Probably the best that can be said for Halloween Ends, which was released two weeks ago, is that, after the disaster of Halloween Kills (2021), there were low expectations for the film and it cleared them. Just about. Maybe.
The primary structural problem with Halloween Kills was that it just tried to do too much; there were too many characters, themes, and subplots for even a good script to have melded them into something coherent and enjoyable. Halloween Ends has some extraneous elements it neither fully commits to nor ties up (we’ll get to that), but it largely corrects this worst flaw of Halloween Kills and in many ways that is enough to make it a better film than the last one.
Halloween Ends, however, has a structural flaw all of its own: Michael Myers (played here by James Jude Courtney) does not appear at all until forty minutes into the film; plays an intermittent part for the next twenty-five minutes; and then disappears again until fifteen minutes before the end. It would be a strange decision to have Michael occupy only forty minutes out of 105 in any movie in the franchise, but to do it in the last one is crazy.
The reason Michael’s role is so reduced is that the central character in Halloween Ends is Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a 21-year-old introduced in the cold open, who accidentally kills a boy he is babysitting and then becomes the boyfriend of Laurie Strode’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) granddaughter, Allyson Nelson (Andi Matichak), before—to give away the plot (I did warn you)—discovering Michael hiding in a sewer, collaborating with Michael in a series of murders, and then stealing Michael’s role (mask and all) until the last quarter of an hour.
The Halloween series did not even have to rely on the lesson of Friday the 13th Part V (1985), where the killer was not Jason Voorhees, to know this would be a bad idea. Whatever novelty or shock value replacing a franchise’s killer seems to have in theory, the payoff is never going to work in practice. Halloween has its own experience with this. Setting aside the debacle of Halloween 3 (1982), there is an almost direct analogy when the series wisely backed away from the idea it trailed at the end of Halloween 4 (1988) that Michael’s role would pass to his niece, Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris).
Halloween Kills repeated the plot problem of Halloween II (1981) by having its main character, Laurie, once again in a hospital bed for most of the film; it is arguably worse for Halloween Ends to have made an error that has actually been averted once. Indeed, the transfer of Michael’s evil to Corey makes less sense than it would have with Jamie: there was a blood relation with Jamie and some effort at the end of Halloween 4 to suggest a transfer by contact; Halloween Ends begins with Corey feeling genuine contrition for the accidental death he caused, and then quite suddenly he is on a killing rampage.
Speaking of the end of the fourth film, the transition to Halloween 5 (1989), set a year later, involves Michael being shot and falling down a mineshaft, only to be nursed back to health by a hermit. Now, it is a difficult enough stretch that the opening sequence to Halloween 5 has Michael essentially lying in one place for a year, but at least he had been injured in a way that would have been fatal to anyone else, so one can sort of work with the idea of a slow recovery. Halloween Kills did not end with Michael being seriously injured, and Halloween Ends is set four years later: it makes the enfeebled Michael we are introduced to in the sewer incomprehensible. How can he be this weak after all this time? One of the themes that Halloween Ends begins to play with to explain this—that Michael has withered without killing, and is then revived when Corey brings him someone to kill—gets completely lost when, a few scenes later, Corey returns to the sewer and wrestles the mask off Michael in probably the worst scene of the film. In between these two events, there is a sequence of collaborative kills between Michael and Corey that do not work, either. Having Michael work with someone made it difficult to continue to suspend disbelief.
As a slasher, Halloween Ends essentially fails in all directions: there is none of the suspense the Halloween franchise was built on; the gore in this one is—with one exception—behind Halloween Kills; and the things it attempts to do on the psychological and sociological front (summarised by the much-mocked repetition in Curtis’ interviews of the word “trauma”) are superficial.
I never particularly liked the reboot idea—I quite liked the fourth, fifth, and sixth (at least the producer’s cut) films—but Halloween (2018) was so good it gave some hope for this new trilogy. Alas, such hopes were dashed. I still think Halloween Kills is objectively worse—a bafflingly pointless film that could have been replaced by some version of Halloween Ends, if they really had to have this Corey-type detour, before bringing it back around to Michael for the final act. But it is a close-run thing, since Halloween Kills is at least recognisably a Halloween film, while Halloween Ends feels only tenuously linked to the rest of the series.
Ultimately, Halloween Ends just was not what I would have wanted from a Halloween film at any point in the series, and for this to be how my favourite horror franchise ended was especially disappointing. Still, it is to be hoped this really is the end. Michael being fairly definitively killed off, and the rebuke at the box office, suggests it might be. The story has been played out as far as it can go. Time for something fresh.