Halloween Ends: Movie Review

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Rohan Campbell, Andi Matichak, Nick Castle
Director: David Gordon Green

If Halloween Kills made Michael Myers into a supernatural unkillable force, Halloween Ends sidelines him to the sewers for most of the film, the trilogy's conclusion and the capper to some 40 plus years of stabby scares.

The age old arguments of Nature and nurture collide with a town's trauma and the desire to villify the evil that lies within in David Gordon Green's more psychologically scarred end to the franchise.

In the finale, it's been 4 years since the events of Halloween Kills, and Michael Myers has vanished from Haddonfield. But the town is still damaged by the trauma, and has a new boogeyman to pillory in the form of accidental child-killer Corey Cunningham (Campbell).

A case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, this former babysitter finds himself on a collision course with a maudlin Laurie Strode (Curtis, in fine form) and her granddaughter Allyson (Matichak) after he forms an attraction to Allyson.

Introduced by Laurie, she soon begins to fear the darkness within him is growing in the build-up to another Halloween and after continued persecution from within the community and an over-protective mother....

Halloween Ends is not the finale you'd expect to the franchise.

If you're after a slasher-fest that piles up the body count and builds to a bloody end of almost Reichenbach levels, this is not the film for you. In truth, the awful Halloween Kills, with its chants of "Evil dies tonight" throughout, gave the body count its final outing and really demonstrated how the franchise had lost its edge.

What Green does here is more a play on the reality of killers, the shadow their pall casts on communities, on how the outcasts are just teetering on the edge of insanity and how an infection inveigles its way in and rots all from the inside.

Myers doesn't even appear until a good 40 minutes of the film have passed, leaving Campbell, Matichak and Curtis to shoulder a great deal of the set up of the movie. When he does finally kill, there's a hint that this withered and decrepit shape that's lost its purpose seems to get some kind of empowerment from the hacking and slicing, an idea that Green teases but disappointingly never really fully forms.

While the body count is substantially lower this time, it's not to say the kills don't lack brutality throughout when they occur. And yes there's a showdown between Strode and the Shape that everyone could see coming, and in truth, which suffers from an inevitability of a conclusion that's obvious a mile off.

Perhaps that's some of the problem of Halloween Ends - it can't escape the inescapable, and while it may subvert the journey to get there and offers a refreshingly different finale that channels The Thing and Scream in extremis, its muted appeal may not be as widely appreciated as perhaps it should.