The title “Halloween Ends” is a bit off, and that’s not just because nobody in their right mind seriously thinks this lucrative franchise will completely stop here.
Even if you take filmmaker David Gordon Green at his word, this new “Halloween” movie doesn’t put much of a button on the series. It says very little that wasn’t already said in “Halloween Kills,” a divisive sequel which attempted, with some success, to reframe the whole series as a treatise on multigenerational trauma, culminating with the metaphysical rebirth of Michael Myers as an immortal idea, a despicable living legend.
Instead of providing any fresh perspectives on Myers and his impact on the long-suffering town of Haddonfield — or its most famous residents, the Strode family — “Halloween Ends” merely offers an extended, one might say extremely padded, coda to the tale that Green has been telling. The film eventually provides some memorable gore but the ultimate conclusion is unconvincing and perfunctory. “Halloween Anecdotally Concludes” would have been much more accurate, although the studio’s marketing department would no doubt have hated it.
After a brief and shocking prelude, “Halloween Ends” picks up several years after the events of “Halloween” and “Halloween Kills.” Myers has disappeared without a trace, but it seems like every Halloween since that fateful night has been marred by tragic, mysterious deaths which may or may not have been the boogeyman’s handiwork. Maybe he’s out there killing people, or maybe Haddonfield is now just a place where horrible things happen all the time, as though his evil has infected it.
Surprisingly, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has taken Myers’ disappearance in stride. She’s living in suburbia again, with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak, “Foxhole”), and writing an autobiography to purge her inner demons. They’re still mourning the loss of their family members, but it appears that life, for once, is pretty good for the Strode family. It’s an observation that infuriates their deeply scarred neighbors, who constantly remind Laurie that her tragedy has ruined their lives.
Yes, Haddonfielders have long memories. They also refuse to let a young man named Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell, “The Hardy Boys”) forget a shocking tragedy in his own past. He’s guilt-ridden, repressed and fragile, and Laurie and Allyson immediately recognize him as a kindred spirit in need of love and support. If he can stop beating himself up – and if the townsfolk can stop beating him up, too – Corey might even realize that Allyson is not only totally into him but also charmingly forward about it.
The problem is that Corey might not be on a path to healing. He might be on a much darker journey, which could lead him into the literal and figurative catacombs of Haddonfield, where he’d find his own, very unusual place in the legacy of the town. What if Corey isn’t another Laurie Strode? What if he’s another Michael Myers?
At least, that’s the idea that “Halloween Ends” is toying with. It’s a bold decision to take a series that had previously focused on the Strode family and suddenly refocus much of it on a brand-new character, in what was supposed to be (allegedly) its final chapter. But the novelty wears off quickly. The script can’t seem to make up its mind about Corey. Either he was always evil, or he was driven to it by an oppressive community; both plot points get floated, and neither is supported very well by Campbell’s scattershot performance. It’s not intriguingly ambiguous — it’s just frustratingly non-committal, and it takes up most of the movie.
So much time and energy is dedicated to Corey’s plot that “Halloween Ends” no longer plays like a continuation of the original story. Instead, it’s like we’re watching a backdoor pilot episode for some kind of “Tales of Haddonfield” anthology horror series, where scary things happen on October 31 but are only tangentially related to the characters and ideas from the original films. Not a bad pitch for a show, but not a very satisfying film.
Green’s movie might have been stronger if it had committed to an anthology concept, instead of constantly reminding us that there are other, richer, pre-existing characters we could be focusing on more before eventually tacking the conclusion to their story onto the end of a “Corey Cunningham” standalone. Then again, the “Halloween” series has a bit of a sketchy history of transforming its third installments into unrelated anthology tales. If it’s an intentional throwback to “Halloween III: Season of the Witch,” it’s less effective than its ridiculous but consistently entertaining 1982 predecessor.
Corey’s storyline ultimately yields some memorably gruesome set pieces, but Green’s screenplay — for which he shares credit with three other writers — struggles to make it fit into the rest of the puzzle. What does it even say about Allyson that she can fall in love with someone who, possibly, has a lot in common with the mass murderer who killed her mom? The world may never know, because the script for “Halloween Ends” doesn’t want to ask that or many other valid, potentially fascinating questions.
Instead, Corey’s story awkwardly segues into a tacked-on climax that’s probably supposed to give this all some sense of closure. But the events of the film are too arbitrary for that to be dramatically satisfying. What’s worse, it doesn’t even seem like the filmmakers are completely convinced it works either, since they spend most of the movie arguing that Haddonfield is a place where evil self-perpetuates, thanks to a populace that refuses to let anything die, before then giving the townsfolk a ham-fisted last-minute conclusion which, based on everyone’s behavior throughout the last two movies, is either completely unearned or unlikely to mean much to them in the long run.
“Halloween Ends” is far from the worst film in the series, but that says more about the series than it does about “Halloween Ends.” It’s hard to give a film credit for going in an unexpected direction when the direction is this aimless. As a slasher movie, it’s too backloaded to be broadly entertaining, and the handful of gruesome kills are counterbalanced by other, more humdrum slayings. Even cinematographer Michael Simmonds, whose oily shadows and eerie compositions made Green’s other “Halloween” movies total stunners, seems oddly subdued for most of “Halloween Ends.”
Perhaps “Halloween Ends” doesn’t work because — going back to that title — “Halloween” isn’t supposed to end. John Carpenter left the original with an almost complete lack of closure, which played less like a sequel tease and more like a threat. Michael Myers is still out there somewhere, literally or figuratively, and he’s going to get you. If he’s not, then this whole enterprise comes across as rather pointless. If evil can truly end — and especially if it ends this anticlimactically — it must not have been that powerful to begin with.
“Halloween Ends” opens in US theaters and streams exclusively on Peacock Oct. 14.