Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: David Gordon Green
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, James Jude Courtney, Andi Matichak, Will Patton, Rohan
Campbell, Kyle Richards
When a new Halloween trilogy was announced, many fans
jokingly questioned whether the third instalment would follow the
original's lead and give us a movie that didn't feature the series'
villain Michael Myers. Of course, in these risk-averse times such a move
was never going to happen. Yet, when the movie opens with a credits
sequence employing the same font used in 1982's
Halloween III, were it not for Michael's image having been plastered all over the
marketing, we might begin to wonder if director
David Gordon Green is following tradition after all.
Michael does feature, but barely, and the film would likely be far more
interesting if he was completely excised from the narrative. Green -
whose co-screenwriter Danny McBride is joined here by
Paul Brad Logan and Chris Bernier – takes his narrative
cues less from the Halloween franchise and more from John
Carpenter's Christine, a tale of a put-upon loner who becomes empowered by discovering a
possessed car which turns him to evil. Here Michael stands in for the
Plymouth Fury, a silent mentor for a troubled young man.
That young man is Corey (Rohan Campbell), a 21-year-old who
takes a babysitting job on Halloween night, 2019, exactly one year after
the events of the previous two movies. Perhaps the most difficult to
swallow aspect of this ridiculous movie is that anyone would hire an
adult male babysitter in 2019, but there you go. When his young charge
pulls a prank that goes wrong, the boy ends up dead. Corey is cleared of
any wrongdoing, but most of the town holds him responsible for the boy's
death (this franchise really is a PSA warning against the risks of
babysitting).
Three years later, Corey is a morose figure whom, in the first of
several Christine references, we find working in his
father's scrapyard. When an altercation with some bratty teens leaves
him with an injured hand, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) comes
to his rescue and takes him to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, where her
granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) is employed as a nurse.
Thus begins an unlikely and wholly unconvincing romance, with Allyson
taking pity on the downtrodden sap and forcing him to accompany her to a
costume party. On the way home from said party, which doesn't go well,
Corey has an encounter with Michael. Unlike most who meet The Shape,
Corey doesn't just survive, but through some sort of Vulcan mind meld
process, ingests some of Michael's evil, as though the masked meanie was
transferring an mp3 via Bluetooth. Corey emerges emboldened from the
encounter, and like Keith Gordon in Christine, embraces his confident new life, riding around town on a motorbike
with Allyson clinging to his back, and bumping off those who have done
him wrong, sometimes with the aid of Michael, sometimes alone.
The idea of Michael transforming into some sort of mentor in a Big
Brother for Young Sociopaths programme is ludicrous, but I'll give the
film this – it at least commits to its daft premise. Unlike the previous
two movies, which seemed to be making it all up on the fly, there is at
least a consistent narrative here, even if it is very, very silly.
As with his previous two instalments, Halloween Ends once
again finds Green out of his depth in the horror genre. The opening
prank sequence is so badly constructed that it makes no physical sense
and is rendered unintentionally laughable. Once again we're denied the
sort of stalking sequences that make Carpenter's film such a suspenseful
watch. The kills are staged blandly at best, incomprehensibly at worst.
Yet again Carpenter struggles to score a movie whose rhythms are alien
to his own considered style of filmmaking, leaving us with an
unremarkable soundtrack that only sounds like a
Halloween score over the opening credits.
There are ironically a couple of moments that remind us of how good
Green can be with character drama. There's a really sweet scene of
awkward flirting between Laurie and now retired sheriff's deputy Frank
(Will Patton), that's reminiscent of the dynamic between Al
Pacino and Holly Hunter in Green's
Manglehorn. After the insufferable gun nut "I want to speak to your manager"
version of Laurie the previous two movies foisted on us, here we get a
depiction of Laurie far more in keeping with the sweet-natured and smart
17-year-old we first met in 1978, and Curtis feels far more comfortable
inhabiting this version of the character.
While the first two instalments of this trilogy were filled with little
details that annoyed fans of the series, this has a premise that's so
off the wall it's difficult to even think of it as a
Halloween movie, and as a result it doesn't rankle so
much. Like Rob Zombie before him, Green is doing his own thing here,
which I'll take any day over the schizophrenic tone of his previous
efforts, which seemed torn between pleasing the fans and taking the
series in a new direction. In its best moments, which are admittedly few
and far between, Halloween Ends plays like the pilot
episode of a TV series titled Haddonfield, which examines the effects of
Michael's legacy on a group of characters in the town. But once again
the film can't make its mind up regarding whether Michael was just an
angry young man who became an angry old man, or some sort of
supernatural force. And again the decision to ignore previous sequels
and remove the sibling connection between Laurie and Michael comes off
as an own goal. If Michael and Laurie were related, we might have gotten
a far more interesting third instalment in which Allyson takes over his
mantle, fulfilling the promise of the shock ending of the vastly
under-rated Halloween 4.
