Film Review: Halloween Ends

Director: David Gordon Green
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell
Running time: 111 minutes

Halloween Ends has been marketed as the, um, end of the Halloween franchise - a something finale that will bring Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie and Michael Myers face-to-face one last time. The trailers suggest as much. The poster suggests as much. So why, then, does the film make every effort to focus on anything other than those two? Why, with a pretty sizable runtime of just under two hours, is so little of the movie spent with characters the audience actually cares about? This, alongside a cacophony of other cinematic sins, makes the final instalment in David Gordon Green’s horror trilogy brutally bad. 

The story begins with Rohan Campbell’s Corey, an aspiring engineer, as his time babysitting a family friend’s child ends in tragedy - and the film largely follows his descent into madness from there. Only every now and then do we meet back up with the franchise’s main characters, and only in the most bizarre circumstances: Laurie is writing a book that will need heavily editing if it is to avoid a drubbing on Goodreads; Michael gives us some insight into his unusual living situation (let’s just say it’d make for a lousy episode of MTV Cribs). 

And it is because of the focus on Corey’s storyline, a tired, messy exploration of incel culture, that Halloween Ends rather rapidly falls apart. Where the original Halloween - and, to a lesser extent, Green’s 2018 reboot - are built on suspense, on the tension of not knowing what lurks in the shadows, Corey’s tale is an on-the-nose revenge narrative that feels like it’s been plucked from the latest cheap Netflix teen movie. 

The dialogue is painfully unsubtle, and the director and his team can’t seem to decide whether they want you to root for him or not. At times, it feels like the over-crowded writing team - which consists of four separate screenwriters - had sat down to watch Joker and discussed how they could take any artistry from that film and replace it with B-movie tropes. 

Due to the obsession with Corey’s narrative, Halloween Ends suffers from the Toy Story 4 effect. That is, it takes a punt on an emotional, cathartic final act that fails to justify its attempt at a pay-off. Keeping characters apart for ninety minutes, giving them no connection and no contact, and then chucking them together right at the last does little to engage the audience in the stakes of their relationship. For this reason, when they do finally meet, it’s genuinely difficult to care. 

For all its failings, though, this film will largely satisfy those looking for some easy, mindless brutality during this spooky season. As was the case with last year’s release, Green refuses to hold back on the visuals of the kills in this one, and, while the motivations behind these kills are questionable, there is undoubtedly creativity within the gore. If you’re happy to look past a dull storyline, shoddy editing and poor scriptwriting, you could have a great time here. 

So, Halloween ends, but it ends with a whimper. 44 years and 3,642 sequels after the original wowed audiences with its originality and bravery, the franchise comes to a close with a painfully generic, poorly-executed finale. No happy halloween here, then.

Halloween Ends is now showing at Savoy Cinema