Halloween Ends

Despite the poster space dedicated to the twin pillars of this franchise, Halloween Ends is not particularly focused on either Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode or Nick Castle and James Jude Courtney's Michael Myers. Instead the film largely revolves around Rohan Campbell's Corey, a hapless babysitter who has become the town pariah following the accidental death of a child in his care. Corey's lot in life as an aimless twentysomething is so diminished that he is routinely set upon by a group of teenagers that, judging by their clothing, are members of the local school's marching band. He doesn't even rank high enough to attract the ire of nearby jocks. Intimidation and violence instead coming from the layer of secondary school most likely to suffer bullying themselves. Even the misfits hate Corey. 

This unusual bubble of cruelty is emblematic of the ways in which Ends attempts to define the concept of evil and its potential to be transmitted. Michael Myers is portrayed here as a malignant root that has grown into the earth, polluting Haddonfield and everyone within it. The town itself hasn't moved on from the killer's recent sprees; even going as far as blaming Strode and her family for provoking Myers' violence. Buildings within Haddonfield have visibly decayed too, no longer resembling the dreamy Californian suburbs of the original John Carpenter film - this ancestral imagery clearly important to director David Gordon Green as a point of contrast since it is threaded into the framing device that follows the Halloween III: Season of the Witch inspired credit sequence. Instead of a comfortable incubator for the American middle-class, Ends gives us a division expressed spatially; terrifyingly vertical McMansions at one end of town and a poverty row junk yard at the other. Corey, the film's transformational component, employing the machinery of the latter to exorcise the trauma he has experienced thanks to the former. 

Green's film then, co-written with Danny McBride, Chris Bernier and Paul Brad Logan, offers up hints that it intends to be a character piece, one not dissimilar to the damned path beaten by Rob Zombie and Scout Taylor-Compton in their excellent Halloween II. Although an unexpected diversion for a sequel whose ad campaign demands it be received as a conclusion, Corey's hold on the film, and his increasing willingness to wield violence as a way of getting what he wants is, at least, a kind of development for Green's misfiring sub-series. Unfortunately, Corey's halting hold over the desiccated Shape is neither definitive nor lasting, allowing the subterranean memory to bubble up out of the ground and resume their own slaughter. Given the rejection of Terminator: Dark Fate by YouTube's finest film critics, it's unlikely that anyone bankrolling a series that relies on nostalgia will want to see their legacy toys subordinated by new characters or ideas but, that said, there's nothing else in this film as good as a brief interlude in which we see a manic Corey mugging a mummified Myers and, triumphantly, seizing his mask to go on his own killing spree. Youthful, sexually actualised venom finally overcoming the virginal corpse who has become the black mould in the water pipes.