USA. 2022.
Crew
Director – David Gordon Green, Screenplay – Chris Bernier, David Gordon Green, Paul Brad Logan & Danny McBride, Producers – Malek Akkad, Bill Block & Jason Blum, Photography – Michael Simmonds, Music – Cody Carpenter, John Carpenter & Daniel Davies, Visual Effects – Crafty Apes (Supervisor – Andy Chang), Cutting Edge (Supervisor – Damien Thaller), Special Effects Supervisor – Danny Cangemi & Heather Hood, Makeup Effects Design – Christopher Nelson, Prosthetics – Vincent Van Dyke Effects, Inc., Production Design – Richard A. Wright. Production Company – Universal/Miramax/Blumhouse/Rough House Pictures.
Cast
Jamie Lee Curtis (Laurie Strode), Rohan Campbell (Corey Cunningham), Andi Matichak (Allyson Nelson), James Jude Corey (The Shape/Michael Myers), Will Patton (Frank Hawkins), Jesse C. Boyd (Officer Mulaney), Michael Barbieri (Terry), Joanne Baron (Joan Cunningham), Rick Moose (Ronald Cunningham), Michele Dawson (Nurse Deb), Kyle Richards (Lindsey Wallace), Candice Rose (Mrs Allen), Michael O’Leary (Dr Mathis), Omar J. Dorsey (Sheriff Barker), Destiny Mone (Stacy), Joey Harris (Margo), Marteen (Billy), Keraun Harris (Willy the Kid), Blaque Fowler (Vagabond), Diva Taylor (Sondra), Jaxon Goldenberg (Jeremy Allen), Jack William Marshall (Mr Allen)
Plot
On Halloween of 2019, Corey Cunningham is asked to babysit young Jeremy for the Allen family. However, Corey gets locked in a room and manages to break out just as Jeremy falls over the banisters to his death. The family return home to find Corey kneeling over the body with a bloody knife. Corey is charged with manslaughter but is acquitted. In the present day, Corey works at his father’s junkyard. He is bullied by a group of teenagers but Laurie Strode comes by and drives them away. She introduces Corey to her granddaughter Allyson and the two strike up an attraction. However, the same bullies later return and beat up Corey, shoving him off a bridge. Corey enters a sewer culvert and encounters Michael Myers alive. Michael spares Corey. Allyson tells Corey that she wants to get away from Haddonfield and would gladly burn it all down. Corey then begins to take revenge against those that torment them using Michael to kill.
Halloween (1978) is an undisputed genre classic. It essentially created the Slasher Film and turned John Carpenter into a cult director. It immediately spawned a line of sequels under producer Moustapha Akkad with Halloween II (1981), Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), Halloween 5 (1989), Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998) and Halloween: Resurrection (2002). Rob Zombie then conducted a much disliked remake Halloween (2007), which produced a sequel with Halloween II (2009).
In more recent years, David Gordon Green conducted a revival of the franchise at Blumhouse with Halloween (2018) starring a sixty year-old Jamie Lee Curtis and produced by John Carpenter and the late Moustapha Akkad’s son Malek, which proved a popular commercial and critical hit. Green and Jamie Lee Curtis followed this with Halloween Kills (2021), which received a much more middling reception, and conclude the trilogy with Halloween Ends. I am not a fan of David Gordon Green’s work in the horror genre – he is at best a competent commercial director, nothing more than that, and crucially comes nowhere near creating anything of John Carpenter’s eerie suspense in the original. Green however seems to think he has the right to stand up with the horror greats and next went on to revisit another classic horror franchise with The Exorcist: Believer (2023).
The disappointment of Halloween Ends is that it is barely even a Halloween film. There is the setting of Haddonfield, while Jamie Lee’s Laurie Strode and her granddaughter (Andi Matichak) return as characters from the rest of the franchise. On the other hand, the film seems almost disinterested in Michael Myers. He lurks around the periphery but never emerges from the sewers until near the end. Crucially, he never goes on any kind of Michael Myers-esque killing rampage until the 79 minute mark – by contrast, the original Halloween only ran for 91 minutes.
Instead, the primary focus of Halloween Ends is the completely new character of Corey Cunningham. Corey has an interesting arc as someone who is wrongly charged with the death of a child but is acquitted. He seems a decent kid and is bullied until Laurie steps in and takes a shine to him, setting him up with her granddaughter Allyson. Allyson is given a left field twist that has never been part of her character before – as someone hating life in Haddonfield and only wanting to burn it all down and run away. The two of them seem destined to meet as he takes a step over to the dark side, a relationship that seems modelled on better works like Badlands (1973).
The one good aspect of this is the performance from Rohan Campbell who is capable of quite believably moving between an innocent nice kid and brooding violence. Green and co apparently based the character on Keith Gordon in John Carpenter’s Christine (1983) – even going to the extent of outfitting the character with the same surname Cunningham in homage. There are other John Carpenter homages throughout, including at one point screening The Thing (1982) on tv – the original 1951 film The Thing from Another World (1951) appears on the tv in the original Halloween. (This leads to interesting speculation about whether John Carpenter exists in this fictional timeline, especially given that the success of the original Halloween is what led to him directing The Thing).
Not since Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) have we had an entry in the series that feels as though it taken the name of the series to lure audiences in the door only to use it to make a completely different film altogether. The characters are wrenched out of shape – Allyson is rewritten from the standard Final Girl she was in previous chapters into someone who has a simmering resentment for the town she grew up in that is only a couple of notches away from anarchic violence. Even worse is the character of Michael Myers who goes from evil incarnate and a mindless killing machine to someone else’s bitch, engaged in a series of revenge killings at Corey’s bidding.
It is only in its last half that Halloween Ends emerges as being the slasher film it promised to be. At which it is a standard hackathon, which makes it no more than one of the sequels to the original, just the same as Halloween Kills was. There does get to be an effective climactic knock-down-drag-‘em-out fight between Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael. The film ends with a whole town funeral for Michael as Jamie Lee feeds his body into a shredder, which seems a fairly decisive attempt to kill the character off even as David Gordon Green is making noises in press junket for the film about ways that the franchise can continue.
Trailer here