Mark Reviews Movies: HALLOWEEN ENDS

Halloween Ends, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 13, 2022

It takes some guts to spend two movies establishing certain characters and setting up various conflicts, mysteries, and expectations, only to make the third and final entry of a trilogy into something that seems completely different. That's the case with co-writer/director David Gordon Green's Halloween Ends, which spends most of its time ignoring the series' main characters or pushing them into backdrop of a tale about a murderer-in-the-making.

On its own, that story is intriguing and presented with an eerie level of empathy, and if Green wanted to make that movie, he certainly should have. As for whether this works when forced into the culmination of a long-running franchise, that's a different story.

To be clear, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the woman who survived a killing spree in 1978 and another one 40 years later, and her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) are significant characters here. So, too, is Michael Myers, the masked man or boogeyman or personification of pure evil who has left the small town of Haddonfield in a kind of collective trauma since his murderous return and sudden disappearance on Halloween in 2018.

In the main plot, four years have passed since that night, and despite the implications of the ending of Halloween Kills, a lot has changed for the two during the interim. Laurie is finished with preparing for and seeking revenge (This sequel basically doubles down on the character's lack of involvement in its predecessor). She now lives with an orphaned Allyson, who works at a hospital, and is writing a book about her experiences with Michael, trying to make some sense of the senseless brutality he unleashed on her, her friends, her family, and the Illinois town in general.

Save for the climax, that's more or less the end of any development of or participation from these characters in the story. The crux of it involves Corey (Rohan Campbell), a pretty ordinary young man who, on Halloween in 2019, is saving up money for college. In the bait-and-switch prologue, Corey is babysitting a bratty boy. While shadows moving in the background and a knife disappearing from a counter lead us to believe a certain someone has returned again, the truth of this sequence is far more mundane but just as fatal—and shockingly so.

The screenplay (written by Green, Paul Brad Logan, Chris Bernier, and Danny McBride) takes a rather daring step that comes to define this entry and re-adjusts whatever expectations one might have for the entire point of this series. With Laurie and Allyson basically static and in a state of relative contentment after everything that has happened to them, Corey becomes the protagonist here. He has been blamed for an accident and ostracized by the town. There's plenty of gossip surrounding him, and harassment, bullying, and threats follow him wherever he goes (It's somewhat amusing that his main bullies consist of a group of high school band kids).

He's being pushed to some brink, obviously, and while a chance encounter with Laurie leads to him starting to date Allyson, the ghosts of his past keep coming back to confront him. By even more chance, he ends up coming face-to-face with different kind of ghost: Michael, who has been hiding away in the town's sewers. They lock eyes, and something connects or shifts between them.

None of this makes much sense, although that has become something of an expectation after Green followed up his brutally efficient first installment in this new series with a sequel that attempted to add a few too many layers of myth to Michael, his origins, and the point of his existence. Still, Corey's story is a surprisingly engaging one, portrayed in a down-to-earth style, with a melancholy tone, and with a sense of rising dread. Green almost pulls off the change in focus and purpose here (This rebooted series has always tried to question the nature of evil, so Corey's take does fit into the scheme in that way, at least). There's definitely an impulse to credit the filmmaker for taking such a big narrative risk.

Michael's direct but enigmatic involvement in Corey's character, though, instantly shatters whatever Green and company's intentions with the character might and could have been. It's an immediate reminder that this story doesn't and cannot belong to him. After all, this movie has too much baggage of plot, theme, and pre-ordained payoffs to setups that Green's cycle of slasher movies has insisted to be more than four decades in the making.

Whoever Corey may be and whatever he may become, he is ultimately just a stand-in for the character we're anticipating, meaning that the third act becomes the onslaught of violence that the rest of the movie has avoided. In that same vein, he's also a significant delaying tactic for the standoff that the very title promises.

Because the movie spends so much time and energy with this other tale, though, it also undermines the significance and potential impact of that promised event. For all of its risk-taking, Halloween Ends disappoints on two levels: in trying to do something different, because it simply cannot by the end, and in doing exactly what we expect, because the movie so blatantly attempts to be something else.

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