Directed by David Gordon Green
Written by Paul Brad Logan, Chris Bernier, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green
Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell
Rated R for bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout and some sexual references.
Runtime: 1 hour and 51 minutes

by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

David Gordon Green has had a strange, prolific career with wild highs, terrible lows and everything in between. He swings for the fences, and when he hits, he knocks it out of the park. When he misses, he goes spiraling out of control, spinning like a top. I think, as a storyteller, he just acts on pure impulse and doesn’t ever second guess those impulses. If something feels right to him, he’ll do it. For better, and for worse (much, much worse, at times), these are the stories exactly as he likes them to be told.

The first movie of his I saw was George Washington. I’d heard about it, and I rented it from a video store before those things pretty much all closed across the world. It’s a masterpiece and I love it. I adore it. I own the Criterion edition Blu-ray and everything.

Pretty much right after I saw that, Pineapple Express came out. I watched it, and even though the two movies wouldn’t be any different tonally or even stylistically, I think I loved it about as much. It was funny as hell, action-packed and just good old fashioned fun. If George Washington is a critical darling and a masterpiece in the traditional sense, Pineapple Express is definitely a stoner classic, one to throw on every April 20th.

Now, not everything he’s made has been as good as those two. He’s come close! He’s made some damn fine movies. But he’s made some stinkers, too. When it was announced that not only would he be helming not only the new Halloween movie for Blumhouse, but a whole-ass trilogy, I thought, “Huh, that’s a weird choice,” and my opinion on that has not wavered one bit, four years later. In fact, I think his Halloween trilogy is a pretty decent metaphor for his entire filmography, in all its valleys and troughs.

Halloween (2018) is fine. I’m still not totally sure why David Gordon Green and his frequent collaborator Danny McBride had pitched this project, because it’s pretty standard slasher/reboot fare. The performances are better than you’d expect in this kind of movie, and Jamie Lee Curtis is great, as always, returning to the role that made her a star, Laurie Strode. The story itself, though, is nothing special and some of the twists and turns the plot makes are… well, let’s face it, pretty dumb. It has some interesting ideas, some genuinely chilling build-ups, but it never comes together as a whole. I always felt like it was a waste of a lot of talent, to put together something so pedestrian.

My favorite part of Halloween, Green’s reboot, is my coincidence-filled day I had with it. I saw Halloween at a very early matinee. I lived in LA at the time, and my wife wanted to go to some knitting/craft expo in Pasadena. We were like, “Hey, we just saw Halloween, we should check out the Michael Myers house while we’re there!” We did, and it was decorated up for October and it was so cool. There were posters for the original movie in the windows and everything. Then, over at the expo, we saw Judy Greer buying yarn. I wanted to say, “I just saw you in the movie I watched about an hour ago!” but ehhhh. I didn’t wanna bug her.

Halloween Kills is, in my humblest of opinions, possibly the worst of the entire Halloween franchise, and I might even go so far as to call it David Gordon Green’s worst movie, too. Reaction to this movie is quite mixed. I know people who like it really like it, and people who dislike it seem to really, really dislike it. I don’t hate it. I appreciate what it’s trying to say, and that it’s not merely a clone of its predecessors talking points about the personification of evil. Instead, the movie holds up a mirror to us, the viewer, and has us take a good, long look at who the real monster is.

The problem is, all those “mob mentality” scenes are just terrible. Everything about them is terrible. The dialogue, the repeat, “Evil dies tonight!” line—hell, even the way those scenes are shot look amateurish and goofy, with the camera punch-zooming in and out.

My complaint about Halloween (2018) was that the fear and mystery of Michael Myers was eschewed in favor of graphic violence and gore, which is not the point of the original movie at all. The original was bathed in shadows and it was just so creepy and wonderful. Green’s Halloween might as well have been a Friday the 13th movie, there was no difference between The Shape and Jason.

In Halloween Kills, Green gives in to all of his worst impulses. He tries to differentiate it by having a unique plot that goes unexpected places, but I watched most of it, jaw agape, in awe of just how dumb it all was. I also had to laugh out loud and the preposterousness of Anthony Michael Hall as a grown-up Tommy Doyle dismissing riling up a crowd to kill an innocent man with a quick shrug and, “I fucked up,” like he ordered the wrong meal at Taco Bell.

Halloween Ends appears to be everyone else’s vote for not only the worst of David Gordon Green’s Halloween Trilogy but possibly the worst that the Halloween franchise has to offer.

I’m not ordinarily a contrarian. I don’t like to dislike popular things, or hate beloved things, just for the yuck of it. Hot takes are exhausting bullshit to keep up. So, I’m surprised at myself by how much I enjoyed Halloween Ends.

Don’t get me wrong, and make no mistake, I can understand why someone would not like this movie. And even as much as I like it, don’t find it perfect. It’s flawed as hell, but I think it’s goddamned ambitious, well made, suspenseful and, for the first time, a movie I could tell was directed by David Gordon Green. The soundtrack is great, back are his long, dreamy, slow-mo shots that made everyone think he was the second coming of Terrence Malick early on in his career. There’s a long, unbroken shot of two lovers riding a motorcycle at night, with the wind blowing in their hair, with a perfect, ambient score underplaying it, and it’s fantastic. It’s something the rest of the trilogy lacked and needed.

The biggest complaint regarding Halloween Ends is focused on its lack of Michael Myers/the Shape and the introduction of a new villain, brought under Myers’ wing: Corey. Your milage is going to vary on this, so if you’re wanting to see a movie chock full of Michael Myers hacking and slashing, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. There’s very little of him in it, and even though I never did an official body count comparison, I think it’s the lowest of his trilogy. Still, I think it’s the most interesting examination of a different kind of evil. Is Corey a natural born killer, was he made this way by a town driven mad by Michael Myers, or was it a combination of things?

Halloween Ends takes Kill’s ideas about mob mentality and actually does something interesting with it. The story is chilling. It reminds me a bit of Stephen King’s IT, in which an entire town was victimized by its legacy of evil and cruelty. The movie has an understanding of societal toxicity and how it permeates a culture.

Simply put, I get Halloween Ends. I get what it was trying to say, I get why it sidelined Michael Myers, and I get why it decided to be a character study on Corey, the man who is either the rebirth of evil incarnate, or was made that way by a lifetime of enduring cruelty. In that way, it reminded by of George Romero’s vampire masterpiece, Martin, in which we’re asked to sympathize, although not condone, the actions of a monster. Whether this monster is human, or something else, is beside the point. That’s for us to decide.

Not to sound all pretentious here, like the movie went over everyone’s head if they didn’t like it, but I think maybe the change was sprung on some viewers. They went in expecting another David Gordon Green Halloween movie with a high body count, but were instead given a movie where a mostly-in-the-shadows (like a masked Colonel Kurtz) Myers grooms a new henchman to carry out murder on his behalf. I went into the movie already knowing this to be the case, because of general internet outrage, so I had an advantage going in. Similarly, I saw Halloween III decades after confused, angry audiences had an unrelated story about an evil mask-maker dropped on them.

I had a chance to judge the movie on its own terms and without my expectations being completely subverted. On its own terms, as a movie dissecting the nature of evil, and how it can affect a community, I found it oddly sweet and sensitive. It had plenty of gore, but it was more about those quiet moments that built up to the explosions of violence. In an odd way, Halloween Ends felt like the closest in spirit to the original that we’ve gotten since the original film was released. The two movies have similar build-ups and pay-offs to violent scenarios. And it was refreshing to see an entry in the Halloween franchise obsessed with how cool violence and gore is, but to show it as a shocking, ugly thing that can rock a town to its core. And the violence spreads like a disease, allowed to cause more and more.

David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy has been all over the place in terms of quality. My prediction is that Halloween Ends will be something of a Halloween III: Season of the Witch, with equal amounts of hate and love given to it. It will confuse, anger and ruffle some, and others will adore its audacity to be totally different. To me, I think Green’s trilogy has been building up to this. The mundane Halloween, the terrible Halloween Kills, were necessary chapters to this conclusion.