Will it ever end? It’s a question that’ll likely run through your head more than once as Jamie Lee Curtis’s one-time babysitter once again faces off with the seemingly relentless Michael Myers in this equally indestructible long-running horror franchise.
Both Myers and Curtis’ Laurie Strode have more lives than your average alley cat, so however final this feels, don’t bet on it being the very end.
Halloween Ends brings this latest cycle to a close, following Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills (2021), moving the action four years on. Bogeyman Myers (James Jude Courtney) has slithered away – no-one knows where. Strode is now living her best life, with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), writing her memoirs (it’s not called ‘Michael Myers And Me’, but it should be).
Fear not, though, there’s a new ‘psycho’ in the town of Haddonfield, at least if you believe the gossip. Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) is a teen who, in the prologue, is involved – accidentally, or maybe not? – in the death of the boy he’s babysitting.
Although he doesn’t go to jail, he’s mercilessly bullied by the townsfolk, much in the way the outsider Strode is considered a ‘freak show’.
Corey befriends Strode and her granddaughter, but it seems darkness lurks within him. After the relentlessly gratuitous slaughter of Halloween Kills, at least this film tries to build up a story. Is evil innate or is it fostered by circumstance? That is the notion Halloween Ends ponders. Laurie, needless to say, will be forced to face her demon one final time, by which point Halloween Ends knocks up a seriously high body count.
‘I just get excited by all that bogeyman bullshit,’ chuckles one character, though after one obvious kill after another, it’s hard to agree.
One woman gets knifed in the stomach, pinned to a wall, her feet dangling. A man gets his face blow-torched. Another gets his tongue cut out.
Director David Gordon Green understands what fans of the franchise want, even if it is all so depressingly predictable. Still, Curtis is forever the heart of Halloween – and she rocks here like she always does.
