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.  

Halloween Kills

With Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode counted out of this instalment - thanks to injuries suffered during the previous episode - the hysteria that drives Halloween Kills is that of Anthony Michael Hall's buffoonish Tommy Doyle, the child Ms Strode spent her evening looking after in John Carpenter's original film. Having grown into a drearily solemn raconteur, Doyle seizes on the opportunity presented by a new spate of murders, clumsily attempting to make himself the solution to the recurring problem of Michael Myers and win some form of approval from his slumbering former babysitter in the process. Doyle is self-important and not short on confidence; a red-faced eye-bulger who hurries from incident to incident, vomiting up a leadership routine that barely extends beyond a tumultuous chanting. He's a farcical figure. A one-note fantasist gumming up the works of a slasher film that is already disinclined to generating pity. 

David Gordon Green's second Halloween sequel, co-written with Scott Teems and Danny McBride, is structured to spend long stretches of time in the company of unlikable, middle-aged, cretins. The film is assembled in a style much closer to that of a comedy, with its various pieces working towards blunt, graceless, murder as if it carried the same dramatic inevitability, or entertainment, as a punchline. Halloween Kills is the horror film as a litany of quick, unsatisfying, releases rather than any sustained attempt to sculpt tension. The audience always knows more than the film's mindless throng too, so no sense of trepidation is never allowed to creep into our minds. A brief sequence in which a hospital, packed with the bereaved and panicking, suddenly goes into meltdown at the suggestion that Myers has begun to attack the building could work if the viewer was left in some doubt as to what was actually happening. We're always two or three steps ahead though. We know it isn't Myers, so we're just watching headless chickens piling on and over each other. 

As with Green's previous effort, Myers is calibrated to be an engine of violence, mechanically brutalising any body he come across. This lack of methodology - Myers seemingly killing people to pass the time on his way back to his childhood home - isn't helped by his constantly stressed invincibility or a cast of characters who, largely, fail to deviate from Green and McBride's well documented gift for ugly (but crucially not absurd in this instance) caricature. There's no sincerity or empathy in how Kills handles its victims. No consistent, creative level, decisions that indicate that the filmmakers have any interest in the brew they are concocting beyond wheel spinning. The film's better moments then are either happy accidents - a video stream briefly sputtering during a rare gooey kill in such a way that it recalls the blurring censorship visited on the animated Fist of the North Star movie - or strange little orphans in search of purchase. A closing segment built around Laurie's daughter Karen - played by the indefatigable Judy Greer - catching a glimpse of a child's image seared into a window pane elicits a strange supernatural sadness but, by then, it's too little too late. 

Halloween (2018)

David Gordon Green's series snubbing continuation of Halloween lacks the mythic, otherworldly sweep of John Carpenter's parent film. It's a fragment blown up to a feature, the basically brilliant idea of a hopelessly broken Laurie Strode taking on aspects of her massive, unkillable nemesis in order to beat him. Rather than build their entire script around a pitch that (admittedly) is better suited to an action movie follow-up, writers Green, Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride keep multiple victim wheels spinning, dedicating long passages of screen time to podcast journalists who (kind of, sort of) reawaken a torpid Michael Myers and a duplicitous psychiatric doctor who smuggles in slasher sequel notes that do nothing but take the shine off their central threat.

Surprisingly, this Halloween lacks the underlining sense of brooding, psychological disquiet Green and McBride routinely bring to their television projects. Perhaps Michael Myers is the issue? After all, the ignorance and mania that power Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones rings superfluous when dealing with a tireless Shape. Rather than wriggle into Myers' head space and spend time with him as a character, this menace is simply observed, an out-of-focus object who exists on the frame's perimeter. As if to banish all memory of Rob Zombie's sympathetic take on the franchise, we are never allowed to connect to this Michael as anything other than a drifting force for violence.

Although a more aggressive sense of interior perspective might puncture the killer's boogeyman persona, there is at least precedent in Carpenter's original. The 1978 film gave us a taste of the alien, hammering its unsuspecting audience with long, floating, point-of-view sequences that positioned us inside the killer's head. We gazed out of his eyes. We heard his straining, whooping excitement when he murdered. Moments were burnt listening to his breathing normalise after a conquest. The otherness of the 1978 Michael was made all the more revolting by the ways in which his actions misunderstood basic human impulses - his was a nascent, adolescent sexuality focused around kitchen knives and young women he felt he couldn't otherwise possess. By comparison, this iteration is simply robotic.

MICHAEL

There's something wonderful about the uncomplicated, almost childish, cruelty of a Michael Myers who staggers around with a handful of freshly plucked, show-and-tell teeth.