Halloween Ends... Triumphantly?!

Absolutely ditching the formula built up from the rest of the franchise and crafted to an art with the last two in DGGs trilogy following our favourite man in a mask hacking down members of Haddonfield after they get a few minutes to do a silly skit. Despite loving alot about the direction and craft of Kills, it felt tensionless, aimless and cartoonish in a way that really hurt 2018s more emotional trauma centric conclusion to Laurie.

Halloween Ends is a whole different beast, its no wonder Carpenter and Stephen King both love the movie, since it focuses on the infectious evil of Myers seeping into Haddonfield and how that forms in his absense (more like ideas in IT or Twin Peaks The Return than anything you'd see in this increasingly tired franchise) which is an infinity more interesting angle to depict Myers as an unstoppable evil than anything more literally ghoulish. The main character here is not a Strode like the marketing would have you believe, instead it focuses on Corey who after a horrific accident in the terrific and genuinely clever opening throws his life off course he must confront whether the evil is attacking him from the outside... Or from within 👻.

As a ghoulish rotting Myers infects Correy, the film becomes Christine for around an hour and rocks as he struggles with wanting a fresh start away from all this pain and hate and has an out with a budding relationship with Lauries daughter which is given a generous amount of time in the movie to be explored, but Haddonfield which is a character in this movie in a much more successful way than they tried in Kills, who needs a new boogeyman to attach all their fear to attempt to drag Corey down and mould him into the new shape of evil in the town. DGG and McBride obviously love their genre movies with this movie littered with nods to inspirations even having shots from Drive and Lost Highway.

While this was extremely character focused and it waited a long while before giving you the kills you expect, when they finally come they come fasty, bloody and very creative. The DJ kill is easily my favourite of the new trilogy.

A genuinely new look at the concept of evil, the most faithful sequel to the original we have had. However, it is a messy film struggling between the new story with Corey it wants to tell and a final battle between Laurie and Michael that people expected, ultimately ending the movie on another brawl between the two. Which was fun and schlocky and did sort of work but ending there did take away from who was the rest of the films main character.

Opening titles where killer showing the main thesis of the movie having evil changing shape in the different freaky pumpkins, extra star for using the Season of the witch font.