A two-and-half-star rating can seem like a “meh” response, but this is more of a split-the-difference score, for a horror flick that has stretches of baffling badness but also fits of weird brilliance. As Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) moves toward a last reckoning with the seemingly unkillable Michael Myers, the final entry in David Gordon Green’s legacy sequel trilogy never falls into easy cliché.
Unfortunately, it’s a maddening, bewildering, bloody mess.
Director Green, who co-scripts with Danny McBride, has a clear message: Evil doesn’t die, it just changes shape.
The shape we see in the very fraught year of 2022 feeds on the fact that fear, shame and rage are contagious. Violence doesn’t stop at the end of Michael Myers’ butcher knife. Its knock-on effects have seeped into the community of Haddonfield for four decades, spreading trauma and guilt, giving rise to victim-blaming, conspiracy theories and an irrational mob mentality.
People are always looking for a boogeyman, Laurie believes. Michael Myers may be the unknowable, unstoppable embodiment of pure evil, but Halloween Ends is more interested in the way his monstrosity unlocks the potential for evil in others.
Some franchise fans will be outraged by this approach to the Halloween legend, some will be intrigued, but almost everyone will be frustrated by how the message plays out in the storyline — first with slow, sneaky hints, then with bonkers bloodshed, but mostly in ways that feel conceptually and psychologically incoherent and incomplete.
As the story opens, Laurie has finally made herself a real home, not a fortified trap. She lives with granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), and she’s writing a memoir and even flirting awkwardly with Officer Frank Hawkins (Will Patton) at the grocery store.
When Allyson, still grieving the loss of her mother, meets Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a young man dealing with his own trauma, the two begin a tentative relationship. Meanwhile, in the lead-up to Oct. 31, Michael Myers seems to be lurking somewhere close, waiting to unleash another night of horror.
There’s a genuinely shocking cold open, which efficiently and effectively upends a number of horror tropes, and a high-body-count conclusion with some crunchy, nastily clever kills.
In between, Curtis is the poignant throughline trying to hold things together, as well as linking John Carpenter’s classic 1978 original to this 13th franchise instalment. Laurie has gone from scream queen and teen babysitter to a defiantly middle-aged survivor, and there’s something radical about centring a slasher flick on the 63-year-old Curtis, who now stands, in all her grey-haired glory and vulnerability, as a kind of post-menopausal Final Girl.
There are also moments — an impressionistic party scene, some atmospheric nightscapes — that remind us that Green, before he turned to comedy (Pineapple Express) and then horror (he’s currently helming a remake of The Exorcist), was an indie filmmaker whose debut feature, George Washington, had an evocative, imagistic, Terrence Malick-type vibe.
Ultimately, though, this trilogy, which had a promising start with Halloween (2018) and a stalled-out second entry with Halloween Kills (2021), has fatally faltered. Halloween ends, the title suggests, and with this exasperatingly uneven finale, it should.
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Alison Gillmor
Writer
Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto’s York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992.
