In my opinion, the best kind of movies are the ones where after you see one you have no idea if it was a bad movie or a good one. Halloween Ends is one of those movies.
As the third and final entry in David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, Ends has a lot resting on its shoulders. It has to live up to the brilliance of his 2018 reboot, which featured the exact right levels of self-awareness while also basically being a remake of the original. It has to make up for the disaster that was Halloween Kills. And it has to provide closure to fans (at least until the studio reboots the entire thing a few years from now).
Defying all expectations, Halloween Ends manages to do all three. It’s also one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen.
Spoiler alert: At this point, I’m going to get into some medium-sized plot details because it’s kind of impossible to describe this movie without spoiling parts of it. Also, it comes out later today. Consider yourself warned.
Halloween Ends begins with a story that has nothing to do with Michael Meyers. On Halloween night, 2019, high school senior Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) is babysitting a rich kid in Haddonfield, Illinois. The kid decides to prank Corey and, in a freak accident, Corey kills the kid.
Fast forward three years to 2022 and Corey, who got off on a manslaughter charge, is still living in Haddonfield and ostracized by everyone in town. In the absence of Michael Myers, who’s seemingly vanished, Corey’s become the town’s defacto new boogeyman.
One day outside a local gas station, he’s terrorized by a group of high school marching band members (yes, this movie tries to convince us that band kids can be both cool and scary). Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) steps in to help and decides to set Corey up with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), who’s still dealing with the trauma of watching Michael murder both of her parents.
In perhaps the movie’s most shocking twist, Corey and Allyson fall in love. The only problem is that Corey has a deadly secret... he found Michael Myers in an old sewer and has seemingly teamed up with the serial killer. (Yes, this is the plot of Halloween Ends and it rules. No further questions.)
Corey and Allyson make no sense at first until you realize just how broken Allyson is. This is a movie that devotes at least a fourth of its runtime to a bizarre romance full of dreamy motorcycle rides and dialogue about waiting to burn down the world (“I’ll light the match,” Corey says in response.)
The brilliance of 2018’s Halloween was its depiction of a deeply traumatized Laurie Strode decades after Michael Myers’ attack. This movie pulls a similar trick with Laurie’s granddaughter, and it mostly works.
Rohan Campbell does a decent job at selling Corey, which is no easy task when you consider that he’s basically the Halloween equivalent of Michael Meyers’ Sith apprentice. Campbell pulls off unhinged for the most part, but he’s no match for Jamie Lee Curtis. Who once again proves she’s tougher than any boogeyman John Carpenter ever created.
Thankfully, Michael eventually takes matters into his own hands as well. At that point, it finally becomes a fair fight, leading to Halloween Ends overly dramatic (but also pretty powerful) conclusion.
People like to say the problem with Halloween Kills was that it was just Michael killing people for two hours. But that is not the problem with Halloween Kills. The problem with Kills was that it was a boring movie that stuck Laurie Strode in a hospital bed and tried to have a message about the dangers of mob mentality.
Luckily, Halloween Ends does neither of those things. Jamie Lee Curtis is operating on all cylinders here — including her skills with a pistol. And there’s no deeper message to be found. Instead, it’s all in the title: Halloween Ends.
And that’s exactly what it does.
Halloween Ends premieres in theaters and on Peacock on Friday, October 14.
