Halloween Ends
Cert 18 |  ★✩✩✩✩

Jamie Lee Curtis reprises her iconic “final girl” role as Laurie Strode in the 13th and last installment in one of the longest-running horror franchises of all time.  John Carpenter’s Halloween first hit our screens in 1978 and has since seen several incantations over the last 44 years. Picked up in 2018 by prolific horror outfit Blumhouse Productions, the saga of sadistic masked killer Michael Myers has seen something of a resurgence thanks to the current trend for bringing back legacy characters — Laurie Strode in this instance — in the hope of enticing long-time fans of the franchise to be part of this new incarnation.

Set four years after the events of Halloween Kills (released in 2021), Halloween Ends follows Laurie as she attempts to recover from the trauma she suffered after the death of her daughter. Now living with her granddaughter Alyson (Andi Matichak), Laurie has vowed to release herself from the hold Michael Myers has had over her for over 4 decades. But when a young man, Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), is accused of killing a boy he was babysitting, it ignites a wave of violence and terror that will force Laurie to finally confront the evil that has made her life a living hell.

Bowing out, not with a bang, but rather with a whimper, this final chapter doesn’t just feel superfluous and cliche-laden, but it also represents what it feels like to be scraping the bottom of a barrel that has been dry and barren for decades. Quite aside from the frankly preposterous storyline, Halloween End is simply just not that scary or that entertaining. In the absence of a coherent premise, director David Gordon Green and his co-writers resort to the worst type of slasher tropes and nothing more.

One could excuse the lack of scares had the writers done something out of the ordinary with this closing chapter. Instead, we are left with a case of “let’s throw everything at the story but the kitchen sink and see what sticks”. The result is a series of half-baked ideas with no real hook or anything to warrant anyone’s attention.

This is sadly the worst installment yet in this much-loved saga. Curtis, as ever, gives it her best but is once again let down by a needlessly overpopulated screenplay and a storyline that is incapable of standing on its own two feet. A huge disappointment from start to finish.