HALLOWEEN ENDS (18)
HHHII
REVIEWS BY DAMON SMITH
FEAR never dies, it just changes shape in Halloween Ends, the concluding chapter of director David Gordon Green’s trilogy reboot of the influential slasher franchise, which has been terrorising babysitters and their cherubic wards since 1978.
Scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis completes her tour of duty as Laurie Strode, the object of Michael Myers’ obsession for more than 40 years.
Set four years after the events of Halloween Kills, Laurie is living in Haddonfield with granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), putting the finishing touches to a prosaic memoir that will finally lay to rest the ghost of Michael Myers.
Unshackled from her tragic past, Laurie embraces life and flirts with Deputy Frank Hawkins (Will Patton) at the supermarket.
Prickles of discomfort resurface when Allyson forms a romantic attachment to twentysomething misfit Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), who faced an aggravated manslaughter charge three years ago after a young boy died in his care while babysitting on All Hallow’s Eve.
Deputy Hawkins is sympathetic to Corey’s plight, but pockets of the community aren’t so forgiving. As discontent simmers, pure evil returns to Haddonfield and Laurie faces her greatest fear.
Intellectually, Halloween Ends is the most engaging chapter of the
modern triptych, exploring the corrosive power of fear, despair and survivor’s guilt on a Midwestern community that mistakenly assumed the greatest threat to its long-term prosperity was a masked bogeyman.
Venomous words cut deeper than any blade, angrily attributing blame to Laurie and her offspring for goading a monster out of the shadows and back to Illinois.
Humour skitters through early exchanges in a script that rattles through gory deaths of unfortunate townsfolk, including two sequences of gratuitous mutilation and one obligatory jump scare.
Halloween Ends fulfils the storytelling obligations of its title with cool efficiency.
John Carpenter’s original 1978 picture heavily influenced Scream (1996) and Ghostface returns the favour here, prompting a renewed nature versus nurture debate about evil.
Gordon Green’s film gets splinters in its rump sitting on the fence.
In cinemas now