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Halloween Ends Saunters to a Weary, Maladroit Conclusion


It really is about cancel culture, huh?
Halloween Ends wants to sell itself as the finale of the Halloween franchise. This is a difficult task for what’s arguably the fifth movie professing to be the conclusion of the Michael Myers saga, so many times has he been subdued “for good”. It has never been the case and probably never will be as long as the brand stays financially lucrative. Michael Myers and perhaps even Jamie Lee Curtis will be back within the decade on a whole other reboot. However Halloween Ends at least is a conclusion to the story first helmed at Blumhouse by David Gordon Green and Danny McBride back in 2018, right? Well it would be a stretch to call this series a singular story -a series that started out decently but then went off the rails in both sequels. The nicest thing I can say about Halloween Ends is that its’ choices are at least not so misguided as its’ predecessor and it does have a notable streak of boldness to it. At the very least it’s not a conventional slasher flick.
But for the risks taken it isn’t particularly good either -losing sight almost completely of the built-up conflict between Michael and Laurie Strode (Curtis) in favour of a storyline meant to represent further that toxicity of Haddonfield so clumsily portrayed in Halloween Kills. Rather than Laurie or Michael, the central figure of this film is some guy called Corey, played by Rohan Campbell. Foregoing a genuine resolution to Halloween Kills, which if you’ll recall ended abruptly without one, it jumps forward a year -introducing Corey as a babysitter looking after an obnoxious kid on Halloween night who locks him in the attic as a prank; and in the effort of kicking the door down Corey accidentally pushes him off a high spiral stairway to his death. Despite an acquittal, he becomes a Haddonfield pariah over the next few years, working in a scrapyard for his step-father and being bullied by teenagers younger than him. Laurie meanwhile seems to be relatively at peace (despite Michael being still at large and having killed her daughter), writing a memoir and looking after her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), when Corey becomes involved in their lives through Allyson pursuing him romantically.
Michael, you’ll have noted, doesn’t come up in that set-up; in fact it’s quite some time before he even makes an appearance, and is not all that relevant to the movie in general, neither the plot nor pervasive themes. Most of it revolves instead around Corey and his own proclivities towards the kind of violence Michael enacted as a direct result of the towns’ ostracizing of him. He is rejected everywhere and by everyone, constantly reminded of the trauma, and seeks only love or escape. The deep issues with this throughline should be apparent, not least because of the retroactive notion of “humanizing” Michael through applying this same logic. Never mind the side-stepping of accountability, it’s far too trite an observation: that Haddonfield’s toxicity (standing in for society at large) is responsible for making killers by way of scapegoating, neglect, and random acts of cruelty. In each public setting, Corey is recognized and derided by the folks there, the pressure building with each interaction -and we’re explicitly meant to feel sorry for him. But it’s the standard story told in all quarters about violent people -that they are created by their environments and by the way people “unjustly” treat them. And it’s a tired narrative, lacking in nuance or credulity, especially in these times. Bizarrely as the movie pushes this though, it also wants you to know that sometimes people are just plain evil. There’s a strange relationship this movie has to the nature vs. nurture philosophy, ostensibly trying to take both sides in its’ assessment of Corey -through Laurie specifically, who is first compassionate and understanding, before spouting off extravagantly about darkness and evil (as though they were tangible things) in his eyes. There are times when Laurie feels like little more than an overwrought caricature -and her writing, which is similarly hyperbolic, isn’t terribly good.
It’s not that there isn’t reason for this shift, only that it’s a reason that makes just marginal narrative sense in a movie subset supposedly divorced from the supernatural elements that wind their way every so often into otherwise straightforward slashers. Parts of this movie would indicate that Michael has some power of consciousness transferal or that he exudes a magical homicidal influence that it is up to Corey to either succumb to or resist. Integral to the tension in this is Corey’s relationship with Allyson, which already feels like a strained device. Supposedly united by their traumas -even though they are vastly different traumas, especially in, as Corey notes, how society perceives them- their connection seems built in mere efficiency. And certainly the power is never conveyed in it to account for such passionate actions as the two ultimately conspire to see through.
Credit where it’s due though, choosing to centre this drama and this kind of conflict is a brazen choice in a series and genre not exactly known for them. And I might have appreciated it more if it were complex or was saying at least something different and incisive. But Green and McBride don’t consider much beyond the surface here and the change in approach seems only to serve their hollow impression of modern social commentary. And it comes at the very real expense of what people are here to see, what the marketing sold to them with callous disregard for the subject.
To be fair, this movie doesn’t abandon the slasher genre the way something like Halloween III: Season of the Witch did (that movie to come out of the very brief period when the series was envisioned as an anthology). Michael Myers does come out of the shadows eventually to gruesomely murder some folks, although it does palpably feel like Green is getting a bit bored of him as, of the handful of killings he does commit, the most notable is just a direct echo of one of his most famous from the first movie -and the others aren’t all that inventive either. There’s also an additional component to Michael’s murders this time around that very precariously walks the line of goofiness, although the violence carried out does feel legitimately more visceral through context. And I’ll admit one beat in the third act ahead of the climax, acting as a minor twist, was played stupendously. The awaited showdown though between Michael and Laurie is for the most part handled poorly, barely built up at all and couched within the narrative as an afterthought of the main story arc. I suppose that dichotomy had been hammered to death in previous movies there was nowhere more to go with it, but still it feels a touch lazy. How it is actually done is also rather banal, before the movie takes it in a direction that is half absurd, half demented, with the Haddonfield community getting involved and showing, perhaps unintentionally though it would fit Green’s messaging, how twisted they are comparable to Michael. But it’s still drawn out and dismal.
And in a way it doesn’t matter. Because again, Halloween Ends is not going to be the last Halloween movie -Michael Myers will return no matter what this movie did to him. But yet for this self-contained little trilogy it’s still largely a letdown. I admire some degree of its’ ambition, however it hasn’t got the perspective or ideas to pull it off. And Green doesn’t have a lot of the visionary acumen to make up for this either. It exists in this weird place of both being a slasher movie and trying to subvert the slasher movie, and its’ not terribly effective either way.
Put away the decorations, hang up the mask. Halloween is over. At least until next year…

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