After escaping the inferno he was trapped in in Halloween (2018), Michael Myers carves/stabs/crushes a path of destruction through Haddonfield while a mob led by Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall) and other survivors follow in his wake.
Because of contractual obligations, Myers kills everybody and escapes again.
Four years later, Myers is still missing, but Haddonfield has found a new boogeyman: Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a young man who accidentally killed a kid he was babysitting.
Still traumatised by the incident, and bullied by those who believe he is a murderer, Corey has been unable to move on.
After some kids assault him, Corey is left for dead.
Which is where he meets someone who will shape his future - and that of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis)…
This is a review of Halloween Ends, but it will partially be about Kills, which I watched immediately before it.
I lay out that track because it probably informed my impression of Ends more than anything else.
Kills feels narratively unfinished - it begins as a previously on and ends in a way that feels more generic
There is some attempt at thematic development - the rage of the trauma caused by Michael Myers - but it is dissipated by a story that splits itself too thin, and feels more like connective tissue for elements of its predecessors rather than a complete story.
The movie is more of a straight slasher movie, but the attempts at commentary (is mob justice bad?) and constant need to fill in narrative gaps means it is never as fun as it could be.
If Kills is the franchise spinning wheels, Ends is the series picking a direction and mostly sticking to it.
From the beginning, Ends feels like it has a sense of direction and purpose. It also feels less interested in tying itself to the franchise.
The lack of familiar story beats gives the story a real sense of tension and surprise.
Michael Myers is not seen for almost half the runtime, and when he is, he comes on like the sum total of his injuries and age.
For the first half of the movie, the story is centred around Corey and his increasing estrangement from society. There is a shift from Michael - a creature seemingly born evil - to Corey, an ordinary person rendered evil through circumstance.
It makes for an interesting change of pace from its predecessor and marks Ends out as the original entry in the franchise since Season of the Witch.
It is not perfect - the bullies who catalyse Corey’s transformation are cartoons, and feel totally out of step with the muted, autumnal tone of the film. Their presence, along with Michael Myers’ eventual appearance, begins to deflate the sense of psychological realism the film is attempting. The romance between Corey and Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) never really convinces either.
And in the end, unlike the first Halloween III, this movie has to also act as a conclusion to the Laurie-Michael story, which means the Shape has to be wedged back into the story - and means we get two distinct climaxes right after each other.
For a trilogy which is supposedly about Laurie finally triumphing over the Shape, the films still feel stuck in the familiar groove of the unkillable slasher villain.
What is frustrating is that the finale ends on the idea that evil never dies - it changes shape. It feels like you could cut Michael Myers out of this movie and it would still work with the Shape mask as a metaphor for Michael’s evil enabling new variants like Corey.
Back in the eighties, John Carpenter supposedly pitched the idea of a Halloween movie where Michael Myers is dead, but his presence continues to haunt and influence Haddonfield.
A genuinely progressive direction for the franchise would have been to kill Michael in Halloween ‘18, and use the fear he has engendered in the community to explore the ways it affects people, whether through the mob mentality of Kills or the rise of copycats in Ends.
Halloween Ends is more entertaining and involving than it has any right to be, but in the end it highlights the limits of the legacy sequel template.
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