind of pointless come quickly to mind. Yes, there is a final showdown between heroine Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and the masked killer Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney), but the road to that final battle is riddled with strange detours that ultimately don’t really lead anywhere.
The film opens on Halloween night 2019, one year after the bloody conclusion of the previous film, Halloween Kills (2021). A babysitter named Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) somehow gets locked in the attic of child he is looking after and, after forcing open the door, the boy is knocked down the stairwell to his death. He is apparently absolved but becomes something of a pariah. Three more years pass, and Corey begins to fall for Allyson (Andi Matichak), the granddaughter of Laurie Strode, but cannot escape his past. After falling from a bridge during an encounter with some bullies, Corey is dragged into a nearby sewer, where he comes face-to-face with Michael Myers himself (It, anyone?). In some strange way, he becomes corrupted by Myers’s evil and forms a bizarre partnership with the monster. They start a new killing spree and soon target Laurie.
Viewers expecting a straightforward final chapter to the Halloween franchise will definitely walk away feeling disappointed. One of the biggest strengths of the 1978 classic was its simplicity: a group of teenagers was stalked by Myers, and the last one standing had to fight to survive. Halloween 2018 was fairly straightforward as well, with only one pointless detour or two, and so was Kills, where the plot was easy to comprehend, despite its flaws. But Ends is anything but simple, and it suffers for it.
The movie apparently had no less than four screenwriters, and they have crammed the movie with several subplots that fall flat. There are hints of a supernatural force in the opening sequence, when the boy Corey is looking after disappears. But there doesn’t seem to be much of a connection between these events and Myers, whose sudden ability to corrupt others with his evil is also inexplicable. For a while, it seems like Corey will become the new main villain as he attempts to seduce Allyson while brutally killing those who wronged him. As the climax approaches, Corey attempts to pin his own death on Laurie, creating a huge rift between her and Allyson.
Not only are these story threads not very good, but they don't really amount to much, either. They ultimately fold in upon themselves and come to naught when Myers steps back in. The movie takes a hard left turn to again become about the struggle between Laurie and Myers. Their fight was obviously what the entire trilogy had been building up to, but so many other strange things were happening in the meantime that it comes across as jarring and even somewhat anticlimactic. The screenwriters would have done much better to remove these subplots altogether and instead focus solely on this conflict.
Maybe the makers of Halloween Ends were trying to do something different with the classic slasher formula for this final chapter. Perhaps they thought it would be good to take chances and end the series with a bang. Instead, it has ended with a whimper. Would Ends have been an improvement if it had followed the directness of its predecessors? We cannot know for sure, but it certainly wouldn’t have hurt. What should have been a simple final battle was bogged down with story lines that don’t amount to anything in the long run. As of this writing, Ends has a 5.1 rating on IMDb, meaning many moviegoers were likely also put off by these decisions. If so, maybe the title is accurate, and this really is the closing chapter for the franchise. Or maybe it will just get rebooted again in five or ten years. It is the Hollywood way.
Director: David Gordon Green
Screenplay: David Gordon Green, Chris Bernier, Danny McBride, Paul Brad Logan (Based on characters created by John Carpenter and Debra Hill)
Producers: Jason Blum, Bill Block, Malek Akkad
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis (Laurie Strode), Andi Matichak (Allyson Nelson), Rohan Campbell (Corey Cunningham), Kyle Richards (Lindsey Wallace), Will Patton (Frank Hawkins), James Jude Courney (The Shape)
Rated: R (for bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout and some sexual references)
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