Halloween Ends with this concluding chapter to director David Gordon Green’s Michael Myers trilogy. Daniel Rutledge reckons that’s probably for the best…
Halloween Ends
And so the Halloween franchise coughs and sputters to its latest (final?) end as a sad shadow of its former self. This is a real missed opportunity for what could have been an awesome goodbye to Michael Myers and Laurie Strode but instead is just slightly entertaining and mostly disappointing. Franchises with ten or more sequels generally include ups and downs, but it’s hard to think of any that launched with such a high peak before plumbing as many low lows as this one has. The 2018 movie was the best Halloween since the 1978 original, but the latest is just another less-than-average one to blur in indistinguishably with the rest of them.
Slasher movies used to live or die on the strength of their kills and while great gore isn’t enough to satisfy on its own anymore, it’s still important. There are a few notable bits of bloodshed in this including a bit with a tongue and a record player and a climactic, prolonged execution at the end. But after advances in visual effects made artificial violence much more achievable in films for the last few decades, horror fans need a great movie as a vehicle for great gore, or at least a shitty movie with incredible, inventive, groundbreaking gore. Halloween Ends is a mostly shitty movie with a few decent kills and that’s not nearly enough, especially as the swansong of a franchise that started with one of the genre’s bona fide all-time greats.
To its credit, Halloween Ends tries some new stuff and shakes up the formula quite a bit. There’s a second killer who joins forces with Michael Myers but also predictably battles him, and there are new characters doing plenty of things other than just being stabbed to death, too. There is also quite a different opening scene that kept me guessing and had a nicely brutal unexpected shock just before that timeless theme music kicked in for the opening credits. Unfortunately, all of the fresh elements don’t amount to anything interesting. Also to the film’s detriment, there are far, far too many fake jump scares. The amount of times it cuts rapidly to something random with a really loud noise would’ve been comical if it weren’t so annoying.
I think there’s some sort of theme about evil never ending or something, according to a book Laurie is writing in the film. Whatever that is it’s less than half-baked, as was the filmmakers’ attempt at whatever they were trying to say about trauma in Halloween Kills. That could be fine, we don’t need horror movies to make us think, even if many of the greats do; but if not then they should at least be a lot more entertaining than Halloween Ends is. I doubt the filmmakers intended it to be seen like this, but having Michael Myers as a weary, almost pitiful old man who does nothing apart from hide in a sewer for most of the movie is very much a metaphor for the movie itself.
