Halloween Ends Review

Halloween Ends? It’s about time it did. Mike Myers has been wandering the streets of Haddonfield since 1978, and in that time, a whole one film of real, lasting quality has been released. That is not a good inning. Certainly not in the grand scheme of where Halloween now ends. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is back in action after the grease and slop of Halloween Kills released. It was going to take a Herculean effort to salvage the final piece of the trilogy, and, as expected, nobody was particularly up for that. Not much effort in attempting to breach the market with something expressive or new. No, instead, slumping onto Peacock with a rock-heavy soundtrack is a tongue-in-cheek re-appraisal of the slasher and its place in the genre.

Move on, appears to be the message David Gordon Green. Evil shifts in shape. That is a lot of dedication given to Halloween, whose audience at this point is here for kills, blood and gore. Those that enter into this piece just for that and the lowly decal of classic 1970s horror will be excited. But those that are here just for that may as well watch the John Carpenter original or the two-piece Rob Zombie feature pack. Halloween Ends is as comical as it is poorly structured and thoroughly meandering. As fun as it is to see Curtis attempt to light the fire of a new direction for this character, it is about four decades too late. What happens instead is a woeful attempt at passing the torch, for hero and for villain, in a sloppy and underwritten piece.

Even the chills and kills that should be right at the forefront of Halloween Ends are desperately unappealing and terribly stiff. They are the usual moments of discomfort that prey on exploitation of death, vulnerable and underwritten characters. When that is paired with a sincerely awful performance from Rohan Campbell, things start to fall apart. Granted it is not Campbell’s fault he is being asked to saunter around as the new face of the series, but doing so relegates the real attraction to the backseat. Instead of giving closure to characters that are decades in the making, Green makes the startling, useless decision to focus on new storylines that exist only in this piece. If this is his attempt to reform and articulate the Haddonfield horrors then he has missed the mark with a pairing of stereotypical, dullard moments and, fascinatingly enough, discovering the one and only way to make Myers look weak and emotionally vulnerable.

In humanising a spirit known only as The Shape, Halloween Ends completely undoes what it was hoping to achieve. By desecrating the source in the hopes of building something fresh from the ashes, it fails to check the foundation is sturdy. Sloppy and underwhelming, yet set to be defended by those that believe throwing Myers off into some poultry ending, equivalent to that of a witch burning from the Middle Ages, is a satisfying conclusion to four years of story building. Muddled, uninteresting and damned beyond the stages of mediocre shallowness, Halloween Ends is exactly what fans of Halloween Kills deserve.