Jamie Lee Curtis was 19 when she made her film debut as Laurie in the original Halloween directed by Carpenter

Jamie Lee Curtis was 19 when she made her film debut as Laurie in the original directed by Carpenter. She has appeared in 7 of the 13 movies and is in fine form in this new one.

Jamie Lee Curtis and Rohan Campbell in Halloween Ends

Halloween Ends (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★½

The title suggests No.13 – Halloween Ends –will be the final instalment in the slasher horror series created by John Carpenter and Debra Hill back in 1978.

That may well be, though I wouldn’t bet the house on it. I always think of Peter Cushing popping up in the 2016 Star Wars movie, Rogue One, two decades after his death.

And the Halloween franchise, centred on sociopathic killer Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, the high school girl who escaped his clutches in 1978, has a reputation for tweaking timelines and doing remakes and reboots.

The opening titles sequence is a wry nod to this. It shows grinning Halloween pumpkins emerging from each other like babushka dolls.

Jamie Lee Curtis was 19 when she made her film debut as Laurie in the original, directed by Carpenter. She has appeared in seven of the 13 movies and is in fine form in this new one.

Watching her nuanced performance, there is a sense that this is an ending, an accounting, a reckoning. What form that might take sets up some intriguing possibilities.

Fans will think I’m as mad as Mike but as I watched I thought of Fight Club and wondered if the ultimate twist would be that Laurie Strode and Michael Myers were the same person.

Or, more generally, does Michael Myers – “who took our dreams and turned them into nightmares”, as Laurie puts it – exist in a corporeal sense or is he a psychological evil that can manifest in anybody?

Who is the shape behind the mask?

This second speculation came to my mind early on when, a few days before Halloween, a babysitter named Corey (an impressive Rohan Campbell), is hired to mind a pre-teen boy who is afraid of the dark.

When Corey tells the boy there’s no need to be frightened, the whippersnapper snaps back, “Michael Myers is still out there. He kills babysitters, not kids.”

What follows is a heart-racing sequence with a final twist that subtly alters the Halloween formula. The night ends extremely badly but the babysitter does not die.

Soon after, when Corey and Laurie are standing together on the street, the leader of a gang of youths points at them and jeers, “A psycho meets a freak show”. Laurie has bought a house in Haddonfield, Illinois, the town where the bloodshed began in 1978 and then was repeated and repeated and repeated. She says it is a place to live, not a place to hide.

This 111-minute movie is a sequel to its 2021 predecessor Halloween Kills. Both films are directed and co-written by David Gordon Green.

Four years have passed since the last body count. There’s a deft bit of backgrounding where Laurie, still working on her memoir, recounts the past and brings the story up to date.

Her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) takes a fancy to Corey, despite what happened on his babysitting job. Canadian actor Campbell, new to the franchise, brings a creepy elusiveness to Corey, who works in a car yard.

When Allyson, frustrated with small town life, says she wants to burn it all to the ground, he replies, “I’ll light the match”.

Is he just an impulsive young man sweet on a girl or is he something else altogether? As Halloween night approaches, that question looms larger and larger.

“Did Michael Myers let you go, or did you escape?’’ he asks Allyson who, like her grandmother, survived an encounter with the bogeyman.

As this is a Halloween movie, there is a knife-wielding figure in a mask – known as the Shape – and people start to die, in graphically gruesome circumstances. Fans of blood and gore are not short-changed.

The question is: Who is the shape behind the mask? Is 65-year-old Michael Myers back for a final slash before retirement, either forced or voluntary? Or is it someone else?

This fast-paced, well-acted thriller – in the psychological and slasher sense – carries us to an answer that may or may not be definitive.

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Memory (MA15+)
Amazon Prime
★★

Liam Neeson received his first and so far only Oscar nomination for being Oskar: the Jew-saving Nazi Oskar Schindler in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List, based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Tom Keneally.

The Academy Award for best actor went not to Neeson but to Tom Hanks for Philadelphia. That was long ago.

Watching the Irish actor’s new movie, the tepid thriller Memory, it seems even more of a distant, pun intended, memory.

Neeson, now 70, rose to prominence in the wake of Schindler’s List, landing the title roles in Rob Roy (1995) and Michael Collins (1996) and, as a change of pace, a part in Love Actually (2003).

However, since the box office success of the 2008 action-thriller Taken and its two sequels, Neeson has been more or less locked into man-with-a-gun roles.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with that but Memory, directed by New Zealand filmmaker Martin Campbell and written by Dario Scardapane, shows that talented people can have a bad day at the office.

I was keen to see this movie because Campbell directed the gripping 1985 TV series Edge of Darkness, starring Bob Peck, and its 2010 film spin-off with Mel Gibson and Ray Winstone. He’s also doubled up on 007s, making Golden Eye (1995) with Pierce Brosnan and Casino Royal (2005) with Daniel Craig.

The cast includes Australia’s Guy Pearce, who always interests me, and Monica Bellucci.

It’s an English language remake of the 2003 Belgian film The Alzheimer Case, based on the novel by Belgian writer Jef Geeraerts.

The original title goes to what this 116-minute movie is about. Alex Lewis (Neeson) is a contract killer who is suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s.

He wants to retire but agrees to do one final job, in Texas, for his mysterious employer Davana Sealman (Bellucci).

It soon becomes apparent that having shaky recall is not an asset in his line of work. As one character tells Sealman, “Your shooter’s losing his shit.”

Lewis pushes on, aiming and shooting, but puts on the safety catch when he learns that one of his targets is a 13-year-old girl. Her involvement brings in an FBI special agent (Pearce).

Lewis tries to bolster his memory by writing notes on his arm, as in Christopher Nolan’s mesmerising Memento (2000), starring Pearce.

That connection to Pearce and Memento should be a bit of film-on-film fun but it happens once only. This goes to why this movie is disappointing. It has an interesting idea, a hit man with Alzheimer’s, and does so little with it.

For most of the time, he’s just a hit man in an ordinarily (for paid assassins) sticky situation. He won’t kill the girl but others will, and him as well. Can he save her and himself and so on.

As such, this is like a million other movies. Lewis’s mental state is barely explored. Pearce is wasted. The script is weak and the performances are middling.

“We all have to die,’’ Lewis says at one point. “It’s what you do before you go.”

Personally I think what Liam Neeson should do is order a hit on the role of hit man and have a go at doing something different.

Not another hit! Liam Neeson stars as “Alex Lewis” in director Martin Campbell’s Memory