Hallow, goodbye
FITTING FINALE TO ONE OF THE BIG SCREEN’S LONGEST DEATH SENTENCES
HALLOWEEN ENDS (MA15+) Director: David Gordon Green (Our Brand Is Crisis)
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Rohan Campbell, Andi Matichak, Will Patton.
All bad things must come to an end
As they say in the classics, “it ain’t over ’til it’s over”.
And if we are to take away anything from Halloween Ends, “it” will finally be “over” – once and for all – for the most iconic, star-crossed and blood-spattered couple in horror movie history.
The perpetually stressed-out and messed-up heroine of Halloween, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), and her stab-happy, sadsack nemesis Michael Myers have been dancing a tango of mutual torment dating all the way back to 1978.
Sure, the music often stopped for lengthy periods across the Halloween franchise’s long and twisted journey.
And yes, there were times where both had been definitively killed off, never to return.
Nevertheless, Laurie and Michael have always been made for each other, while making each other’s lives a misery.
Four decades-plus of looking over her shoulder can’t have been to the benefit of Laurie’s mental health. As for Michael, well, all that time spent under that itchylooking old mask can’t have been good for his complexion.
So, as we enter the familiarly forbidding Halloween universe and take our front-row seats for a showdown so many horror fans have been waiting for, a vague sense of sadness descends. This will be the last time these best-offrenemies will get to do what they have done so well.
Therefore the overall quality of the first two acts of Halloween Ends will be of little concern to longstanding devotees of the series.
While storytelling standards have decidedly slipped since 2018’s surprisingly strong reactivation of the franchise, they remain well above those displayed by last year’s rather dreadful Halloween Kills (an instalment most people missed due to the last of the Covid lockdowns).
All you really need to know regarding the plot of Halloween
Ends is that Laurie is almost at peace with her problematic past. Almost. Perhaps even to the point of becoming complacent about the everpersistent threat of another unannounced visit from Mr Myers.
Then again, how was Laurie to know that by finding a boyfriend for her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), she would be once again unlocking the gates of her own personal hell?
Corey (Rohan Campbell) is a nice enough lad, but there is a personality defect in his make-up that could be all that Michael needs to re-enter Laurie’s seemingly secure world.
As directed by David Gordon Green – who has been at the helm of the two previous episodes – Halloween Ends does a professional and focused job of justifying and then enacting its climactic confrontation between two veteran combatants.
While the final dramatic destination arrived at by the movie cannot be mentioned here, be assured that Halloween Ends finds a fitting full stop to complete one of cinema’s longest death sentences.
Halloween Ends is in cinemas now
THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH (MA15+) ★★★★1/2 Selected cinemas
Unpretentiously simple, straightforward and honest – but never to a fault – this excellent French crime drama is undoubtedly one of the finest movie releases of 2022.
An opening title card soberly states that in France, about 20 per cent of all murder cases will never be solved. The film then swiftly embeds its audience within an investigative unit who have just commenced work on a particularly challenging murder case in the mountain region near the city of Grenoble.
A 21-year-old woman named Clara was killed in the middle of the night while walking down a supposedly safe street after a small party with friends.
The killer has not left a single shred of evidence.
All the detectives initially have to work with is a terribly disfigured body (the victim was set on fire), a series of messages left on a mobile phone, and enigmatic talk of a tangled love/sex life that will take some considerable time to decode. The clarity of tone, the noted absence of any exploitative storytelling agendas and a vividly natural and unforced set of performances across a brilliant cast guarantee this is a singular movie experience no viewer will be forgetting in a hurry. Highly recommended.
MEMORY (MA15+) ★★★
Now streaming on Amazon Prime Credit where credit’s due: every so often, Liam Neeson’s late-in-life quest to flood the market with pulpy tales of revenge, anger, redemption and then a little more revenge will turn up a good one. Therefore anyone with a soft spot for Neeson’s hard-nut high-jinks should be giving this new effort a go.
It is a remake of top-notch Belgian thriller The Memory of a Killer, in which a veteran assassin who is beginning to lose his memory also forgets to do the bidding of his sinister boss. Neeson stars as Alex, the hired gun with the fading recall.
Monica Bellucci is the evil crime dame who orders Alex to wipe out any trace of her connection to a sex trafficking ring.
Amid the mayhem, the alwayswelcome sight of Guy Pearce appears as an FBI agent trying to do nothing more than the right thing.