‘Halloween Ends’ flops in trilogy´s final installment

Micheal Myers and Laurie Strode have been a major part of the horror genre the last 40 years. The ¨Halloween¨ franchise has been through a lot of reinventions throughout the years. The latest trilogy began in 2018. The movie was wildly successful, and is personally one of my favorite movies. The studio was given the green light for the next two installments, which are named ¨Halloween Kills¨ and ¨Halloween Ends¨ respectively. ¨

“Halloween Kills¨ was the second movie in the new trilogy. It picks up right after the 2018 movie, & continues through that same Halloween night. It wasn’t as good as it could have been, but it wasn’t terrible. It performed fairly well and did its job as the middle movie. The final addition to the franchise came out Oct. 14.  The film, directed by David Gordon Green,  was promoted to be the final showdown between Myers and  Strode, as the franchise was finally coming to an end. However, the movie failed to capitalize on the hype. 

The movie picks up four years after the events of the first two movies. Strode is now recovering from her last encounter with Myers and is trying to rewrite the history of her story. The focus of the movie was more about the idea of evil and how it affects someone, which I actually liked. The other movies, while iconic in their own ways, had the same format over and over again. It was always Myers versus Strode. Sure, they were newer characters, but they were almost always written terribly. They were never able to stand on their own, unlike the original as well as the 2018 sequel. The newer movies have done better with introducing new characters and writing them well, such as Strode´s granddaughter, Allison, portrayed by actress Andi Matichak.  

The movie didn’t have Jamie Lee Curtis, the actress who portrays Laurie Strode, as a main character in the movie. The focus of the movie was mainly on a new character, Corey, played by  Rohan Cambell. He is portrayed as an outcast after being blamed for the accidental death of a kid he was babysitting. I do think that adding newer characters was a good thing. It gave me a refresher to see a difference in the previous films, but the movie felt slow and did not leave me with a memorable conclusion. They focused more on the newer characters rather than the original ones and while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it seems they forgot the whole point of the movie. The main focus should have been, as previously stated, Myers and Strode’s final meeting. Instead, the movie did a poor service of giving these famous characters a nice send off. It felt more like a spinoff rather than a finale of the series. 

Technically, the movie held the line. The cinematography was fairly good, as it has always been. The music used in these movies has always been fantastic, so here it was no different. But, in the end,  it just didn’t deliver. They had all the right tools to make a great finale, but something went wrong. Overall, I didn’t hate the movie. However, the best parts happen way too late in the film, and it is not worth the wait. If you´re a fan of the franchise, I´d recommend a watch. Otherwise, I would avoid it.