HALLOWEEN ENDS (2022) ★
Looking at the latest "Halloween" trilogy, which began in 2018, I've never been more certain that Hollywood needs to stop making sequels. They really messed up the "Star Wars" franchise. "Indiana Jones and the (Fill in the Blank)" is well past its sell-by date. And Malek Akkad, son of Moustapha, might've given his father's legacy a better send off than "Halloween Ends."
The problem with this movie is that it sucks. It isn't scary. It isn't interesting. It is boring from the first minute to the last. And worst of all, it has no clue that it sucks. It thinks it's a good movie. It thinks it's the best film in the latest sequel series, because it intends to show us how Michael Myers finally meets his fate. But it's self-contradictory. It has been established in all the previous films that Michael is un-killable. "Halloween Kills" drove that home harder than any of them. The whole town tried its damnedest to kill him. It beat him with clubs, shot him, and severed his spine, just under the base of his skull. He went down, as he always does. And as usual, he got up again and butchered everyone. You can't do Mike. Mike does you.
"Halloween Ends" loses that character trait, and offers us an aging, limping, uncertain Michael. Set four years after "Halloween Kills," the story suggests that he's been living in a sewer. It isn't really clear why that is, because he's never "lived" anywhere before, except in his childhood home and in a maximum security prison. Yet suddenly he's borrowing his digs from Pennywise the clown. But even weirder, "Halloween Ends" portrays the town of Haddonfield, where all prior horrors occurred, as a sedate Anytown USA, full of smiling faces and suburban homes with apple pies in their windows. Jamie Lee Curtis plays Laurie Strode as someone who has forgotten the past, and who has no concern about the present - a present in which Michael is still at large. She bakes and runs errands at the grocery store like everyone else. Gone is the militant survivor of past movies. No more guns, knives, and booby traps. What gives?
None of this makes any sense. The movie shifts most of its focus away from Michael and his genuinely scary presence, and moves it over to a dullard named Corey Cunningham, who is played by a sleepwalking Rohan Campbell. Corey is a teen who accidentally knocked a rich couple's pre-pubescent brat from their third story landing and somehow avoided serving time for manslaughter. It's more rewarding to watch paint dry than it is to watch Corey's life. He's a lonely geek who committed a physically impossible crime (the door he knocked the kid with was nowhere near the landing), and yet his spare time is relegated to being bullied at gas stations and sulking over the fact that Andi Matichak's character has the hots for him. Matichak is given precious little to work with; Allyson Nelson, Laurie's granddaughter, has also gone from being determined to murder Michael to not giving a whit. It's as if everyone but Michael has lost it.
The most galling mistake of this film is the critical miscalculation at its core. At some point writers Paul Brad Logan, Chris Bernier, Danny McBride, and writer/director David Gordon Green decided that Michael Myers needed to die, and that his death would mark the end of the saga. But audiences aren't interested in seeing him buy the farm. The whole point of "Halloween" is that Michael Myers possesses death-defying powers that are just shy of ridiculous, and downright terrifying when the lights go down. Killing him, and creating a scenario in which he loses his paranormal edge, defeats the purpose of seeing "The Shape" stalk Haddonfield's streets on October 31st. Worse still, it gives fans exactly what they don't want.
Green's movie does eventually ramp up the gratuitous stabbing and strangling and bloodshed, but it's all framed by a story that isn't ready for it. Michael isn't ready for it, and the broken narrative pushes him into acts that are also bizarrely hypocritical. This is what happens when bad writing infects a franchise: producers try papering over the unnecessary act of lying to the audience. We all know this isn't the end of Michael Myers. We all expect to see that familiar demented William Shatner mask again. Everyone knows "Halloween" has no end. We don't need a lame movie to pretend otherwise.
--- Bill Fontaine
