I can see why people enjoyed it and I do really like the theory in execution but it's the end result of my big problem with the trilogy as a whole: it just feels far too rushed and overbloated with its own messages. It'll never not be weird to me that Kills and Ends were shot practically at the same time yet they are so disjointed and feel like they were made by two different creative teams.
The first Green Halloween was a solid re-introduction to Michael in the zeitgeist. You can't push whatever new things you want in there because it needs to be about returning Myers to a place of power and cinematic "weight". That said if Ends is where you wanted to go with the films and you had two of them back to back, why didn't Kills open with this idea of Corey and MM's evil presence taking over the town? Instead you get some major, major reconstruction on the lore and history of Haddonfield with the townspeople acting like morons. You had two movies to build up this idea yet they just threw it into the last one by itself and took Kills to... do whatever that was.
I also don't like the execution of the story in Ends. It's just too cheesy for me and the main characters all feel like they get the "cool" disease at some point in it.
I think some context that might help explain my view is that Ends was not shot at the same time as Kills, even though that was the original plan. Covid lockdown prevented them from shooting back to back and the negative reception to Kills caused DGG and crew to change plans, hence Ends feeling so different.
Some might view that as a failure of planning, but I think it shows DGG is willing to take into account feedback and let his imagination take him to interesting places (I also think people waaaaaaay overrate how much film franchises or even TV shows need to be "planned." Remember, Thor 1's reveal of the treasure room got retconned in Thor Ragnarok. Todd in Breaking Bad was not supposed to survive the first season. Discovering things in the course of creation is a big part of the magic of an ongoing series.). The interpretation of Michael as a font of evil living underground and corrupting everything around him is unexpected and unique but totally keeping in spirit with Carpenter's interpretation of Michael as "The Boogeyman" or "pure evil" - he might look like an ordinary killer but he also got shot six times and disappeared, he's not normal (showing Michael's arrest in Kills is also part of why I didn't like the film, since it completely demystifies him). Are the characters beyond Michael a little cheesy? In a way yes, but they're also like... 22 and emotionally stunted from trauma, I don't think they sounded wrong. It's also just well directed, maybe the best directed of the trilogy - the shot on the bridge, with the lights on the billboard refracted through the fog, is a great fusion of Cundey's expressionist lighting with the practical-forward cinematography philosophy of today, while that shot of Corey being dragged into the sewer by an unseen force might be my favorite shot in...any of the movies, original included. So evocative and quietly terrifying.
I'm not pretending the movie is perfect. Laurie's parts are by and large the weakest; I love the parts where we get to see her open up and be supportive, but so much of the film is about her trauma and her pain over being ostracized and those parts just don't work. It also needed a wider canvas to explore some of the stuff it was trying to explore, chief among them Allyson getting sick of being propped up as a hero, which is an important element that feels very tell-don't-show (and this is where I am more sympathetic to the folks saying more ideas should've been introduced in Kills, since these are thematic elements that can be examined in the aftermath of 2018). that doesn't change the fact that the ideas at the center are pretty rock solid and interesting, and a damn-sight more engaging than the weak political commentary of Kills.
And while I can see the argument that more of these elements should've been introduced in the earlier films - there's a reason why it wasn't, but I understand why it would've been more satisfying if it was - I'm just so, so glad that it went off in an interesting direction at all. We complain all the time that every franchise movie is the same now, that they can't stray from the formula, won't something please switch things up. Then along comes Halloween Ends doing exactly that, and it has the added benefit of being a fairly well made film on top of that.
One final thing: I was not excited for DGG Exorcist before Ends. I was worried that it'd just be drawn out fanservice, which we saw in Kills can yield diminishing returns very quickly. After Ends, seeing all the weird places he can take established IP and iconography when given the chance to experiment while also ekeing out some crowdpleasing sequences when need be, I am fully on board for the new adventures of Captain Howdy and co.
