Written by William Brooks
The unlucky 13th instalment in the Halloween franchise is more odds than ends.
Before it lumbers to its big showdown—half-heartedly, and with all the excitement that can be mustered by a third instalment of a third reboot cycle—Halloween Ends is an unusually Michael Myers-free affair.
Rather than pick up after the chaos of the last film, Ends opens in 2019 with a new main character named Corey Cunningham (the downright bad Rohan Campbell, poorly directed to a dull performance). While babysitting the world’s most annoying kid on Halloween night, a confluence of unfortunate twists of fate leads Corey to accidentally kill the boy, thereby making himself a local pariah. Fast forward three years, and after getting the shit kicked out of him by a group of marching band tough guys—surely a first in cinema history—Corey accidentally stumbles across a vagrant Michael Myers hanging out in the sewers. Instead of his usual greeting to strangers (namely turning their intestines into balloon animals) Michael decides to stare into Corey’s eyes and … transfer his evil powers into him or something? I really don’t know anymore.
Illustration by @thranax on Fiverr and Twitter
Running alongside the Myers & Son slasher villain protegee storyline, Laurie (Jamie Lee-Curtis) is tapping out her memoirs in idyllic suburbia—allowing for way too much voiceover containing what appear to be her less-than-compelling observations about evil (which I suspect her editor is going to cut). She is now apparently over her trauma with Michael Myers, and is living a normal grandma existence, awkwardly flirting with old flames in grocery stores and baking pies. This is the same woman who spent her entire adult life as a paranoid survivalist while her tormentor was locked away in a maximum-security mental institution. It’s inexplicable that Laurie of all people would choose to let her guard down now that Myers has escaped, killed half of the town (including her daughter and son-in-law), and remains at large.
And then there’s Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), who is saddled with ridiculous dialogue on top of her inability to out-emote a Yorkshire pudding. Sure enough, a contrived romance soon develops between Allyson and Corey in order to tie these two plot threads together, and their on-screen chemistry sizzles like a flask of slightly tepid water while the audience tries desperately to stay awake, and … this is all too much isn’t it? As per Carpenter’s original model, the narrative should be as minimal and sleek as a salmon. The more time we spend in Haddonfield, the more unreal and preposterous everything seems. It’s like suddenly realising that your taxi is being driven by a balloon with a smiley face drawn on it.
Halloween Ends has the feeling of dour obligation, and it’s clear that no one’s heart is really in this anymore, the limits of narrative possibility having already been stretched beyond the realms of credibility during the last outing. There are four writers at work here—Paul Brad Logan, Chris Bernier, producer Danny McBride and director David Gordon-Green—and it often feels as though they are competing with one another with contradictory subplots, themes, and superfluous characters. The narrative lurches indecisively from indie drama vibes, to unconvincing coming-of-age “let’s get out of this town” romance, and finally to a perfunctory Halloween slasher right at the very end.
Thematically, Green isn’t up to anything particularly interesting here, as his entire trilogy has been about the various ways that evil can corrupt individuals caught in its wake. If Corey had perhaps been present in the last two films, then his slow descent into madness and depravity over the course of a trilogy might have set up a meaningful final act to stick the landing on this overarching thesis. Instead, Ends provides more of the same scare-free nonsense gussied up with blather about evil, survival, and suffering, because Green never met a thematic dead horse he couldn’t beat to a bloody pulp. Even the fun of a quality kill is denied us here, as victims are unevenly dispatched with remarkably forgettable monotony—only a local radio DJ gets a death worth remembering.
This is allegedly the final instalment in a franchise that nominally started 44 years ago, but now that the rights have again reverted to the Akkad family, we can safely discard that possibility. The only thing that Ends here is my interest in seeing Green’s sequel to The Exorcist next year.
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