Halloween Ends Parent Guide

Although mysterious serial murderer Michael Myers was stabbed, shot, and thoroughly beaten on Halloween Night in 2018, he managed to slip back into the darkness, leaving the town of Haddonfield in its usual state of fear. Four years have passed, and Myers has yet to re-emerge so Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has decided to try and move on with her life. She’s bought house in town (without a booby-trapped basement) where she lives with her granddaughter and only surviving relative, Allyson (Andi Matichak).

In a further bid for normalcy, Allyson has found romance with Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a quiet young man with a deeply troubled past. Although Laurie introduced the two, she has second thoughts as Corey’s behaviour becomes stranger – so strange that Laurie finds herself thinking of Michael Myers, and wondering if evil is catching in Haddonfield.

The Halloween franchise has seen some real ups and downs. The original is, obviously, a horror classic, a cultural icon against which all successive slasher films have been judged, for better or worse. This new series, beginning with Halloween (2018), retconned all the goofy sequels out of the equation and tried to get back to the franchise basics: a scary unkillable mouth-breather with a massive kitchen knife wanders slowly around a suburb on Halloween slicing, impaling, and bludgeoning his way through the hapless residents. The trick? It never got much past that.

It shouldn’t have tried. Every time the franchise tries to get to the heart of Michael Myers, to unpack his seemingly supernatural powers or dig into some weak moral musing on the nature of evil itself, it just gets in its own way. Do you know what we knew about Myers in the original? That he was a weird kid who stabbed his sister for reasons best known to himself, spent a good chunk of time in a psychiatric hospital, broke out, and then started gunning for Laurie Strode. That’s all you need. This isn’t a complicated franchise. All you need is a huge dude, a worn out Captain Kirk mask, and a kitchen knife. Everything else is icing. And Halloween Ends really loses itself in way too much icing.

Parents who are somehow unaware of the franchise’s gory reputation should be aware that this film includes a healthy amount of brutal, stabby murder. People are bludgeoned, tossed off overpasses, hanged, shot, hit with cars, and burned to death with an oxy-acetylene torch. In one notably gruesome instance, a character is beaten until his jaw shatters, and then his tongue is cut out. At this point, I don’t think you’re going to be too concerned about the cussing, but if you’re curious, there are around three dozen f-bombs and a bit of scatological cursing. Horror fans with photosensitivity should also know that there’s a sequence at a party with bright flashing lights.

On the whole, Halloween Ends is less frustrating than the preceding film, the purpose of which seems to have been to see how many times you can put the phrase “Evil dies tonight” in a script before people walk out of a theater - not a high bar to clear. Sure, the latest film manages to pack in some blood-soaked homicides to keep franchise fans happy, but it also veers into dialogue so stupid that there was audible laughter in my theater. Not from me, for the record. I save my derision for the reviews.