By Ryan Lavoie

Each week, I will look at a movie that is currently in theaters or available to stream and give some reasons why people should watch it. This isn’t necessarily a film critique, rather, an overview of what I think is enjoyable about the film, and why it’s worth seeing. However, this week for the first time, I will be giving a negative review, as Halloween Ends left me about as disappointed as I’ve ever been leaving the movie theater.

To start, I will never encourage you to not go to the movie theater. The movie theater is one of my favorite places and it is a troubled species. Let’s just say this will serve as a warning if you opt to see the final film in the David Gordon Green directed Halloween trilogy. I won’t be specific, but a few broad spoilers are ahead.

The most important thing wrong with Halloween Ends is a distinct lack of Michael Myers. Myers is nothing more than a supporting character, inexplicably, after being the subject of more than a dozen movies in total from 1978 to now. To make a trilogy that was so Myers based in the first two installments, and then title the movie Halloween ENDS, marking the potential end of the character, and barely show him for an hour and a half is absurd. Regardless of your thoughts on the character that turns evil throughout the movie and the execution of that, you can’t do a trilogy ending Halloween movie and Myers not be the main villain and a main focus! All problems with this movie stem from this. Because the
movie follows a different character and makes a big deal about a love story between this
character and Allyson Strode, the movie feels like some twisted, dark, romance film. Like a
Nicolas Sparks novel if he dabbled in horror. Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode has a complete attitude change from the other movies in the first half of this movie which feels out of place. If she can’t get over Michael being alive after 40 years in the 2018 film, how in the next four years, with knowledge he’s defintlely alive and killed her daughter, can she act like it’s over? That has never once been how Laurie Strode has acted. This movie betrays a lot of the groundwork it laid in the first two movies, and until the last twenty minutes, felt more like a movie you would start a trilogy with rather than end one. It’s not that the movie is awful, it’s that it’s awfully misplaced. In a vacuum it’s a bold film that tried to be different. But this is not a vacuum, and given the context of the prior two films, this was a misguided way for Halloween to end.

Halloween Ends is currently showing in theaters everywhere.