We have waited a long time for this, the final showdown between Laurie Strode and Michael Myers. This is 44 years in the making. Was it worth it or should you skip all together?
NOTE: I spoil the entirety of HALLOWEEN ENDS as well as the ending of HALLOWEEN KILLS. If you do not want to know what happens, then I would not read this review until after you see the film.
I am a big fan of what David Gordon Green and company did with HALLOWEEN 2018 and HALLOWEEN KILLS. I thought that both films worked and had a lot of fun watching both of, especially HALLOWEEN KILLS. So, I was very excited about seeing what they would do with the final entry into their trilogy, HALLOWEEN ENDS.
I did not like the film.
The film starts out with this guy taking care of a kid in a giant house. The kid is an asshole. Him and the guy watch John Carpenter’s THE THING and then the kid disappears. The guy goes looking for the kid. The guy goes into the attic and the kid locks him in. The guy busts down the door, hitting the kid and sending him over the railing, killing him in the process.
We flash forward four years and Laurie is actually happy. She is living with her granddaughter and is actually looking forward to Halloween. I thought that this was a weird choice given that Laurie’s daughter was killed on Halloween in the last film. Laurie spent forty years being scared of Michael Myers, but then she is ok with the holiday after her daughter is killed four years prior? It is a weird turn to go with, but the film gets a lot weirder.
The guy from the beginning of the film has spent time in jail (I think) and he is out and working at his father’s junkyard. I didn’t realize it was his father’s place until later on in the film. He meets, Allyson, Laurie’s granddaughter and they begin to date. There are a few scenes where someone from the town gets mad that anyone would allow this guy to be alive but Allyson decides to stay with him.
Then he starts killing people.
The guy is harassed by some punks who throw him off a bridge. The guy is saved by someone who drags him into a nearby sewer. Who is the person who saved him? Well, that would be our favorite villain, Michael Myers. Yes, Myers saves this kid. I guess he saw something in the guy. The guy wants to learn how to kill like Myers, so he leads one of his many harassers into the sewer where Myers kills the harasser. I guess this is Myers passing the baton to the guy and I think this made them friends too. Yes, Michael Myers, who is purely and simply evil, has made a friend. They don’t stay friends too long as the guy beats up Myers and steals his mask. I don’t really know why he does this as he had his own mask, but he steals it anyway.
It was at this point in the film that I said: What the fuck is this film?
I don’t get why Green and company would go in this direction. This is supposed to be the end of their HALLOWEEN trilogy and they leave Myers on the sidelines. Why? We came to see a HALLOWEEN film and it doesn’t really feel like one. Sure, the film takes place on HALLOWEEN, at least some of it does, but without Myers, the film feels like something else entirely. There should have been a build-up to the final confrontation between Laurie and Michael, but there isn’t. The film spends so much time with this guy that we actually forget we are watching a HALLOWEEN film. For most of the runtime, Myers isn’t even a threat. You would think that the town wouldn’t forget what happened in the last film, but it seems like they do. Sure, there are a few scenes with a few of the townspeople from the last film, but they are few and far between. This does not feel like the Haddonfield of the last film. This feels like a completely different town that barely brings up Michael Myers. I mean, the townspeople were chasing Myers down in the last film. He is still around yet they don’t seem to care much.
When Myers decides to come out of hiding, the film is basically over. He shows up at Laurie’s house and they fight. This is the most that Myers does in the entire film. The guy that Allyson falls for is the main focus of the film. After he steals Myers' mask, he dresses like him and kills a few people. Myers basically comes out of hiding to get his mask back. It just so happens that the mask is at Laurie’s house. Had the mask been somewhere else, Myers would have killed the people who were around when he goes to get his mask and then disappear again. This takes away from the final confrontation. He only goes after Laurie because she was there when he got his mask back.
The film also makes takes the power of the ending of HALLOWEEN KILLS and kills it. That film ended with Michael Myers killing Laurie's daughter. It was a shocking ending that no one saw coming. HALLOWEEN ENDS does nothing with this ending. You would think that something would have come from it, but it doesn't. I was really disappointed by this as that ending means almost nothing now. The filmmakers could have built off of it instead of focusing on a guy we don't care about. While I applaud the new direction for its ballsiness, it just doesn't work.
Now, is there anything good about the film? Sure there is. The film is really gory. It’s not as gory as HALLOWEEN KILLS, but it still has its fair share of gore. The scene at the junkyard was especially gory. The problem lies in the fact that Myers does almost none of the killing, so it falls a bit flat. Still, I liked the gore.
The film’s score is also great. In fact, the score is the best thing about this film. Carpenter and company really go out with the score and it is placed in just the right spots for maximum effectiveness. The scene at the end of the film with all the townspeople is really effective. It is a shame that this great score is wasted on a kind of bad film.
HALLOWEEN ENDS is the sequel to FRIDAY THE 13th PART V: A NEW BEGINNING we should have gotten. At the end of that film, Tommy Jarvis is shown to be wearing the hockey mask (I know that it is Roy’s mask, but that’s ok) and he is about to kill the final girl. You change the names along with the beginning of HALLOWEEN ENDS and change Jason into Michael Myers and you have HALLOWEEN ENDS. The film is ok at best, but it should have been so much more. This should have been the epic conclusion to the Laurie Strode/Michael Myers storyline, but it isn’t. It is some guy with a small role (cameo) from Michael Myers.
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