--Laurie Strode, Halloween Ends
After an excellent resurrection of the series in 2018 and a more mixed sequel Halloween Kills in 2021, the reboot Halloween movies come to a very strange, unfitting end. What could have been a highly suspenseful, nostalgic, and morally charged finale--after all, Halloween Kills very directly addresses how people can become the very things they think they are fighting against--barely even seems like it was intended to follow the other sequel films from 2018 and 2021. Did the writers not have a coherent plan for the trilogy from the start? It would appear not! Halloween Ends completes the steady decline of the recent films, and it is fortunate for the franchise that this has been hailed as the definitive conclusion to the latest of several reboots to the series.
Production Values
The very disjointed nature of the new trilogy and a particularly disjointed third installment does not even boast the greatest brutality of the 2018-2022 reboot era. Jamie Lee Curtis is still as right at home in the role as she was in 2018, but, like with so much in this story, the way she is utilized and the direction things go in fails to match the talent of the cast. She is also a main character rather than the main character. Halloween Ends is not even primarily about Laurie Strode or Michael Myers. For the most part, it is about Laurie's granddaughter Allyson and her new boyfriend Corey, whose potential for darkness leads him to become a sort of protege of Michael--whether this is supposed to be an explicitly supernatural connection they share or just a random development is not actually clarified. Andi Matichak and Rohan Campbell, who play Allyson and Corey, are not the ones at fault for a story that needed to focus on other characters, and there are more than a few moments where their characters are realized very well, with sincere pains and longings. The plot is just so pointlessly bizarre for a reboot Halloween movie that almost every opportunity beyond the performances themselves is wasted.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
A year after Michael Myers resurfaced in Haddonfield in 2018, a babysitter named Corey accidentally kills the child he was watching, receiving lots of contempt from a town that does not understand the distinction between accidentally killing someone and murdering them. Four years after the events of Halloween Kills, Laurie has begun living in a more hopeful, relaxed manner. She has started a book about her traumatic experiences in Haddonfield. When she first meets Corey, she introduces him to her granddaughter to let them become romantically entangled, but Michael encounters and spares Corey because he is implied to see himself in this other person. Corey becomes more aggressive to people besides Allyson as Allyson loses her allegiance to the town.
Intellectual Content
Too muddled and all over the place to effectively explore its themes about how evil and tragedy and so easily beget more evil and tragedy, Halloween Ends tries to show the injustices and dangers of scapegoating others and of responding to unjust violence with more unjust violence, but its lack of narrative focus and the vague, unexpected direction the story goes in holds it back. As if to show how the worldviews of the characters are random in ways that mirror the plot, Laurie gives one of the most erroneous descriptions of evil when she calls it an external physical threat to safety, but then she says that another kind of evil lurks within the human heart, one that people might not know has infected them. There is no way to know if one is good or evil just by introspecting on how one feels about oneself or about any concept or action, for feelings are irrelevant to moral metaphysics and epistemology, yet at least Laurie was seemingly trying to acknowledge how people can sink into things they want to justify even though they oppose them in others. This, was an undeveloped theme that deserved far better attention than it received.
Conclusion
Halloween Ends does not come close to living up to the promise and excellence of the 2018 reboot which set the series down this path. To take such a strong beginning and then avoid or misuse the story threads that branch (or could have branched) from it is a tragedy, and one that was completely avoidable, as practically all cinematic blunders are. There are glimmers of potential in this end to the trilogy. Allyson and Corey really do share some sweet moments with each other and benefit from skilled acting, but sidelining Michael and Laurie in the climax of their own rebooted franchise without a very strong story was destined to fall short of what it reaches for. Had the series continued beyond this without another remake or reboot, it would probably only have descended into greater flaws.
Content:
1. Violence: The handful of kills sometimes involve lots of blood. Imagery like that of a woman impaled against a wall off the ground or a man having his neck snapped is all shown onscreen.
2. Profanity: "Fuck," "shit," and "damn" are used.
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