In 2018, the team of David Gordon Green and Danny McBride partnered with Blumhouse Productions to bring back the iconic Michael Myers. Eyebrows were raised as this new installment was asking fans to ignore all of the previous installments except the 1978 original classic. Though splitting fans, Halloween 2018, pulled off a very good entry and put forth a believable and entertaining follow up film. After a total gross neared a quarter of a billion dollars, sequels to this re-imagining were quickly greenlit. After a delay due to the international pandemic, the second installment, Halloween Kills, was released in 2021. An over-the-top blood buffet once again had fans divided on the content. Though choppy, Kills can be admired for the symphony of slaughter from The Shape as well as praised for bringing back some staple characters from the original film. An undertone of the events of 78’ holding the town of Haddonfield hostage come October set up an eagerly anticipated conclusion to this new trilogy of terror. Halloween Ends was promised to conclude the Myers vs. Strode saga with a hint of future films for the celebrated franchise.
Four years have passed since Michael Myers returned to once again wreak havoc on the small town of Haddonfield. Since that time, deathly occurrences have all been shrouded in the lore of Myers, who has completely disappeared. One of those tragedies, involving another babysitting nightmare, has destroyed the promising life of Corey Cunningham. The rattled community has gleaned a vengeful eye towards Corey, immediately casting him as the new boogeyman. Laurie Strode, now attempting to live a life free of the past, encounters Corey and empathizes with his plight. Strode introduces Corey to her granddaughter, feeling the unification of their past could help both to move on to a happier existence. Still feeling he will never break the curse of his past, Corey attempts to flee for good. His escape takes a horrific turn, and he ends up meeting the true monster of mayhem. Corey returns from his encounter a changed man. Evil and vengeance run rampant through him as he begins to attack a town that turned its back on him. With the help of The Shape, Corey begins to write his own legacy with a blood-soaked pen. Sensing a change she has seen before, Laurie attempts to keep her granddaughter safe as well as eliminate the evil before it spreads.
Apparently, it is just impossible to wrap up a storyline in this franchise. Fans were stoked for Jamie to become the new face of terror in Halloween 5. Instead, we got a jumbled cult story. Rob Zombie set up the Laurie character to possibly arise as a siren of slaughter. Nothing came of that plot. Halloween Ends dwarfs both of those disappointments with an embarrassing and arrogant finish. Green, McBride, Chris Bernier and Paul Logan scribed this abomination of a story. It took four veteran writers to pen a plot so incoherent that it would take an entire semester of study to perhaps make any sense out of its meaning. Green stated that the film would be going in another direction. It certainly did. A one-hundred-fifty mile an hour juggernaut down the wrong way of a one-way street, eventually crashing into calamity. Audiences are asked to suspend disbelief in film, the only thing to disbelieve is that anyone can buy into this absurd entry. Characters from the previous two films only show up for senseless cameos. Citizens of Haddonfield continue to blame Laurie for taunting Myers, as if she took a weekly trip to Smiths Grove to stick her tongue out at him. One of several unfathomable plot points, has Alyson ready to abandon a nursing job to run away with a man who has a severely checkered past, after knowing him for all of a few days. One might buy a down and out Alyson, who is struggling with her past, but her character is a limply written debacle and a complete waste of a potential new heroine. Laurie herself struggles to put the past behind forever and expel the ghost that has haunted the town forever. Of course, she does this by penning a memoir that would live on forever. An evil entity theme, which could be linked to Myers’ reflection in his sister’s window, is waisted with a pathetic transformation. Myers himself goes from horrifically weak to superhuman with zero plausible transformation scenes. Perhaps, just maybe, there was an idea to pass on the evil to a new generation here, but it could be mistakenly created by a bunch of fans that had a fun weekend creating a horror film on their iPhone. Not a major big budget production. The Halloween franchise, even the weaker entries, has always been admired for its score. Either that is non-existent, or the film is so awful that one can take no notice of any traditional or new sound. Green gave the franchise one of the best long pan shots in horror history with his 2018 installment, the kills he orchestrated in the second film were fantastic. While the film plays professionally visually, there is hardly a glimmer of any exceptional film making or shots that will linger after the last frame. With the exception of the opening kill, the rest of the deaths are either goofy or basic. This entire film screams, “we want to hurry up and be done with this.” Jamie Lee Curtis stated before the film’s release, that fans will hate this film. Perhaps she should have spoken those words when she received the first draft of the script!
Scream Score: 3/10