Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is looking to settle down and leave the horrors of Michael Myers behind her.  She takes over the mothering role for her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), since her parents were killed by Michael just a few years prior.  Allyson, however, it itching to leave this town and the stigma her family faces far behind her, and when she meets Corey (Rohan Campbell), a loner who is also looking to escape, she finds both compassion for the troubled young man and also sees him as a ticket to anywhere but Haddonfield, IL.  As Halloween approaches, however, Myers comes out of hiding once again to seek revenge on the Strode family and the community at large.

David Gordon Green returns to finish his updated Halloween trilogy with Halloween Ends, the 13th installment in the series and 4th in this timeline for Universal Pictures.  The film cold opens with Corey babysitting a young boy, Jeremy (Jaxon Goldenberg), which ends in a truly upsetting way and sets up Corey to be a social pariah with the Strodes.  To take this opening as a promise to be a brutal and no-holds-barred film will only lead to disappointment as it is not until late in the 111-minute runtime that things begin to get bloody again.

After the cold open, Green catches audiences up to speed with a montage of the previous installments through a voiceover by Laurie as she sits at her computer working on her memoir.  It is a welcome refresher to the series that distills the important character relations needed to understand the story; not that it is complicated, but to revisit the earlier films would be a chore.  After these brief glimpses of Myers in memory, Halloween Ends really begins to follow the beat of its own drum, focusing much more on the relationship and budding romance of Allyson and Corey.  It is an interesting choice to be sure, stepping so far away from the title characters is what is teased to be the final chapter, and while the themes it explores work well, its marriage to the IP puts the film in this strange middle ground where it is an interesting horror story, but severely lacking in feeling like an entry into an iconic franchise.

Like so much about Halloween Ends, the strange thing here, too, is that while this deviation from the Michael Myers mythology is the strongest element of the film, the building blocks for the characters – their motivations and actions – are all over the place.  No one is acting like a real and logical person, even by horror movie standards, everyone is acting without thinking and their actions exist, seemingly, in a vacuum because there are no long-lasting consequences.  Instant gratification.  Instant punishment.  Instant reconciliation.  Nothing seems to matter and nothing seems to build up to anything, especially in the formation of the relationship between Allyson and Corey.  Green’s script is a bit gratuitous in outfitting Corey with red flags and it tips into the realm of absurdity how nonchalantly Allyson accepts this all, unquestioning, and how easily her friends drop their very valid concerns.  He is asking a lot of the audience to follow along and accept that this dynamic not just exists, but is deemed rather okay in the world of the film, and sitting captive in the auditorium, we must accept it or the entire film unravels and falls apart.

What the film does do well, though, is capture the horror movie vibe.  It has the benefit of the John Carpenter score which pulls the tinkering themes from the original, but even beyond that the colors chosen are rich, yet uneasy.  The sets are all very well decorated too, specifically Laurie’s home, but what is most unique about the film is the number of different locations it features.  Occupying this town is a host of characters that all attribute to the general feeling of rot within the film.  There is Terry (Michael Barbieri), the high school bully and his gang of neighborhood degenerates, Dr. Mathis (Michael O’Leary) who openly engages in sexual harassment of the female employees of the hospital, and Officer Mulaney (Jesse C. Boyd) who abuses his power to get closer with Allyson after she rejected him.  As the film begins to crank up its body count, these are some of the more cheer worthy-kills because of their despicable nature, and the pattern of how they are knocked off sets up some interesting, albeit unexplored, territory for the franchise working in a moral grey area of these are bad people but do they deserve to die?  Further complicating the issues is that the film cannot help but to also slash its way through many supporting characters who have not done anything remotely close to being able to balance their fate with their actions.

With its title, Green is promising a showdown forty years in the making, but the script is so frontloaded with Allyson and Corey that it never quite has the time to develop and support the epic conclusion.  When it finally does get to Laurie vs. Michael, Green struggles for the third time to define where the limits for these characters are.  Laurie herself oscillates from saying that Michael is just a man to that he is evil incarnate, yet the action we see on screen proves him to be superhuman in his resilience and pain tolerance.  To be a formidable foe, Laurie also becomes imbued with this superhuman-like strength and will while the two are fighting, and while it makes for good cinema, audiences struggle to get invested because it ends up being an unstoppable force meeting an unmovable object and the clash just is not big enough to deliver on what is promised.  Further, the final sequence is so cartoonishly out of place that anyone still locked into the film will find it hard not to be ejected from it.  While seeing the action play out on screen is a touch too absurd, credit must be given that the actors’ blocking and camera placement does make for some great imagery.

Halloween Ends does not deliver on its ambitious premise, but it is hard to write it off as a total failure.  As a horror movie, it does quite well and broaches some very interesting and engaging story points, but as the end-of-sentence for one of the most iconic horror franchises, it stumbles.  There just is not enough of Michael and Laurie that for much of the film we forget that we are even watching a Halloween title, and while the two faced off quite a bit in the previous Halloween Kills (2021) that to do it again here would be a simple retread, Michael needed a stronger presence in this new plot.  His role in the action of the film is undeniable, sure, and while the first two acts when he is hiding in the shadows even more than usual are engaging, there are just too many missed opportunities to bring him out as the supposed boogeyman of this town to instill some of that classic fear and fright into the characters and the audience alike, even if the Michael Myers of today has been unrecognizably juiced up from his initial outing in 1978.  Though there are somethings that never change – the jumpsuit, the mask, and the knife – these primal items in their simplicity are more frightening than anything, and it is that simplicity of a deranged man stalking a babysitter that is missing from this legacy trilogy which was seeking to expand on an idea that had been perfectly understood and acted on, and, as we have come to witness, to add more to it only detracts from its power.