Halloween Ends

It is a trilogy, so that means it is supposed to end, conclusively. Of course, in horror, they have a habit of turning into quartets and quintets, as in the case of Scream. In this case, the Halloween rights will revert from Blumhouse to Malek Akkad, the son of the original producer, Moustapha Al Akkad, following the completion of David Gordon Green’s retconned trilogy. Laurie Strode thought she finally trapped Michael Myers in Halloween (2018), but the bogeyman escaped to take his revenge on the entire town of Haddonfield in Halloween Kills. Four years later, Strode and her granddaughter Allyson Nelson are still wondering if and when Myers will return to kill again, which of course he does in Green’s Halloween Ends, releasing today in theaters and on Peacock.

Myers’ last Halloween rampage was a brutal one. Amongst his victims was Strode’s daughter Karen Nelson. Since then, Strode has relaxed a little, finding therapeutic value in writing her memoirs. She is still a bit of an outcast, so she has sympathy for Corey Cunningham, who accidentally killed the bratty kid he was babysitting on a non-Michael Myers Halloween a few years earlier, during the unsatisfying prologue.

Nelson is also interested in the moody Cunningham, but their dating attempts constantly lead to confrontations with Haddonfield’s bullies. After one particularly nasty beating, the town’s most notorious outsider takes Cunningham under his wing. Soon, he and Myers are hunting together, but he still pursues a relationship with Nelson, even though Strode can sense he is under Myers’ influence.

Compared to the previous films in Green’s Halloween trilogy, Ends is a major disappointment. Whereas the first two films were big, grandly chaotic, and intensely exhausting, the new film just feels small. Kills graphically depicted the way Myers’ evil precipitates the entire social breakdown of Haddonfield. End half-heartedly tosses around themes of trauma and recovery, but it is more of an afterthought than a driving concern. For franchise fans, Cunningham also takes far too much screen-time away from Myers.

Halloween Kills: The Michael Myers Film for Our Time

This is truly a Michael Myers film for the Biden years. The chaos we watched unfold in the Kabul airport and the anarchy we try to ignore every day at the border has come to Haddonfield. It is Halloween, 2018. Myers has survived Laurie Strode’s death trap and is killing people with impunity. Sheriff Barker is powerless to stop him and incapable of restoring law and order as the town slips into panic and paranoid violence. Only those who previously survived Myers’ prior attacks can hope to stop him now in David Gordon Green’s Blumhouse-produced Halloween Kills, which opens Friday in theaters nationwide.

The action picks up immediately where Halloween 2018 left off. Strode is on her way to the hospital, believing she finally put an end to Myers once and for all. Unfortunately, at this time, he is actually hacking his way through the firemen that were dispatched to the blaze consuming Strode compound.

This being Halloween, a group of survivors from the original 1978 horror night have congregated to commemorate those who died and toast those who saved them, including Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace, the kids Strode was babysitting, now all grown-up. When word reaches them of Myers’ fresh killing spree, they decide to find him and kill themselves. Obviously, it is easier said than done, but Doyle turns out to be a good recruiter for vigilante patrols. Of course, Strode is convinced he is coming for her, but her granddaughter isn’t so sure.

In some ways, Halloween 2018 would have made a really satisfying conclusion to the franchise, having retconned the other inferior sequels and reboots into the stuff of fake news and urban legend. However, it probably was unrealistic to think it would be so easy to kill off a bogeyman like Myers. Unfortunately, Halloween Kills is conspicuously a middle film that obviously sets up the already-announced third movie in the sequel trilogy, so there is not a heck a lot of closure when the credits roll.

On the other hand, Kill continues to echo the 1978 film in ways that deepen the tragic resonance of the Michael Myers mythos. The return of his survivors is more than just fan service (but it is that too, especially Kyle Richards reprising her old role as Lindsey and Charles Cyphers making his first film appearance since 2007 as Sheriff Leigh Brackett, now a security guard at the hospital—and they are both quite good). Rather, their reappearance personifies the degree to which the community remains traumatized by Myers’s crimes, even forty years later.

Jamie Lee Curtis and Will Patton are both dependable as ever playing Strode and Officer Hawkins, but since both are largely sidelined from the film due to serious injuries suffered they in the previous film, a good deal of the load falls on Anthony Michael Hall, who is really terrific as Doyle. It is a gritty tormented performance that gives the film depth and a real edge.

Halloween (2018)—Because It’s Halloween (2020)

Don't you wish Star Wars would follow Michael Myers’ example? The franchise’s best received film since the 1978 original simply retconned away every other sequel with a casual conversation. Was Laurie Strode actually Myers’ sister? Nope, that was just the stuff of fake news and urban legends. Strode has spent her life waiting for Myers to take another stab at her and he finally does in David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018), a Blumhouse production, which screens at the IPIC Fort Lee, the closest thing to a Manhattan theater these days.

Strode always knew Myers would come back, so in the forty since his initial rampage through Haddonfield, she raised her daughter survivalist-style, so she would be prepared to defend herself, much like Sarah Connor did in Terminator 2. Karen Strode (now Nelson) always resented her mother’s crazy paranoid upbringing, just like John Connor, but she tries to understand how her mother was affected by the trauma of 1978.

Proving the unfailing stupidity of bureaucrats, someone schedules Myers’ long anticipated transfer from the late Dr. Loomis’s asylum to a maximum-security prison on the day of Halloween. Of course, Myers escapes, leaving a trail of bodies behind him. However, Strode has made full use of her time to prepare for him. Frankly, she doesn’t have much use for the cops, including veteran Deputy Hawkins, who was there that fateful night with Dr. Loomis. She will take care of Myers herself, as soon as her family is safely under guard, hopefully including her unaccounted for granddaughter, Allyson.

Rob Zombie, you’ve been dunked on. Green wiped away all the sequels and reboots (except maybe the in-name-only Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which has always been the oddball outlier)—and nobody mourns for them. Instead, Green and his co-screenwriters Jeff Bradley and Danny McBride go back to what made the original so effective. They make Haddonfield and its homes feel like real places, so Myers’ brutality has a much more visceral impact as a result. In addition, there are hat-tips (including an audio recording of Donald Pleasence’s Dr. Loomis), echoes, and parallels of the classic first film that fans will appreciate.

The defiance and resilience of Jamie Lee Curtis’s portrayal of Strode is another major payoff for the franchise faithful. She is the first to admit she made mistakes, but it is clear she refuses to be a “victim.” Honestly, this film makes a compelling case for 2^nd Amendment rights (despite an early firearm mishap that really doesn’t ring true). Obviously, waiting for the cops when stalked by hulking psycho killer is not a winning strategy.

John Carpenter’s Halloween

Two films released in the late 1970s had a disproportionate influence on the movie business in the 1980s. Stars Wars was one. This is the other. It inspired an army of imitators, a platoon of inferior sequels, and what is still considered the most violent Atari game ever. Its place in history has been codified by its selection for the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry—and its still scary. John Carpenter’s Halloween screens tonight in New York and probably somewhere near you, because its Halloween.

For some reason, all the parents in Haddonfield, IL always choose to enjoy a date night on Halloween, leaving their children in the care of sitters. Ordinarily, that means good money for Laurie Strode and her friends, but this year they will be stalked by a monstrous psychopath who has just escape from a criminal insane asylum. You know his name: Michael Myers. You also recognize his iconic William Shatner mask.

Logically, Myers should not be such a superman, since he has sat silently in an apparent catatonic state since murdering his older sister on a fateful Halloween at the tender age of six. Unfortunately, there is nothing logical about pure, unalloyed evil. Dr. Samuel Loomis understands that. He is a headshrinker with a license to practice and to carry, the latter because Myers so profoundly freaks him out. He will follow Myers back to his old hometown of Haddonfield, where the escaped patient will become obsessed with Strode.

Even in 1978, the screenplay, co-written by Carpenter and his producing partner Debra Hill, was not exactly revolutionary, but the way the elements combined was like lightning in a bottle. First and foremost, it is impossible to overstate how much Carpenter’s music adds to the overall vibe of mounting fear. It is not just the instantly recognizable opening theme. The entire soundtrack potently enhances the mood and worms its way into your ear.

Halloween also establishes the signature look of Carpenter’s films, thanks to Dean Cundey’s soft yet sinister lensing. In many ways, Halloween resembles an evil Norman Rockwell painting. Frankly, it is weird that there haven’t regular Cundey retrospectives, since he also shot films like The Thing, Jurassic Park, Psycho II, and the Back to the Future trilogy.