Audiences May Be Grateful that At Last ‘Halloween Ends’

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Rating: 1.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Experienced horror fans will recognize this, but anytime a long running franchise has to resort to Telekinesis, you know you’re in for trouble. It didn’t work for Jason, It didn’t work for Freddy, It didn’t work for Michael Myers the first time he tried it in “Halloween 5” … it most certainly does not work here in “Halloween Ends.”

This film picks up four years after the events of Halloween Kills, with Laurie Stroud (Jamie Lee Curtis) now a kindly old grandma whose biggest shock is when she sets off the smoke alarm while trying to bake a pie. She’s decided to take a stab at normalcy after decades of paranoia, and plow her experiences and feelings into a book … until Michael Myers makes his inevitable return.

Halloween Ends
Photo credit: Universal Pictures

In an effort to spice up a series that has clearly run out of gas, the filmmakers introduce Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), another of Haddonfield’s troubled teens. While babysitting a few years back, the child in his care went tumbling over a railing and fell three stories to his death. Since Michael Myers is MIA, Corey is now the town boogeyman … everywhere he goes people whisper about him or call him nasty names to his face. So when some high school thugs throw him off a bridge, he gets dragged down to Michael Myers subterranean lair, where the old monster forms a kind of psychic connection with the damaged new kid.

Turns out – for the purposes of this film anyway – Michael getting a new partner in crime means he derives the power to kill again from the young boy, and then they’re off slashing everyone in sight and painting the town red… with blood. Michael Myers does at one point make one foe eat a lit blowtorch so that’s something. However, most of the kills are almost cartoonishly bad, with disposable figures disposed of in mainly unimaginative way.

How does Laurie Stroud get involved in all this? Her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) falls for Myer’s new ward Corey when he goes in to the hospital, where Allyson works. And proving that Haddonfield is still in need of a decent health care system, the hospital’s seemingly one doctor is more interested in trying to get with a hot nurse than actually treating anyone. So before you can say trick or treat, Laurie is seeing the same evil she saw in Michael in her granddaughter’s new boyfriend.

The “Halloween” series of films is horror fans comfort food at this point.This film takes great pains to make callbacks to the original, but that does little more than remind us what a good film the original still is … this fright deficient current flick suffers from a serious shortage of scares, and fumbles, flops and flails in its attempt to bring this legacy series to a finale.

Laurie Stroud (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Allyson (Andi Matichak) in ‘Halloween Ends’
Photo credit: Universal Pictures

Earlier this month I wrote about the film “Smile” and how it actively cultivated a feeling of discomfort in the audience. But now I wonder which is worse, a horror movie that makes you feel uncomfortable or one that makes you feel nothing at all? I wasn’t shocked, horrified, scared or sickened at “Halloween Ends’ … and I wasn’t entertained either. It’s merely a soulless product, and like Michael Myers famous mask, it looks more than a little worse for wear.

Jamie Lee Curtis, and her willingness to revisit the role that first made her a star, has at least lent her talent to give the past couple films some degree of watchability. She has been the series secret weapon and helped elevate it above other horror franchises of the same ”mad slasher” variety. However, even Curtis might seem to wonder how she got roped into this thing, in the sense of she’s back looking out second story windows at figures that are there one moment and gone the next … leading to the film’s climax that fails on almost every level. After 44 years it’s been reduced to a grandma fighting a madman in a kitchen.

By SPIKE WALTERS Contributor HollywoodChicago.com spike@hollywoodchicago.com