INTRODUCTION
The following is my review for the film Halloween Ends. A reminder, you can click this link to see how I grade films when I review them.
PLOT
Four years after the events of Halloween night 2018, Laurie has decided to liberate herself from fear and rage and embrace life. But when a young man is accused of killing a boy he was babysitting, it ignites a cascade of violence and terror that will force Laurie to finally confront the evil she can’t control, once and for all.
REVIEW
After Godzilla and the classic Universal Monsters, the Halloween horror movie franchise is one of those slate of genre movies that helped me grow into discovering film as youngin’. I probably shouldn’t have been watching those movies at my age, but nonetheless they were the first slasher films I watched and wanted more of.
The Halloween franchise tends to be ranked dramatically different by everyone who has watched all the movies. Everyone pretty much agrees the 1978 original is the best, but after that I’ve seen literally every sequel and reboot be ranked high and low on everyone’s lists. And its understandable, the franchise has become like the Godzilla franchise in having different continuities, timelines, and versions of the Myers mythos.
The latest of those continuities is the David Gordon Green trilogy which follows up just the original 1978 movie forty years on as Michael escapes captivity once again, and a much older Laurie Strode is ready for him.
I have to be upfront with you that these movies have been hard for me to vibe with. The 2018 film is good, but I’m not in the camp that think its top tier of the franchise either as some clashing tones in it always nag at me. The second movie in the trilogy in Halloween Kills is one of my least favorite movies of the franchise and one my bigger disappointments from last year . So did the third movie finish this off well enough for me?
I’m sad to say no. In fact this honestly might be my least favorite movie OF THE ENTIRE FRANCHISE. Its going to be hard not to do some light spoilers while making my case against the movie so forgive me if I reveal too much.
There’s a reason this has had an Avengers: Endgame style marketing with practically nothing revealed in the trailers. Mainly because Myers isn’t in his “final movie” (Yeah, right, Mike will be back) all that much. Instead we spent most of the running time watching an ill-fated horror romance that feels like its another movie stuck in a Michael Myers film. Granted when Myers finally gets his turn in the third act, we see him do what he does best, but it takes forever to get there. It was giving me flashbacks to the locust subplot in Jurassic World: Dominion but at the very least I still got plenty of the Dinosaurs I was promised.
Furthermore there’s some baffling story beat decisions in this that try to expand on Myers being some sort of supernatural force in a way that I always found silly when these movies went there. I also found it jarring and unrealistic with how we find Laurie and her granddaughter at the start of the film, you’d almost think the last two movies never happened.
If I had to give positives, the performances are all good even with the questionable writing and character arcs. Jamie Lee Curtis unsurprisingly delivers in what we know for sure will be her final turn as Laurie. And if you’re here for the kills you’re going to get them and they are especially gory in this one. I’ll also admit there were one or two times a jump scare actually got me. And just like the other movies you get another solid score and soundtrack.
But all in all, I am happy to say goodbye to this trilogy and will patiently wait to see where the franchise goes next when it inevitably gets rebooted sometime in the next five to ten years. If you enjoyed these movies all the power to you, as I stated before this franchise is always filled with divisive movies that have their own separate cult followings. But for me, I’m happy Halloween Ends puts a capstone on this particular take of the iconic film villain that is Michael Myers.
INITIAL GRADE