Halloween Ends – Review
111 Minutes, Rated R
Written by Paul Brad Logan
Directed by David Gordon Green
**NOTE: this post will be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, You can read Mark’s review below and Ryan’s review HERE. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
In this unexpected final chapter, set four years after the events of last year’s Halloween Kills, Laurie is living with her granddaughter Allyson and is finishing writing her memoir. Michael Myers hasn’t been seen since. Laurie, after allowing the specter of Michael to determine and drive her reality for decades, has decided to liberate herself from fear and rage and embrace life.
But when a young man, Corey Cunningham, is accused of killing a boy he was babysitting, it ignites a cascade of violence and terror that will force Laurie to finally confront the evil she can’t control, once and for all.
After all these years of The Shape terrorizing poor Haddonfield, is it possible that, finally, these horrific killings will end?
After a promising, more psychological, start to this new trilogy of terror, the franchise kindof reverted to form (and then some) with Halloween Kills, racking up an absolutely absurd body count and more blood than Evil Dead.
Now, with the entire town having mobilized against him, successfully (?), what’s next for the people of Haddonfield and Laurie Strode?
Well, shit. this one isn’t good at all. Tonally, Halloween Ends is all over the map, with an opening that tries to adopt a more lighthearted approach to “life after Michael Myers,” with Laurie Strode writing a book while living with her granddaughter in an actual house in the actual town.
It wants to be profound, with Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie waxing poetic about Michael, and Evil, and trauma… or trying to, at least.
It’s not very profound, despite its best efforts.
It tries to inject some humor, but as the audience was laughing at all the wrong places, that doesn’t seem to have worked, either.
Add in a totally clunky romance between Laurie and Sheriff Frank (the always welcome Will Patton), and this is a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to be.
There’s a germ of a good idea here, though, in the form of Corey, who, following the presumed death of Michael Myers in HK, falls victim to the town’s paranoia during the Halloween season, resulting in the death of a young boy he was babysitting, an accident for which he is held responsible by everyone. In the words of his mother to Laurie, the town lost one boogeyman and needed another.
Corey was it.
And while that could have developed into an interesting meditation on the immutability of Evil, it kind of falls apart into more simply more violence and blood.
And let’s not even talk about the closing funeral procession that feels more like an honorific proceeding than a cathartic psychological cleansing for the town.
The actors do the best they can to elevate this to tolerable, but there’s not much there to elevate, so they can’t.
Overall, Halloween Ends is a more than lackluster effort but one which, God willing, will actually serve as the End of this franchise.
Halloween Ends hits theaters and Peacock streaming on Friday, October 14, and stars Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell, Will Patton, and Kyle Richards.
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