Reviews

Looking at HALLOWEEN ENDS purely as a movie - as opposed to a HALLOWEEN-movie - I thought it was technically the best of Green's trilogy. That's not a popular opinion and it doesn't mean I think HALLOWEEN ENDS was a good movie - it certainly isn't - but I do think it was better scripted than the previous two with far less quota of stupid characters acting irrationally in absurd situations.

To say it's the best of the three isn't exactly high praise as I thought Green set the bar very low with the first two.

I think they made a conscious decision here to make this movie the black sheep of the trilogy - like HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH - by building a story that reduced Myers to the distant background.

This is strongly hinted at from the off with the opening credits font very closely matching that of H3:SOTW. This deviation has upset a lot of your rabid Myers/franchise fans because they wanted their quota of Myers on the usual rampage with a pumped-up climactic showdown with Laurie Strode. In the end, Myers is a figure very much on the sidelines throughout and is even forgotten about for long stretches of the story. This sidetracking of their beloved villain will be a bitter pill for many Myers fans to swallow. When the final confrontation with Strode arrives, it too is kept brief and fairly low-key.

None of this bothers me because I'm neither a fan of the franchise nor a Myers fan. My admiration has always solely been for John Carpenter's original film.

I do however have a certain amount of admiration for the makers here for deciding not to spoon-feed the masses the expected three-course menu of mindless mayhem. Instead, they've tried to tell the story of a town injured by its past and the scars this has left on its residents.

Despite this game attempt at delivering a HALLOWEEN movie outside the box, there are still the kind of lapses from Green's pen that have blighted the earlier entries in his series. The failure of what would have possibly been the biggest-ever manhunt in the US to locate Myers hanging out in the local sewers is a big ask of any audience to digest. One would imagine this might be the first place they'd search. Also, Myers' fluctuating strength and weakness is conveniently manipulated to fit individual moments of the story. This is a character who finished the last movie taking out half the townsfolk mob after being shot, stabbed and clubbed, yet is here overpowered by a nerdy youngster and dispossessed of his mask and later completely owned, one-on-one by a Me-Too empowered now Granny Strode as we reach the climax!

This after still being able to lift a character off their feet one-handed and impale her to a wall with a single thrust of a blade.

The unexplained connection between Myers and a random youthful misfit is also something you either just accept or you don't. Green relies on Laurie's written musings to get around this by giving us the throwaway line, "Evil changes shape". Again, this seems a quick, convenient fix around having a character suddenly exhibit traits that were completely absent in the earlier installments.

I'd like to say, having deviated so markedly from his first two offerings and the franchise as a whole, Green here has given us something original but judged outside the HALLOWEEN universe, HALLOWEEN ENDS has a familiar ring to it throughout.

A nerdy young misfit named Cunningham falls under the influence of a sinister evil, uses this evil to exact revenge on his tormentors but is eventually killed by the evil that has consumed him. John Carpenter himself gave us this yarn with CHRISTINE back in 1983. As in CHRISTINE also, the nerdy troubled youth somehow forges a highly unlikely romance with the kind of knockout girl who might not too long ago have been crowned prom queen.

We even have Michael Myers and the '58 Plymouth Fury sharing a similar fate involving a junkyard crusher in their respective stories.

For all this, I would place HALLOWEEN ENDS slightly ahead of its two predecessors because above them, it is far less absurd and has a more linear - if unwelcome by some - character-focused story. It is definitely not what the hardcore HALLOWEEN franchise community expected and is therefore likely to rub large numbers of fans up the wrong way.

My main complaint would be that Green here, has again given us a horror film that is largely bereft of scares and suspense - surely the essential ingredients for this type of film.

Pound for pound however, it is the least chaotic, brutal and plain silly of Green's series and for me, this makes it marginally the better of a pretty poor trilogy.

For many however, it will be the worst.

So we have John Carpenter back on board, scoring and producing. We have Curtis back as Laurie Strode. We even have Nick Castle back, appearing as Myers! So what could go wrong.........?

Well, quite a lot as it happens.

For all the positive noise made in the run up to it's release and the makers smug claims that this was to be the REAL sequel - jettisoning all the others out of existence in the story arc, I was largely disappointed.

There was so little suspense and the whole thing quickly went straight down the well-trodden road of Myers versus Laurie (again) as though she was somehow his chief focus despite killing indiscriminately prior to this - seemingly without even the most vague pathology.

Somewhere amongst all this, his pattern of re-enacting his sister Judith's murder (strongly implied in the original - to which this claims to directly connect and therefore also must focus on with renewed attention) seems completely forgotten. The whole concept of Myers reliving this event by seeking out, then strategically stalking surrogate victims that somehow resemble her, are replaced with a scattershot series of random, opportunist kills in the run up to a Super-bowl-type showdown with Laurie that we are predictably building towards even before he escapes.

For me, this means the much hyped dismissal of the sister/brother angle from the earlier sequels was a waste of time because for all that, it still seemed all about Myers coming after Laurie.........only this time for reasons unknown. They might as well have left the sibling angle in because they completely overlooked the original concept of him killing Judith over and over by targeting teenage girls of her type. This was the only insight we had into the character from the original story but it was enough to make him terrifying yet keep him unfathomable. If they had stuck to this and had Laurie make it her mission to step in to try and thwart him (a la Loomis in the original) rather than be his star focus, that would have been consistent with the earlier Myers characterization and also a believable and intriguing extension of Laurie Strode.

As it is, Strode and her kin are again painted as the passion of Myers' bloodlust - something we've seen several times over before. Laurie's ridiculous doomsday pad had me gasping in disbelief that the story had so centred on her again being the final stopping point of Myers' journey. Why she feels she would be in his firing line is vague and we as an audience are just trusted to accept this because it's the role and character Curtis will always be remembered for. But there is no reason Myers' would be hung up on settling a score with her, nor that she would be so obsessed with him. After all, she had only encountered him once in this new timeline and 40 years earlier at that.

Judith Myers gets merely an obligatory mention from the villainous and utterly pointless Dr character, who is synthetically injected into the plot to provide an absurd and disastrous twist by himself turning homicidal - presumably out of obsession with Myers - only to end up the next victim himself mere moments later! Though this serves as a clunky solution to the logistics of transporting Myers to Laurie's fortress for that horribly telegraphed finale, it hardly seemed worth including the character and ultimately, the twist stank the whole movie to high heaven. I also thought it was daft to present us with a character that has presumably spent years in his specialised profession........ only to wait around for Myers' escape (an event that might never have occurred) and then act out some hitherto subdued homicidal urge of his own. Perhaps it was an act of desperation on the part of the writers to give the movie an extra shot in the arm to make up for substance they suspected was lacking.

I also thought - given how many deaths there were at the early crash scene and then the gas station - the low key police presence on the streets of Haddonfield for the longest stretch of the evening seemed bizarre and absurd. Only when yet more bodies turned up, did there seem to be any real kind of manhunt. Even HALLOWEEN II (1981) presented a more realistic law enforcement reaction around Haddonfield to the crimes that had been only then just discovered. Bear in mind also, the infamy of Myers in this new timeline as a murderer well documented and studied over his 40 year incarceration and the furore that would surely follow his escape.

I believe had there been more daytime scenes and patient buildup to the night terrors that lay in wait, the film would have greatly benefited. There was little structured pacing here. This was HALLOWEEN for the Millennium. A brief set-up, then straight in with the mayhem, brutality and barely 5 minutes without Myers onscreen in case our 2018 audience attention spans begin to wane and people start checking their SnapChats.

Myers' spent so long in the original film (often offscreen) observing people and dogging their steps before choosing his moments to strike. Think of him watching Annie from a few feet away on several occasions at the Wallace house. Or standing in a doorway watching Bob and Lynda - both downstairs and upstairs - before toying with them and luring them to their deaths. Here we are frequently tagging along with him in the third person as he just nonchalantly walks into houses straight off the cuff and kills without any pre-selection or stalking. The victims seemingly have no tie-in to his pathology around reliving Judith's murder - while at the same time also have no connection to any implied plans he may have to target Laurie Strode and her kin. He spent a whole day in the original patiently observing and planning his movements around Haddonfield without strolling into peoples houses and viciously slaughtering whoever was just unlucky enough to live there. There's little subtlety or finesse to the kills either. No, this Myers will just stomp on your head if need be to get you out of the way.

Maybe I'm too wrapped up in the original.......maybe I can't move with the times! But the makers of this were very vocal about this connecting directly to the original and dismissing all the sequels. For this reason, comparisons and close cross-reference to that film are perfectly in order. That said, even dismissing Carpenter's film, for me this was a badly paced, generic slasher with little suspense, almost no scares and plot deviations that are often pointless and not infrequently absurd. And for all the large talk about dismissing the sequels and directly following up the original - this had far more in common with those said sequels than it had Carpenter's film. For me, it was also inferior to several.

A lot of the kills are pointless and brutal, very much out of sync with how Myers operated previously and worst of all - were more reminiscent of what I saw in Rob Zombie's celluloid catastrophes that sadly marked the series.

Then at the resolution, after all Laurie's plans and convictions to finally "end this", she chooses to walk from a self ignited inferno, inexplicably leaving Myers breathing when she had him trapped in a basement before her, foregoing the option to pump him with endless rounds from any of the plentiful firearms she's been stockpiling for 40 years...........I audibly groaned at this point and got a dirty look from someone sitting in the row before me.

This cheap and largely undisguised tactic to facilitate yet another addition to the series was perhaps the final insult to the audience

I really wish I had got more out of this and hope others manage to enjoy it but for me the film was light years short of the simple, yet powerfully effective concept that a low budget independent movie from 1978 presented to us..........and which I fell in love with on first viewing.

I also found it terribly weak judged purely on it's own merits.

Perhaps I'm just getting old and grumpy!!!