Halloween Ends Review: If Only

David Gordon Green’s Halloween Ends, the presumed conclusion to the filmmaker’s legacyquel trilogy, signals its intentions with its opening credits: Ditching the John Carpenter-aping Albertus typeface used in Green’s previous Halloween films, the credits are written in a blue sans-serif font that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who’s seen the franchise’s most infamous and idiosyncratic entry, Tommy Lee Wallace’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch. In this moment, Halloween Ends implicitly promises audiences that they’re in for something different than your average Michael Myers slash-‘em-up.

For a while, the film sort of lives up to its pledge. If we’re not exactly in off-the-wall evil-Irish-toymaker terrain, Halloween Ends is at least—in sharp contrast to its predecessors—character-driven, relatively bloodless, and light on the pervasive and often incongruous humor that co-writer Danny McBride has imprinted on the series. Michael Myers (played variously by James Jude Courtney and Nick Castle) doesn’t even show up until about halfway through, and when he does, he’s been reduced to a hermit dwelling in the sewers beneath Haddonfield.

Picking up four years after the climactic slaying of Laurie Strode’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) daughter, Karen, at the end of Halloween Kills, Halloween Ends shifts focus to a brand-new character, Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a sensitive loner who’s become alienated from the Haddonfield community after accidentally causing the death of the kid he was babysitting one fateful Halloween night. Corey strikes up a romance with Laurie’s granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), who now works as a nurse while living with her grandmother. Needless to say, both Laurie and Allyson are doing their best to put their trauma behind them.

In Halloween Ends, Green toys with an idea that the series has been hinting at throughout its previous two entries: that Michael is no mere mortal but rather some supernatural force, the physical embodiment of pure, unkillable evil. One night, Corey encounters a decrepit Michael lurking in a storm drain, and the spirit of the boogeyman seems to pass into Corey. From this point, the young man grows increasingly malevolent as Michael becomes his Yoda-like guru, training him in the black art of senseless slaughter. And in one of the film’s most potentially daring touches, Allyson flirts with the idea of joining Corey on his malicious journey.

For a while, Halloween Ends starts to feel more like a supervillain origin story than a traditional slasher. After spending two films relentlessly rehashing the past, the series finally seems to be stepping out of the long shadow of Carpenter’s original to create something novel. Even the look and feel of the film, which is shot in cool blue tones and takes place on the less idyllic fringes of Haddonfield, breaks with the warm, nostalgic glow of the previous entries.

But just as Green seems to have finally unshackled his Halloween trilogy from the dead weight of the past, Halloween Ends loses all courage of its convictions, as it steadily worms its way out of every potentially fan-alienating corner that it’s written itself into. It doesn’t help that the screenplay’s sense of drama is so frustratingly leaden and unconvincing, as the characters tend to speak in monologues that all-too-neatly unpack the film’s themes; their behaviors also seem driven more by plot considerations than the vagaries of human nature.

At one point, Halloween Ends practically rubs our noses in its own bait-and-switch tactics, teasing a plot turn that would be genuinely shocking, even upsetting, were it not for the way it’s almost instantly renounced in favor of some audience-stroking Laurie Strode badassery. Step by step, the film discards each of its novel threads, devolving into a muddle of gratuitous kills and cynical fan service as it grinds its way toward its inevitable conclusion: the mano-a-mano showdown between Laurie and Michael that the series has been teasing from its first trailer.

But Green even botches what should be a slam-dunk denouement. Buried inside Halloween Ends is a message about how evil is simply a manifestation of fear, but it’s one that isn’t brought to life by the filmmakers within the constraints of a mainstream slasher. Instead, the film ends with bodily destruction that’s as predictable as it is unsatisfying.

This may actually be the last chapter in Green’s Halloween trilogy, but given that this series has been running off and on for over four decades, it’s clear that the franchise itself isn’t coming to a close. Halloween Ends almost seems to recognize the conditional nature of its own finality in one of its final lines, spoken by Laurie herself: “Evil doesn’t die, it changes shape.” It’s true: As long as there’s money to be made, Michael Myers will always be lurking in the shadows.