Movie Review: ‘Halloween Ends’

Director: David Gordon Green

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, James Jude Courtney, Will Patton, Rohan Campbell, Kyle Richards

Plot: A young, disturbed man named Corey begins to lash out at people who have bullied him over an accidental death years prior. Characters from Halloween also involved.

Review: Look, what was going on here? I don’t know who had the idea that the first two would go back to back before jumping forward a few years for the last one and reset all the surviving characters to something mostly unrecognisable. The big selling point of the 2018 Halloween requel was the reworking of Laurie Strode as a grizzled, toughened survivalist driven by the knowledge that Michael Myers was imprisoned nearby. These days she’s more a sweater wearing grandma with aspirations towards writing. Michael, meanwhile is STILL AT LARGE, having disappeared years earlier but still active in the area. This jarring shift in character is indicative of larger script problems.

You might be able to watch a good hour of this end chapter before it explicitly becomes a Halloween movie. Much of the movie concerns ‘Corey’ (Campbell), an awkward character targeted by bullies and shunned by townsfolk after being involved in the death of a child. Bearing the brunt of people’s emotional outbursts has left Corey withdrawn and he’s dubbed a ‘psycho’ by the people of Haddonfield. Generational abuse has been a theme of Halloween movies in the past, and this could be an expansion of this, but Haddonfield seems fine. Only a few short years later they’re celebrating Halloween as norm with kids running around in costume despite the dozens of people murdered in recent memory and the killer still being at large.

The way our new main character Corey fits into the previous lore is by building a relationship with Allyson (Matichak), now a nurse and living with Laurie (Curtis). The latter is wary, but Allyson is charmed for some reason and wants to trust him. Corey, meanwhile has stumbled across a Michael Myers lurking in the shadows and they form some special psycho bond and form a weird mentor/dependent relationship that culminates in Corey fighting Michael for his mask.

For a moment we expected the Cult of Thorn or maybe Paul Rudd, it was never clear where they were going with this and why we should care. People called him a psycho, but it was an accident, but he was a psycho…it’s flimsy.

This trilogy really fell off after the first.

Rating: THREE out of TEN