Michael Myers and Laurie Strode in Halloween Ends (2022)
The final installment in David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy is every bit as disappointing as you would expect from a team bankrupt of any new ideas. Green’s last chapter in an ever-declining saga pits longtime protagonist and bona fide horror icon Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) against a new evil that terrorizes Haddonfield and brings Michael Myers out of hiding for one final, anticlimactic showdown. While Green’s first installment honored Carpenter’s original vision and reinvigorated the franchise, his latest effort strays miles away from everything that made that film enjoyable. While one can recognize the ambitious choices made in this head-scratching sequel it amounts to little more than a mismatch of poorly-executed ideas and a meandering plot, loosely tied together by a screenplay so trite that one can barely believe it was greenlit at all.
When it was announced we’d receive a new entry in the Halloween franchise on behalf of Blumhouse Productions, I was highly skeptical. While many were excited, knowing that Blumhouse is responsible for the phenomenal films Split (2016) and Get Out (2017), I was too aware they were equally responsible for movies of pitiful quality such as Sinister (2012), Unfriended (2015), and Truth or Dare (2018). Being a massive fan of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), I entered the screening of the latest Halloween film with low expectations. Leaving the theater, I was both impressed by the quality of the latest in a long line of sequels, and equally feeling the sting of knowing how close Blumhouse’s Halloween (2018) came to matching if not surpassing the quality of the original film.
