Halloween Ends

• Directed by David Gordon Green
• October 11, 2022 (Beyond Fest) / October 14, 2022 (US)

Having been missing for five years, Michael Myers returns for the final confrontation with Laurie Strode. And we are introduced to new character Corey Cunningham.

To be clear this latest Halloween reboot has been terrible from start to finish. It’s been poorly written. It’s been low on thrills and just generally kind of boring. It picks and chooses what lore to hold onto and what to discard or allude to. And I swear in Halloween Kills they used footage from Halloween II even though that movie is no longer canonical because Halloween uses the end of Halloween as its starting point. Anywho…

The narrative of Halloween Ends pays a great deal of attention to new character Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) who appears to have killed a kid in 2019 while babysitting but at the time of this movie got off. How? I’m not really sure. They never really tell you. He seems pretty guilty in the scene but he is out. Or maybe it was just so quickly done that I missed it. Much like the last two, this is a bad movie that thinks it is good.

When we first meet him, Corey is framed as brooding and misunderstood. He’s emotionally abused by his mom but cared for very lovingly by his stepfather. And then they show he has very noticeable issues which begs the question how he got off or was not at the minimum institutionalized after his arrest and a psyche evaluation. I would assume one might occur at some point.

And who can forget the romance between Laurie’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) and Corey? It soaks up a great deal of time with Laurie spending some of that trying to warn Allyson away after getting the ball rolling between the two. And at no point does Rohan Campbell make Corey scary or somebody to worry about. He is just an angry brat. Yay? But this is supposed to be the final film confrontation between Laurie and Michael, but their fight feels like an afterthought. Then again so is the featured killer in general. You could have completely removed Michael from the movie and still had a complete narrative.

And when we do get the two facing off, there is no punch to this battle that has been over forty years in the making. And how they ensure no sequels is utterly laughable. Seriously. This is something a child would write in order to finally and completely kill off the main villain of a story. It is ultimate justice crafted by an elementary school kid. The town drops him in an industrial shredder? Not only does it definitely kill him with no chance of survival but provides witnesses so it is very hard to retcon in a survival.

As the conclusion to a slasher film series or the reboot there of Halloween Ends is remarkably bloodless. Yeah, there are some kills, but most of the time it is just a drama about a messed-up kid. It gets scary bad but that is not the kind of scary people want to see in a slasher movie. They gored the corpse of a classic series for a few more bucks but no fan wants that kind of gore. I could do more but I will stop there.

This wasn’t an attempt to invert expectations. This was, well, I don’t know what it was. I’m not even sure if the people behind it knew what it was. They decided to do something different, which is fine but don’t do this.

The story is slow. It’s a lot of padding with nothing expanding upon the material. And worse it is slow. Did I say it was slow? It takes forever to get where it’s going and ultimately where it’s going is nowhere interesting. I think they might have been aiming for a message that we all need to confront evil but if they were, it’s not clear enough to say that yes they are.

Everyone who greenlit this should probably not be allowed near a reboot again. Or a horror film. Or any form of entertainment. They had no appreciation for the material or what fans have come to expect or want. Rob Zombie’s Halloween and Halloween II were bad. From start to finish this gives either of them a serious run to be the worst.

The only reason to watch Halloween Ends is if you’ve watched the first two films. Otherwise skip it. And even if you watched the other two films, skip it because it’s just terrible.