Review: 'Halloween Ends' looks at different levels of evil, before bringing Jamie Lee Curtis and her nemesis together one last time

Once again, a movie in the “Halloween” franchise promises to be the last, the final time that Michael Myers will kill the residents of Haddonfield — and with the sometimes brilliant, sometimes head-scratching “Halloween Ends,” director David Gordon Green seems to mean it.

Myers, the implacable evil killing machine played by James Jude Courtney, lies in wait for much of this movie, hiding out in a sewer culvert, gathering his strength. Instead, much of the movie centers on another character, a young man named Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), who seems to have channelled Michael’s evil essence. Or maybe Green is centering on a non-Michael character in his third “Halloween” movie to pay homage to the Michael-free 1982 sequel “Halloween III: Season of the Witch.”

In the prologue, we meet Corey as a 21-year-old college student, asked to babysit a boy on Halloween, 2019, and how the boy’s prank goes horribly awry — making Corey an accidental killer and a town pariah. One person who looks kindly on Corey is Laurie Strode, the heroine of the franchise played by Jamie Lee Curtis.

Laurie, like Corey, is ostracized by Haddonfield, as many of the townsfolk somehow blame her for Michael Myers’ obsession with her. Never mind that Laurie has been trying to kill Michael for four decades, and that in the last movie, 2021’s “Halloween Kills,” Laurie — spoiler alert — lost her daughter, Karen (Judy Greer, seen here in flashbacks), to Michael’s murderous evil.

That was four years ago, and both Laurie and Haddonfield seem to be returning to normal. Laurie lives with her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), who’s now a nurse in the town’s urgent-care clinic. Laurie is writing her memoir — which provides some overly wordy narration, musing about the nature of evil — and occasionally chats with Frank (Will Patton), the retired police chief, and Lindsey (Kyle Richards), kindly bartender who survived Michael because Laurie was her babysitter in John Carpenter’s 1978 original. (By the way, the maestro shares credit for the score, and his chilling original theme pops up a few times.)

Laurie finds Corey being tormented by some obnoxious high-school kids, and intervenes. Laurie is impressed with Corey, persevering in spite of the town’s reactions to him, and suggests to Allyson that they should go out sometime. They do, and a tentative romance begins.

Simultaneously, though, Corey has another encounter — with Michael Myers. When Michael doesn’t kill him, it seems like the masked monster might have found a kindred spirit, a successor to his murderous ways.

The script — a joint effort of relative newbies Paul Brad Logan and Chris Bernier, Green collaborator Danny McBride and Green himself — becomes a sometimes fascinating character study, comparing Michael’s special blend of evil with Corey’s more mundane form of slaughter. The killing scenes deliver the requisite horror-movie mayhem, though the deaths often are telegraphed so only a few scenes serve up any surprise.

Diehards may get impatient watching Corey kill townspeople while Michael is on the sidelines. But there’s a payoff, of sorts, when the promised final confrontation between Laurie and Michael commences, providing Curtis some solid kick-ass moments and the audience a chance to see the monster one last time. That is, if the powers that be can hold to their plan that this is the last time.

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‘Halloween Ends’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 14, in theaters, and streaming on Peacock. Rated R for bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout and some sexual references. Running time: 111 minutes.