What’s it rated? R
When? 2022
Where’s it showing? Colony, Downtown Centre, Stadium 10, and streaming on Peacock
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is credited as the first slasher film, but the original Halloween (1978) arguably ushered in the Golden Age of the slasher genre. It followed remorseless killer Michael Myers after he escaped from a sanitarium and began stalking high school student Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), who managed to fight him off—leaving her the only survivor of his killing spree.
Can we agree that the Halloween franchise is harder to kill than its boogeyman Michael Myers? Twelve films have followed the original, and despite the most recent one being called Halloween Ends, don’t bet on it. It’s only the end of the most recent rebooted trilogy helmed by director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express), which also includes Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills (2021).
Halloween Ends picks up on two important themes of the franchise—the power of the angry paranoid mob to wreak damage, and the supernatural way pure evil can permeate and spread through a community. Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) is babysitting a boy who dies in a freak accident. Soon Corey is the town pariah, something Laurie Strode understands and sympathizes with, but has Corey awakened an old evil, unleashing another round of mayhem and death? Well, duh! (111 min.) Δ
This article appears in Nov 3-13, 2022.