After 44 years and more than a dozen movies, you’d be forgiven for thinking Michael Myers should be picking up his pension any day now. For how much longer can the mute murderer realistically prey on the good people of Haddonfield, Illinois? What is there to fear from a knife-wielding maniac when he needs help cutting up his food?
It makes sense, therefore, to give him an acolyte to take care of the heavy lifting – the slaughterer’s apprentice, if you will. Enter Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), former engineering student and hapless novice babysitter fresh from serving a three-year aggravated manslaughter prison sentence after a Halloween prank went awry.
Corey’s back home and facing “child killer” taunts from townsfolk, a state of affairs that indirectly brings him into the orbit of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). Now in her sixties, she’s become an unwelcome Myers magnet whose continued presence endangers others. As one angry citizen tells her: “You teased a man with brain damage and then he snapped.”
Not long after beginning a relationship with Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), a brush with bullies results in Corey unwittingly committing another awful crime and coming into contact with Myers, who’s hiding in the tunnels under a major thoroughfare. A switch is flicked in Corey’s brain, and the drain dwellers form a bizarre alliance, prompting the body count to start to rise again.
A sequel to 2021’s Halloween Kills, itself the second entry in director David Gordon Green’s “H40” trilogy, the film embraces sundry slasher conventions while attempting to examine the aftermath and societal impact of those initial atrocities. Haddonfield’s collective grief paints both Laurie and Corey as villains; perhaps not quite on a par with the masked Michael, but nonetheless a life-threatening hazard.
Green avoids delving deeper into the frayed psyches of the victims’ loved ones, though – instead, they largely serve as under-explored intermissions between a succession of (well-executed) traditional horror movie jump-cuts.
The fractured relationship between Allyson and her grandmother – whose actions in earlier movies had devastating consequences for her parents – is touched upon in just one soap-like dramatic scene before being forgotten. Meanwhile, Corey is told by his overbearing mother that misbehaving boys “don’t get custard for dessert”.
Familial confrontation and burdens of guilt aside, though, Halloween Ends motors along at a cracking pace and delivers its shocks with style and creativity. Especially inventive is the moment when a severed body part disrupts a late-night radio DJ’s broadcast, as is when a gang of bratty teenagers get their comeuppance in a junkyard.
Green gets intermittent kicks by framing shots that evocatively reference iconic moments from Carpenter’s original, alongside a few more subliminal reminders of the Hallmark holiday theme. At one point, the make and model of a car seems to have been chosen purely because its rear lights resemble the eyes of a jack-o’-lantern.
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However, the script is littered with groan-inducing dialogue that ranges from the plain silly (see the “custard” line above) to the pretentious (the voiceover sneak peeks at the book Laurie is working on suggest it’s hardly a page-turner).
And don’t be fooled by the title, because although both Curtis and Nick Castle (reprising his role as Myers) have announced this will be their last outing, producers haven’t ruled out further films that would take the franchise into untapped but presumably equally bloodthirsty territory.
No doubt the population of Haddonfield is hoping that territory is as far from their front doors as possible, leaving them to, at last, carve their pumpkins in peace.
Halloween Ends arrives in UK cinemas on 14th October 2022. Looking for something else to watch? Check out our guides to the best series on Netflix and best movies on Netflix, or visit our TV Guide.
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