Parents' Guide to Halloween Ends

This supposedly final chapter in the long-running franchise plays with some intriguing ideas but fails to cohere in a meaningful way. Halloween Ends is an improvement over Halloween Kills, but it still falls short of the 2018 Halloween. Director David Gordon Green's visual palette is positively dystopian here, with the bright Halloween decorations unable to distract from a landscape of trash and clutter, everything worn down and worn out. The most interesting idea in Halloween Ends is the introduction of Corey Cunningham. He's a pretty good guy who suffers an unbelievably bad turn of fate when he causes the accidental death of a child. The movie makes him sympathetic, letting viewers in on how he feels about this life-changing moment and how he deals with the mob mentality reaction to it.

Unfortunately, the plot then turns on an unexplained, even lazy, supernatural moment wherein Michael Myers somehow "transfers" his murderous tendencies to the young man. So if Corey isn't responsible for his own transformation, what does it mean? Weirdly, his character arc is similar to one in another John Carpenter movie, Christine (1983), in which a mild-mannered character falls under the influence of a classic car. But this retread doesn't even have that much of an idea. Corey's character eventually takes screen time away both from Laurie (who has flipped 180 degrees since the 2018 movie and become a happy, pie-baking homemaker) and from Michael himself. And poor Allyson seems positively delusional for being attracted to the troubled Corey. Laurie has dialogue about the various kinds of evil and whatnot, but, sadly, the pieces of Halloween Ends rarely seem to click together. It's less an ending than it is a series simply running dry.