Review: Halloween Ends (2022)

 Halloween Ends (2022)

Rated R for bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout and some sexual references

Score: 3 out of 5

I enjoyed Halloween Ends. I found it to be a solid, if imperfect, end to David Gordon Green and Danny McBride’s Halloween “re-quel” trilogy, and a superior film to Halloween Kills even if it didn’t reach the heights of the 2018 film, let alone the stone-cold classic 1978 original. It is also a movie that I am not remotely surprised turned out to be one of the most divisive in the series, with some particularly angry fans ranking it next to The Curse of Michael Myers and Resurrection as one of its worst almost from the moment they saw it. Because in more than one way, it seems like that was by design.

If I had to compare this film to any one Halloween, it would probably be the famously contentious Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a comparison that Green and McBride seemed to acknowledge when they used that film’s title font for the opening credits here. While this film, unlike that one, does in fact feature Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, it has other things on its mind than simply the much-hyped final confrontation between those two, instead telling a story of how tragedy can leave its mark on a community years after the fact and create a cycle of violence. It’s a sprawling film that doesn’t hit every mark perfectly, and its secondary villain lacks the gravitas of Michael that he would’ve needed to carry the amount of the film that gets placed on his shoulders. But as a daring and experimental film that offers its own form of closure for the series, I liked it, and I imagine that it’s gonna be one that, much like Season of the Witch, gets a reevaluation down the line.

Set several years after the events of the 2018 film and Halloween Kills, we come to a Haddonfield, Illinois that is still traumatized by those events, especially since Michael Myers was never killed or apprehended and remains at large. Several loved ones of the victims have killed themselves out of grief, and every unnatural death in town is immediately suspected to be the work of Michael, back for Round Three. Laurie Strode has moved out of her survivalist bunker and seems to be trying to live a normal life raising her orphaned granddaughter Allyson, now a nurse working for a scumbag of a doctor, though once you look past the surface, it’s clear that Laurie still hasn’t yet outrun the Shape. Meanwhile, a young mechanic named Corey Cunningham, his life ruined as a teenager after he accidentally killed a young boy he was babysitting on the Halloween after Michael’s rampage, is struggling to avoid falling down a very dark path as he finds himself beaten down by bullying from the rest of the community over the incident, and lights the first sparks of a relationship with Allyson. One day, he finds that Michael is still alive and living in the sewers, and unlike everybody else who ever had the misfortune of encountering him, Michael sees that Corey has darkness in his heart and spares him, leading to a twisted bond.

This, above all else, is where this movie lost a lot of people, as while Michael is an important supporting character here, he’s just that: a supporting character. For most of this movie, Corey is the main villain, following the trajectory laid down by another Cunningham from a John Carpenter movie, Arnie from Christine. He’s the guy who takes up Michael’s mask and carries out most of the kills in this film, idolizing Michael and using his image to get revenge on everyone in the town who ever wronged him or his newfound love Allyson. In this movie, Michael himself is less important than what he represents, a force of darkness that hangs over the town like a dark cloud, one whose legacy leads to more violence. Laurie’s final battle with Michael is as much about her destroying that image as it is about one woman overcoming the singular monster who’s haunted her for most of her life.

And overall, I’d say the film weaved these two storylines, Corey’s descent into evil and Laurie’s character arc, together with mixed results. On one hand, the ending was exactly what the film needed to be, but on the other, the film often meandered on its way to that point. Laurie’s role in the film for much of the first two acts, despite her heavy presence throughout, was to act as a Greek chorus, increasingly suspecting that Allyson’s new boyfriend was up to no good and eventually warning her to leave him. This is a job that leaves the film’s ostensible hero with little to do but sit on the sidelines and sulk for two-thirds of the movie, while Allyson is defined largely by her relationships with her grandmother and her boyfriend. I believe that Allyson, not Laurie, should’ve been the main character here, the film exploring how her terrible work life combined with the legacy of her and her family’s experience could very well be making her susceptible to Corey’s nihilism and temptation. The film leans somewhat in this direction in the fraught relationship between Allyson and Laurie, and done correctly, the possibility that Laurie ignored a threat from within her own family that she herself might have inadvertently created by driving Allyson away could have been tantalizing – and fleshed out Laurie’s own character and how she’s still not over what happened to her.

I also didn’t think that Corey made for a particularly memorable villain. I don’t know if it was the actor or the writing, but while he clearly evoked a lot of “bullied kid gone bad” villains, above all else the aforementioned Arnie Cunningham, he remained too sympathetic even as he became a killer in his own right. While Corey was interesting when he started imitating the Shape and stalking Haddonfield, when the mask was off he felt rather flat, imitating James Dean with his motorcycle but lacking much in the way of darkness or edge. I didn’t buy him as somebody who Michael spared because he saw him as having the same evil in his heart, especially not after the opening scene made clear that him killing the boy under his care was a tragic accident. Unlike Arnie, he didn’t come off as a creep when he wasn’t wearing the costume, and unlike Carrie White from Carrie, there wasn’t a sense of him being pushed to the breaking point by the community and snapping. Even with his limited screen time, Michael made for a more compelling villain just with his sheer presence alone.

Despite its problems, however, the basic meat and potatoes of the film were solid, once more indicating that David Gordon Green, like Jordan Peele, is one of those comedy guys whose skillset turned out to be well-suited to horror. Whether it’s Michael or Corey doing the deed, the kills are bloody and brutal, and have an appropriate level of buildup. The Shape is always treated as the threat he is, and I always bought him as somebody capable of absolutely fucking up anybody who gets in his way. The mood of the film felt, in the best way, distinctly retro in a way that a lot of throwback slashers try and fail to achieve, from the way the supporting cast is framed (especially the teenage bullies who routinely harass Corey) to a lot of the staging of various scenes. Jamie Lee Curtis was spectacular as always, and when the film gave her a chance to step out and shine, the film crackled with life. What she did to Michael at the end felt downright Rasputinian in how much punishment she put him through to make damn sure he was dead. And even after the rocky road it took to get there, the ending felt earned, carrying with it a tone of “damn it, no more” and tying together the film’s themes with a nice bow.

The Bottom Line

Halloween Ends is not a perfect movie, but it doesn’t deserve the vitriol it’s received. It’s one that I think will rise in esteem as time goes on and fans have more distance from it, in a manner ironically similar to how some of them have started reevaluating Rob Zombie’s remake duology in this film’s wake. Either way, it does what it does, and it’s better than the sum of its parts would suggest.