The third and final chapter in director David Gordon Green’s and co-writer Danny McBride’s once-promising Halloween revival claims to finally end the decades-long rivalry between The Shape, the unstoppable manifestation of pure evil, and Laurie Strode, the babysitter that got away. This is the same thing promised in Halloween (2018), and then Halloween Kills, not to mention Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, and definitely not to mention Halloween: Resurrection.
What Green and McBride brought to the table seemed to be a true love of the franchise and established comedic bona fides (as two of this year’s best horror films have proven, comedy and horror are not so dissimilar after all). Instead, Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills ended up being dour depictions of the effects of trauma on an individual and societal level. It’s an admirable goal, attempting to inject the staid slasher genre with some real-life ramifications, but the grief cloud hanging over those films drained the thrills out of what made Halloween (1978) so terrifying in the first place. Michael Myers is the unstoppable unknown. Green and McBride have made him a mundane metaphor whose main purpose seems to be serving up ‘memberberries disguised as homage, and delivering more inventive and gorier kills that are meant to thrill (you know, the slasher flick bread and butter) while the movie conversely tells us, no, this is traumatizing, it must be taken seriously.
All that buildup to say that Halloween Ends suffers the same self-seriousness and same incongruity in tone and plot, with one main difference: Halloween Ends is not a Halloween movie. Or rather, it’s not a Michael Myers movie. Many critics have said Halloween Ends takes a big swing, and many seem to like that big swing, but if “big swing” is a reference to baseball, then Halloween Ends is playing soccer. Halloween Ends has more in common with another John Carpenter movie than it does with Halloween (1978). In fact, when the film is following that plotline, completely unrecognizable as a film in the Halloween franchise, it comes to life in a way that the rest of the trilogy never does. Free from the self-inflicted burden of the Michael Myers/Laurie Strode saga, Halloween Ends almost becomes an interesting and enjoyable movie.
It’s not for lack of trying that Green and McBride fail here, and again, that’s admirable. This third installment explores, albeit in not-so-subtle terms, not just trauma but the idea of evil itself, how it can be born but also nurtured. Laurie Strode is unevenly written (an unsuccessful attempt at complexity), but Curtis almost always delivers, memorably saying anger can be “addictive” and calling evil an “infection.” These are the themes of the real movie, shoehorned into a Michael Myers movie—or rather, Michael Myers/The Shape is reappropriated as the personification of those themes, resulting in a brand-new story about a brand-new character Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell). It’s a strange choice to sideline the main characters in the culmination of a trilogy, the irony being that I think the Strode/Myers story gets in the way of the Cunningham story rather than the other way around. In that way, I liked Ends better than 2018 and Kills, but that’s not saying much.
