“Halloween Ends” became the thirteenth installment in the Halloween Franchise, released on Oct. 14, 2022. This movie serves as the end to one of the four timelines in this franchise. This timeline consists of Halloween Ends, the original Halloween, the sequel from 2018, and the 2021 film “Halloween Kills.” The original 1978 “Halloween” horror movie brought slasher movies to a new height in popularity. The 2018 version of “Halloween” came out to mostly positive reviews even with the high expectations held for this movie. However, the 2021 “Halloween Kills” followed and is a huge step down from the previous film. Halloween Kills didn’t move the Michael Myers narrative forward much at all, and it felt like wasted potential set up by its predecessor. 

“Halloween Ends” let me down and is a lousy way to wrap up this timeline. While I didn’t like this movie, there were certain positives in the movie that made me not totally hate this film. The main positive for me is the music and score once again done by John Carpenter, it’s as effective as it’s ever been. His son, Cody Carpenter, and composer Daniel Davies also contributed to the soundtrack. I like to think that John saw the screenplay for this movie and tried to fix it in any way possible. His score throughout the movie kept me interested and on edge. The way the production team created such a paranoid and eerie feel through the many synths and pianos throughout the movie impressed me. The acting done by everyone in the cast, especially Jamie Lee Curtis, who reprises her role as Laurie Strode and Rohan Campell as Cory Cunningham contributed to the positives of the movie. You can tell that the problems with this movie aren’t really the actors’ faults, and they just have bad writing. Laurie Strode feels out of character in the movie for the whole first hour, but Jamie Lee Curtis sells the performance the best she can. Rohan Campbell really gives a convincing performance in this movie as the new addition to this franchise. He makes his character Cory Cunningham fun and pretty interesting for about half the movie until the movie just goes off the rails.

To me, the biggest problems in this movie were the writing of the characters and the pacing of the first two-thirds of the movie. So many lines in this movie were cliches, and it became very distracting. Half the time, it felt like you could predict what the characters were going to say, and that isn’t a good thing. The way they wrote Laurie Strode disappointed me because it doesn’t feel like a super believable switch for her. Not everything in movies is going to be realistic, especially in horror movies, but it sort of feels out of left field for Laurie to switch in the way she did. Despite that, I couldn’t understand how that could be a possibility, but it feels slightly out of character judging by what has been shown throughout the year.

One of the most frustrating people in this movie is Allyson Nelson played by Andi Matichak. She, like the rest of the cast, doesn’t give a bad performance, but like I mentioned before she is written poorly. She claims she will do anything for this boy she fell in love with, within a week of meeting him. I really liked Allyson’s character in the first two movies she starred in, but she becomes extremely frustrating in this film. She takes a big step down from the strong and compelling character she portrayed, and it’s disappointing. The pacing of this movie also feels so off. The intriguing opening sequence displays some ideas that could be very interesting if they were explored further. After that, the movie drags its feet for about 30 minutes until anything interesting happens, and even then I had hoped there would be a turning point where things would get more interesting and they would start exploring some of these interesting ideas the movie had laid out. Instead, they did not, and I was disappointed. 

Along with this, Michael Myers wasn’t in the movie as much as he should have been. He seemed weak throughout the entire movie. I don’t think it’s entirely a bad thing, but we don’t necessarily get an explanation of why Michael acts weak and what’s going on with him. For this being the last movie in the timeline it disappoints the viewer to see the main villain of these movies just kind of take a back seat the whole time. He doesn’t feel very scary, and he hardly racks up any kills throughout the runtime. 

The explanations of things done in this movie are very confusing. Certain things that happen in this film don’t connect to the other movies, and it’s pretty distracting if you stop and think about it. Now if you go into this movie with no expectations and turn your brain off, then you might actually like this movie, and that’s understandable, but for me, I just couldn’t really look past a lot of the issues of this movie to fully enjoy it. If you are already subscribed to Peacock or can watch it for free then you may like this movie if you just watch the action and gore and don’t care about the storyline. I wouldn’t go see it in theaters though, save your money.