It’s only fitting that Halloween Ends is the third installment in this trilogy, as it has more in common with the original Halloween 3 than any other Halloween movie. Halloween 3, for those that don’t recall, did not have Laurie Strode or Michael Myers in it, the plot revolved around an evil Irishman wanting to turn children’s heads into mush by way of evil Halloween masks. In Halloween Ends, we get Laurie and Michael, but they take a backseat to Laurie’s granddaughter and this movie’s new protagonist Corey.
And I guess David Gordon Green wanted to do something “different”, I mean how many times can you make a slasher movie fresh. How many times can Laurie come face to face with the bogeyman. This movie starts out more like John Carpenter’s Christine as opposed to a Halloween movie, but instead of a killer car you get an old serial killer. You get a nerd that gets bullied into becoming a serial killer, followed by some questions about evil being inherent or is it created. Jamie Lee Curtis is just kinda in the background watching things happen, pretty much like in Halloween Kills where she was stuck in a hospital bed the entire time. And her granddaughter, Andi Matichak, becomes the love interest of this new Corey guy.
And that’s a shame that the first movie started out with strong female characters, and now they play a secondary role, almost as if Green was trying to subvert his own thematic threads. Like the first movie was about Laurie’s trauma from 1978, and now we are less concerned with her and more focused on abstract questions on the nature of evil.
This movie isn’t all bad. I will say the first 10 minutes are quite good. And the final fight is over the top and fun to a degree. But overall Halloween Ends is a bad movie, but it’s a different kind of bad than Halloween Kills. With Kills I watched it twice in a row because it was comically bad. Ends however is boring bad, and that in some ways is worse. By the end I was left wondering if the Corey stuff would have worked as its own movie if you would have taken all the Halloween elements out of it. But as of right now, I’m not even sure if Ends can even be considered a Halloween movie. Just set it up on the shelf next to Halloween 3 as an oddity to the massive, never ending, franchise.
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