Halloween Ends The Franchise With A Whimper

Halloween (2018) is a great addition to the Halloween canon. Halloween Kills was a lackluster second entry to the franchise. Not every series can have three perfect entries though, so when Halloween Ends started I had some hope. I hoped writer/director David Gordon Green, who so clearly understood what made the original film so special, would ditch the Covid-19 metaphor and deliver a straight to the point Halloween entry. 

I regret to inform you this isn’t the case. Below is a very slightly spoilery review, because I have to spoil something about Michael Meyers to tell you why Halloween Ends ends the franchise so poorly.

Halloween Ends begins with a long cold open (long is the name of the game with this film, weighing in at almost 2 hours) that ends in an incredibly sudden and harrowing child death. The young man involved, who has not appeared in any other installment of the Halloween franchise, is a major player for the rest of the film and feels out of place among franchise leaders Jamie Lee Curtis, Will Patton and Green-directed staple Andi Matichak. And yet here we are, a movie where the main character is this relative unknown. This maybe wouldn’t bother me except Michael Meyers doesn’t appear until almost an hour into this film and his first kill isn’t until 20+ minutes after that. While Halloween Kills had a clunky insurrection metaphor this film uses a clunky disease metaphor, implying the whole town has caught the evil since Michael’s disappearance after the events of Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills. There is an especially egregious shot where it seems someone has caught the evil by breathing the same air as Michael Meyers. 

Halloween Ends also puts a large amount of focus on the Haddonfield radio tower, which feels like something they meant to set up in the previous films but just didn’t. Laurie Strode seems to be the only through line from Halloween and Halloween Kills — she has a new lease on life now that Michael has disappeared. She has a house and lives with her granddaughter Allison and has even decorated for Halloween. The book she’s writing, presented to us through narration, is clunky but sweet. 

While the meat of Halloween Ends takes place in 2022, four years after the first two movies, some of the characters seem to have aged more than others. Allison, for example, seems a lot older than the 20ish she would be, and this movie doesn’t explore this at all. 

So we have a movie that is marketed as the grand finale of the Laurie/Michael conflict that Michael is barely even in. The kills in this film are unsatisfying and often filmed in such a way it’s almost impossible to know what’s happening. The main character of the film is someone completely new to the audience and the entire town (and by extension the narrative) seems to have blamed Laurie for what happened in 2018. There’s barely any score, it’s mostly licensed music. It all feels so out of place compared to Halloween 2018 that I’m genuinely baffled it came from the same production team. 

This movie can’t decide what it is. Is it an It Follows ghost movie? No. Is it a Halloween movie? Is it a send up of classic tropes? No. It seems to want to be all those things but it never gels. There are more fake out jumpscares than real scares, there are allusions to the previous installments galore but those do not a good film make. They show an excerpt from John Carpenter’s The Thing at the beginning of the film and by the end I wished I had just stayed home and watched that instead. 

I truly can’t get over an hour and fifty minute Halloween movie with about 15 minutes of Michael. To quote Greta Garbo, “give me back my beast!” 

Halloween Ends (Blumhouse Productions; R; 1 hr 51 mins) gets 1 star out of 5.