I was never in the tank for the new Halloweens. The 2018 update, full of grating fanservice and easter eggs calling back to a canon of films that it clearly wanted to dispose of for clarity sake, was a hot ticket when it came out. Everyone loved it, largely I think, because it was a sleek new model of the old vehicle they all grew fond of over the years. It had the excitement of Jamie Lee Curtis returning to her scream queen break out role, the promise of a bloody confrontation between Laurie and Myers, a spiffy new Carpenter score, and a gaggle of new teen fodder just waiting to get chopped up for our slasher enjoyment. Even still, the damn thing was plagued. It felt like a hedged bet, too afraid to indulge in the weirder 'Halloween' side track options, while still remaining stubbornly committed to form. It was a hollow carcass, similar to the Carpenter original in ways that just made me wish I was watching that one instead.

The problems were present in 'Halloween Kills', but at least through all the weird mob-mentality-shared-trauma commentary the film found it's slasher directive and eventually got around to delivering a decent bloodbath. Michael's mythology handling was muddled, inconsistent, scattered, piece meal, you name it-- and so is this one. But when the guy picked up a knife and ventured in through the back door, you felt the element of terror. He was menacing, so they got that right at least.

All that is to say that, I don't think David Gordon Green and writer Danny McBride (the former is a terrific indie director of small Midwest American dramas, the later is a punkass comic jock writer/actor) were the right guys to reprocess and reconfigure a seminal slasher franchise like this one, definitely not in the way the studio producers had in mind. You have a director like Green, genuinely interested in exploring long standing grief and collective generational trauma through the lens of a town plagued by a killing spree decades ago, and then you have a writer like McBride, clearly a fan of the series with all its quirks and eccentricities, trying to do a melting pot riff on the franchise as a whole. Somewhere out in left field, you've got a studio mandate to find a tenuous balance between audience serving commercial reboot and something new enough to get everyone talking. What hope did this trilogy have?

Now we have 'Halloween Ends', a series finale that stays close to the hems of the previous two. This might be me grading on a curve, or just seeing a rebooted brand finally fielding some of the more interesting ideas that have just been floating around in the nebulas up until now, but 'Ends' gets the job done in ways that the previous two didn't bother to, ironically just in time for the whole thing to be put to rest. It's still not good, mostly coming off as a junkyard of assorted trash, but it sort of clicks together in a way that makes satisfying sense within its own realm of absurdity. The first 45 minutes play like the birth of a psycho killer, sans the titular franchise psycho killer. It's pretty audacious honestly.

I have no illusions that this will satisfy most, or even half, of the fanbase that have been paying the bills for 'Halloween' since 2018. It's more of a Midwestern American tragedy then a slasher finale, and you can trace the genes back to Gordon Green's earlier indie dramas chronicling grief stricken stragglers on the fringes of recovery. It's all there in the blueprints: cross sectional overlapping storytelling, whispered conversations in a diner between two broken characters managing their damage, and ugly shocks of melodrama and violent tragedy. The prologue for 'Ends' features the most effective incorporation of the themes of this new trilogy into the overarching narrative.

This story picks up 4 years after the non ending of 'Kills', and begins an assessment of things since the death of Laurie's daughter. Everyone in Haddonfield is a spastic bully/abuser/miscreant who let's the town tragedy color their lives, and how they treat others. A teen boy involved in a horrific accident (seen in the prologue) becomes the town's new target of ire after Micheal Myers' absence. Most of the narrative develops around the toxic bond forming between him and Laurie's granddaughter Allyson. It's fatalist melodrama, where everyone is a cynic, and the entire town is a tar pit waiting for someone to torch the sucker. Hope you weren't jonesing for a positive feedback slasher movie..

I could roll with this flick up until it actually comes time to induct the actual slasher of this series into the nexus of the plot. What happens here, and the explanation for where this story is headed, strains credibility to the breaking point and beyond. Let me be clear, this is not a 'Micheal Myers Halloween'. It is not a Laurie V. Myers: Dawn of Injustice trilogy capper. If you're looking for a satisfactory culmination of what the three films (allegedly) have been building to, you might just want to skippity past this one. Personally, I didn't need the cathartic showdown operatics that the trailer has been pitching us for months. WE ALREADY GOT THAT IN 2018. In all reality, this film would have worked 10x better as an entirely new small town 'kid with a checkered past' drama had it just lopped off the 'Halloween' stuff altogether.

It's clear that these new Halloween pics had no discernable direction to go. Individual sections of the first two needed more finesse in the draft phase to work. McBride's jockey comic sensibility never sat well with Green's buttoned down approach to tell a more dramatically intact study of the effects of group trauma. The themes of these movies have always been spelled out in the most thuddingly literal sense (here, Laurie's memoir (?) does most of the philosophical lifting). Most people will probably despise this film because it pulls a "Rise of Skywalker" style retcon of certain key characters and their motivations, and it seems largely disconnected from the same universe as the first two legs of the trilogy. But at least it feels all of a piece, and has some intriguing passages and ideas. That's not nothing!

Also, it's nice to see Jamie Lee getting to exhibit a few shades beyond the horror stricken slasher survivor archetype she's been saddled with for two movies now. That was pleasant. Now leave this property alone until you guys have a better place to go with it.