Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Halloween Ends’ on Prime Video, in Which Michael Myers Finally At Long Last Absolutely Positively Permanently Dies, Maybe

Halloween Ends (now on Prime Video) puts the jokey tease right there in the title: Thirteen movies into a franchise that has killed off its iconic Big Bad over and over and over again except he keeps coming back over and over over and over again, and it’s finally going to happen? The end? Finito? Michael Myers, ashes to dust and all that? Yeah. Right. We’ll believe it when we see it. And even when we see it when, one assumes, it happens at the end of this movie, no one in their right mind will think it’s actually over. No symbol of existential evil ever truly dies. But it will wrap this trilogy, which began with 2018’s Halloween and 2021’s Halloween Kills, direct sequels to John Carpenter’s enduring 1978 original film, directed by David Gordon Green and notable for bringing back O.G. scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis. So will the slaughter really subside? I have my doubts.

HALLOWEEN ENDS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Haddonfield, Illinois exists under a perpetual cloud of Michael Myers-related gloom – so much so, you want to rename the place Traumaville, or maybe Scarsdale. Everything always goes back to Michael Myers. You can be talking about fishing for alewives and that rhymes with knives and that’s what Michael Myers used to slay all those people. The whole town is just in a bad place. Everyone’s angry and on edge. You sense the only residents who are thriving are the psychotherapists and true-crime podcasters. Cops, nurses, retirees, students, junkyardmen – all suffer under an omnipresent existential threat. So be thankful for escapist movies like this, because we don’t have any of THOSE in our reality!

We open on a terrible scene set on Halloween 2019, when a nice young man, Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), accidentally kills a boy while babysitting him. The kid was pulling a prank and Corey panicked and the kid tumbled over the stair rail. Next we jump to the present day, four years after the events of Halloween Kills. Laurie Strode (Curtis) seems to perhaps maybe but probably not be in the process of Moving On. The locals sneer at her and blame her for Michael Myers’ murderous return. But she seems content enough for now. She’s stopped drinking and is writing a memoir and has moved into a pretty home with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), who’s a nurse at Haddonfield Hospital. The loss of their daughter/mother still lingers – you know, at the end of the last movie, when Michael Myers’ stabby mitts sent Judy Greer to the great beyond.

With the exception of aw-shucks cop guy Frank Hawkins (Will Patton), who flirts with Laurie at the grocery meat counter, everyone in town is an asshole. Other nurses, other retirees, students, the yabbering jackass on the radio. Except Corey. Once a promising student, he now works for his pops in the junkyard. The townsfolk think he’s a creep who killed a kid and kinda got off. A group of high-school bullies eff with him and hurt him and Laurie spots him and takes him to the hospital so she can put him in Allyson’s periphery. Laurie, Allyson, Corey – all are wounded people and objects of Haddonfielders’ disdain. These three are the good people around here. Everyone else has allowed their grief to harden them into hateful shitheads projecting their nastiness and judgment upon others.

Corey and Allyson hit it off and enjoy each other’s company. Maybe they’ve found a little bit of happiness among the selfish superficial dickhead Movie Characters that surround them – Corey’s harpy mother, for example, or Allyson’s co-workers, including the jerkass doctor and the slushbrained nurse he’s boinking. And then one night after a costume party where they let loose and dance to Sebadoh and the Dead Kennedys the bullies shove him off the overpass next to the billboard with the missing girl on it. And beneath the billboard with the missing girl on it is a drainpipe. And something drags Corey inside the drainpipe. Three guesses as to who it is. And no, it’s not the Ghoulies, Critters or C.H.U.D.s.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I’d rank all the Halloween films here, but only people more hopeless than me have seen every last one of ’em. Of those I’ve watched, Halloween Ends is, like the other Green entries, upper-middle-tier, but considering how much dreck clutters this franchise, that’s not saying much.

Performance Worth Watching: For the most part, Curtis slices through a lot of the screenplay’s bric-a-brac to remind us that Laurie’s strength of character lies in her strength, conviction and occasionally slicing sense of humor.

Memorable Dialogue: Laurie encourages Allyson to find a little romance: “You need to find someone that can let go. That makes you wanna rip off your shirt and show grief your f—ing tits and say, ‘You know what, let’s go!’”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: It takes some serious reductionism and a very large metaphorical butcher knife to hack through Green’s maximalist take on Halloween and find a core idea here, and it’s a pretty good one: If Michael Myers is a symbolic corporeal manifestation of the concept of evil, what lures it out of the darkness is cruelty towards your fellow humans. It’s like the cycle of abuse – Michael Myers hurts Haddonfielders, Haddonfielders hurt each other, Michael Myers returns to hurt more Haddenfielders. We’re asked to believe that Michael Myers can draw the darkness from a soul with a little intense eye contact. We’ve also been asked to believe that nothing can kill the guy, so I guess that’s not too much to ask.

I digress somewhat: So what caused Michael Myers’ initial manifestation? Wasn’t he abused or abandoned or something? (It depends which of the far-too-many Halloween movies you consider canon and which you consider crap.) What’s the nature of evil? Does it exist purely so we may have kindness and delight? These are questions for philosophers, and insisting on definitive answers is foolhardy.

Not that Halloween Ends exists wholly to inspire poignant contemplation of the nature of morality. No, it exists so Michael Myers and Laurie Strode can have a mighty two-people-enter-one-person-leaves showdown, because Curtis is 63 and the franchise is 44 and it’s about damn time, right? They both deserve it. “It” being closure, although there’s a line in the script (by Green, Danny McBride, Chris Bernier and Paul Brad Logan) that espouses the wisdom that true closure is a fallacy. All we can do is move on as best as we can, but it might be helpful if someone pins Michael Myers to a butcher’s block with a stainless-steel refrigerator first, and Laurie is more than happy to oblige.

Green oversees the equally ruthless deployment of the pragmatic and thematic in Halloween Ends, which isn’t the amusingly scattershot slop of Kills or the relatively focused brutality of the 2018 film. The primary concern here is whether Green, an undoubtedly talented visual stylist, can use his exquisitely wielded camera to lead us to an emotionally satisfying conclusion. And he mostly does, with plenty of blood and hokey climactic ceremony, after a series of convolutions and semi-distractions that sometimes feel like four screenwriters and not enough editors. They toss together a tonally soupy mess of comedy and revulsion as Michael Myers lets rip with the slaughteriffic kills, many of his victims justifying their fateful desserts via their discompassionate behavior. Which prompts one to wonder why Michael Myers would murder those that propagate the not-very-niceness he so diabolically represents, but don’t ask that, it’ll just make the mess messier.

Our Call: If you’ve gotten this far in the trilogy, you’ll STREAM IT to see what happens, even if seeing what happens is only slightly above-adequate. It’s not the definitive Halloween film, and it’s surely not the last one. There’ll never be a last one. Evil never dies – and don’t you forget it.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.