The opening gambit of Halloween Ends is absolutely brilliant. It’s tense. It’s thrilling. It subverts every expectation. It is a prologue that is so smart, so unexpected, and so visceral, that it felt like a return to form. Unfortunately, the rest of this movie fails to live up to those first few minutes. The credits kick in and it’s all downhill from that point.
I walked into Halloween Ends with two questions on my mind. Could this movie claw its way back from the crushing disappointment that was Halloween Kills? Could it somehow build on the ideas put forward by that messy middle movie and successfully deliver both a scary and satisfying conclusion? After a weirdly paced and strangely structured 110 minutes, I can safely say that the answer to both of those questions is a rather definitive, “no, it really can’t.”
Which is truly unfortunate, because David Gordon Green and Danny McBride’s 2018 Halloween requel was nothing short of a revelation. By that point, after nine movies, three different timelines, and a complete reboot, it felt like there was very little that needed to be said about Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. But by ignoring all but the first two movies, and rebuilding a story that centered around generational and societal trauma, Green and McBride managed to deliver a movie that was tense, and scary, and incredibly smart. What’s more, they managed to pull off the impossible by making Michael Myers feel genuinely scary again.
Halloween Kills, however, tried far too hard to build out those themes. But by shifting the focus away from Laurie Strode and onto the townsfolk, by making Michael Myers a trigger for mass hysteria, the movie ended up feeling like one baffling choice after another. But the biggest misstep of Halloween Kills was to leave Laurie confined to a hospital bed for the vast majority of its runtime. Taking her out of play didn’t just underestimate the importance of the character but also the particular charm and charisma of Jamie Lee Curtis. And while Halloween Ends does its best to shift the focus back to Laurie, it also straddles us with a dark and twisted Romeo and Juliet-esque love story that feels half-baked.
The Final Final Girl
Unlike the previous movie, Halloween Ends begins with a time jump. It’s been four years since anyone in Haddonfield has seen or heard from Michael Myers. Laurie is writing a book. She has, by way of journaling, seemingly confronted her demons, and has decided to once again rejoin society. She and her granddaughter, Allyson, are now living a regular old house in Haddonfield. There is no barbed wire or electrified fences. There is no shotgun under the kitchen table. She’s done with the boogeyman. She’s moving on.
Enter Corey Cunningham, a well meaning but troubled young man who is cast out from society after an adventure in babysitting gone horribly, horribly wrong. Estranged and alienated by Haddonfield, he begins a descent down an incredibly dark and familiar path. All of which makes him an exciting new problem for Allyson to try and fix. They start dating. She rebels against Laurie. You know where all of this is heading.
At this point, I feel like a distinction needs to be made between the importance of this movie to the slasher genre as a whole and whether or not it’s actually any good. There is no denying that Halloween Ends is an important movie. I have no doubt in my mind that this story, which finally – and definitively – puts an end to Laurie Strode’s trauma, needed to be told. Especially now. This movie sets out to reclaim the final girl. To make her more than just the woman you relate to and fall in love with simply because she’s in peril. It pushes past that image of that bruised and bloodied survivor at the end of every slasher movie and gives her a life that is more than just the sum of her trauma.
But just like with Halloween Kills, it feels like the filmmakers were so impressed with their dissection of genre themes that they forgot they were making a slasher movie and not writing a think piece.
The Sad, Old, Deflated Face of Evil
Halloween Ends makes some big swings. It tries to be a slasher movie while providing meta-commentary on the nature of slasher movies. It wants to be this meaningful meditation on what evil is and whether or not it can ever truly be defeated. They are good ideas, but once again it feels like they couldn’t figure out how to make it all work coherently in a single movie. All of these big picture conversations also, unfortunately, undermine the visceral fear that these movies are supposed to inspire.
By getting caught up in so many “themes,” Halloween Ends sidelines Michael Myers to the point where he is barely a presence in this movie. The previous movie set him up as this eternal evil that cannot be defeated. This movie forgets that he exists.
So much so that the final confrontation we were promised in the trailers feels like nothing more than an afterthought. The movie spends so much time demythologizing Michael Myers that there is absolutely no terror or tension when he finally faces off with Laurie for the very last time.
The best thing I can say about Halloween Ends is that it is objectively better than Halloween Kills. But that still doesn’t make it a good movie. There are one or two lively scares. That theme music still slaps. But you’re probably best just moving on, because there really is nothing to see here.
Bring on the next reboot.
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