After last year’s weak Halloween Kills, there was a great deal of uncertainty in the air about how current reins-holders Blumhouse Productions and director/co-writer David Gordon Green were going to finish up their take on the Halloween series. Now, having watched Halloween Ends, I can safely say that that uncertainty remains the dominant reaction to the material, for reasons both good and bad. On one hand, you’ve got a sincere willingness to do something different from franchise expectations (which can be disastrous or liberating), and on the other you have a very slapdash execution, and the vast majority of viewers will find themselves somewhere in that continuum. Short version: Ends is a better film than Kills, though not a better traditional Halloween sequel than its predecessor (if one’s expectations for said sequel is more death in both quantitative and baroque fashion).
When the opening credits pop up in the same font and color as those of 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch, you know something is up — the critical and audience turnaround on that film over the past 40 years has been a very weird phenomenon to observe in real time. It feels like we’re getting a traditional slasher film cold open with Ends, introducing us to a babysitter named Corey (Rohan Campbell, who has one of those amazing morally indeterminate Canadian faces like he’s in an ’80s Atom Egoyan film) and a right shit of a kid named Jeremy. Now, this being a slasher film, blood has to be shed in an opening like this, as well as some kind of inciting incident that’s going to structure how the rest of the film unfolds. This is already pushing out of the comfort zone of the usual Halloween sequel, because legendary killer Michael Myers exists in it only as a legend — a boogeyman. And then the full credits unfurling to a sequence of pumpkins (echoing previous jack-o’-lantern designs from the series) subsuming each other from within is an interesting visual representation of the way sequels work. Usually.
There is a war going on in this screenplay, y’all. There are times when it feels like the many writers are trying to do a macroportrait of the town of Haddonfield, where this 1978 wound in the very fabric of a community simply cannot be filled by anything except festering unease, terror and resentment. And this yields a place where no one feels safe and nobody actually likes their children and unbridled evil is just one conversation away — where all the violence of Michael Myers’ murders become just short of a J-Horror curse. And this particular movie is actually really interesting, even when it sometimes skews obvious and/or stupid. But Halloween Ends, alas, is not just one movie. Thankfully, though you could never call it subtle, at no point does Ends slip into the exhausting traps that plagued Kills, requiring characters to restate the theme continuously. You’ll get the point by the second time a surviving Haddonfielder yells at Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode or community scapegoat Corey, but it’s not a potential lethal drinking game like Kills’ “Evil dies tonight.”
Among the more interesting things happening in this installment is that Corey is in the midst of two very different situations: 1. courting Allyson, in a very singular manner that only mutual social outcasts can do, and 2. figuring out if he wants to become the killer that the whole town thinks he is because he couldn’t keep an awful child alive. Michael Myers, The Shape itself, has been on the sidelines for much of the proceedings, lurking in ominous tunnels, a shadow of the murder machine from Kills. But there’s something tying him to this weird manchild, and before you know it there’s another sequel being made, but it’s in the medium of flesh and blood, and The Shape is the auteur behind it. It’s no Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, but it’s conceptually trying something different, expanding beyond the usual folk from previous editions. There’s also a few moments where Corey and Allyson’s evolving relationship feels like Green’s 2003 All The Real Girls, which is rather nice, even when we at heart know it’s all going to end in bloodshed.
I just can’t help but wish that Halloween Ends didn’t feel like such a quilt. There are whole stretches in which the edit seems to alternate between an interesting and provocative scene immediately followed by one beset by clangy dialogue and goofy choices, seemingly unmaking its strengths as it goes along — not in the "Use Once and Destroy" nihilistic mode of Kills, but as some weird means of maintaining emotional balance. I wish Kyle Richards (as OG survivor Lindsey Wallace) had more to do, because as it is, she’s in this film like The Man in Black from parts 4 and 5, and I really wish the quartet of screenwriters didn’t rely on Jamie Lee Curtis voiceover couched as extracts from the memoir she is writing about her four decades of dread. It’s unfair to yoke the albatross of being a hackneyed writer onto Laurie’s neck in addition to the debilitating trauma and many physical and emotional scars she bears.
But truthfully, after the enervating shitshow of Kills, this is a more complicated, often interesting attempt at shifting a mythos around. It’s not as innovative as Friday the 13th V: A New Beginning, and nowhere near as explosive as Season of the Witch, but it delivers more than expected. And maybe this time, that’s enough?
