Few movie titles encourage their viewers to audibly speak the word “please,” after saying it out loud. Halloween Ends (2022)…please! We have seen IPs beaten down with entry after entry to the point that the product barely resembles the original – but David Gordon Green and his collaborators seem to have forgotten what they wrote in their previous film. Halloween Ends references plenty of moments, but the story being told in this film feels so disconnected from the prior entries that you may find yourself asking if you missed something. However, you’ll find you’ve only missed your lost time and money.
Four years have passed since “Evil” was supposed to die that night – but instead, Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) is simply missing. Now, Laurie and her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), are living a more mundane life, and Laurie is writing her memoir. There are plenty of unanswered elements from the last movie…but rather than jumping into those threads, meet Corey (Rohan Campbell), who has been branded as a child killer after an accident a few years before. Luckily for Corey, Allyson finds him cute, and is willing to ignore the thing the rest of the town of Haddonfield has shunned him for – but Corey may have eyes for another.
In some ways, Halloween Ends may have been an enjoyable film if it wasn’t supposed to be the end of a modern trilogy and the cap on a beloved horror classic. Yet, it is those two things, and this makes it become one of the most irritating final entries in a series ever. Not to take away from the performances, as the actors seem overly committed to this nonsense script – their commitment is not enough to justify the odd decisions and lazy exposition that Halloween Ends gives its audience. Horror films don’t necessarily need to follow logic, but usually, it is the minimal expectation that they follow the internal logic of the world written by the creators. Here, a new “ability” of Myers is introduced. Strode jumps to wild conclusions, based on nothing. This practice in fabricating ideas about Myers based on nothing more than speculation started in Halloween Kills, but it goes further in this film.
Halloween (2018) erased all of the other Halloween films except for 1978 original, which should have been a warning of the direction this may go. There is a forty-year gap between that awful night in Haddonfield where Michael killed four people that somehow makes him the evilest, abhorrent entity to ever exist, as though other serial killers and mass murderers have not at all existed. If this film really wanted to focus specifically on Laurie’s trauma and explore the impact of trauma on its victims, that perspective could have worked. It is not the focus, however, and as the franchise continued it went further and further away from the idea that Michael is just plain “evil” and is somehow a supernaturally-infused being because…well, that’s it. He is evil because the movie tells us he is. He has supernatural abilities because he does. Characters believe things are a certain way based on nothing other than a hunch…but they’re also right in that belief.
I love good storytelling and world-building. That is definitely why Kills and Ends make me so angry. It feels like they tricked us with the 2018 entry, and then just did whatever they wanted in the next two films. While I don’t believe these films can ruin the original, it has absolutely dinged its legacy. Halloween Ends earns the Not a Total Waste of Time rating.
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