Halloween Ends … with a whimper of franchise brain death. The plug has finally been pulled on the series (until such future time as it is considered expedient to reconnect the life-support machine). It is directed by David Gordon Green, who began his career with Malickian drama and then transitioned to comedy before being assigned the final three-movie tranche of branded Halloween content with co-writer Danny McBride. And it is the most uninspired final episode imaginable. There are one or two lively moments, and the famous jabbing piano music is always triggering in a good way, but this is a film with a great big kitchen knife deeply inserted into each vital organ.
With the final curtain descending, a handful of OG legacy characters are hanging about in the made-up town of Haddonfield, Illinois, the site of all the carnage. Jamie Lee Curtis is back as Laurie, who originally faced off with demonic killer Michael Myers in 1978. She has survived innumerable incursions from the masked bore and is now a grandmother tapping out her memoirs, containing what appear to be her less-than-compelling observations about evil and morality, which I suspect her editor is going to cut. She lives with her hot granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) who also fought off Myers in the last film. Lindsey (Kyle Richards), one of the teens from the first film, now works behind a bar and Frank Hawkins (Will Patton), Myers’s original arresting officer in the 2018 version – now retired – has a crush on Laurie. And of course Myers himself is, disconcertingly enough, still at large.
But now the baton of horror is being passed to a younger generation. Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) is a young guy traumatised and embittered after being wrongly blamed for the death of a kid he was babysitting. Moody and alienated from the community, he discovers the legendary killer hiding in a little weird hobbit hole on the edge of town and then double-teams with the maestro, stabbing, slashing and whacking. Allyson, who is herself moody, then starts a relationship with him.
It can’t end well. In fact, it ends badly. In every sense. The mystery of Myers has long since become deflated and inert, and when he is unmasked, the camera can’t quite be bothered to show us his pointless old face (unlike the unhelmeting of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, which did at least show us what the great villain looked like). The only thing that’s scary is the thought of how long this has all been going on.
• Halloween Ends is released on 13 October in Australia and 14 October in the US and UK
