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Halloween Ends Review
Image Credit: Universal Pictures
Loading...[Ed. Note: This review contains SPOILERS for Halloween Ends.]
If I’m not careful, I’m going to trick myself into loving this movie.
My inner nihilist kind of looks at what Halloween Ends did (Oh ho ho, I almost said “accomplished”, and that would be a lie), and thinks “Oh my god, this movie just flipped off the whole world, AND I AM HERE FOR IT”.
But the problem with that is that it implies Halloween Ends did anything intentionally, and I simply do not believe that to be the case. This felt much more like the studio looked at Halloween 2018 and Halloween Kills, then pulled a guy off the street who had seen neither and told him “Hey, finish this trilogy, we don’t care how. You don’t need to have seen the other two first.”
(I’m going to jump straight into SPOILERS from here on out because I’m toying with changing up my written movie reviews to reflect the way I review movies on my podcast)
So we all remember how Halloween Kills ended, right? Michael proved he has some level of supernatural magic, mowed down a mob who had just beaten the shit out of him, and killed Laurie Strode’s daughter. And that was where it left off: Michael, back in his house, with Judy Greer’s corpse, still in the middle of the night with a manhunt after him.
So of course Halloween Ends starts off one year later, with the town of Haddonfield STILL FUCKING CELEBRATING HALLOWEEN JESUS CHRIST WHO IS THE MAYOR AROUND HERE, and a new family of characters: Mom Character, Dad Character, Jeremy, and Corey (their lawnmower-turned-babysitter). Corey is a harmless loser geek overachiever looking into engineering colleges until his brat of a charge pranks him by locking him in the attic. Desperate to break free, Corey accidentally kills Jeremy, necessitating ANOTHER time jump… this one of 3 years.
We find that in the fours years since Michael’s 2018 massacre, a few things have happened:
-Corey served a year for manslaughter, was released, and became the town pariah.
-The “EVIL DIES TONIGHT!” town just decided if they couldn’t kill Michael, they’d just go nuts and bump up their murder rate.
-Michael moved into a sewer and just… chilled out there, and the “EVIL DIES TONIGHT” town just didn’t care about trying to find him at all.
-Haddonfield has decided LAURIE is the cause of all of their problems because fuck you that’s why, and effectively shunned her.
-And Laurie, who spent 40 years in terror that an imprisoned man was going to come get her, now looks at a world where that man murdered her daughter and escaped into the night and goes “I should just live a normal life with my granddaughter Allyson now”.
But hey, whatever! It’s new movie time! Who cares about the last four years? We’re back, so it’s time to get ready for the thrilling conclusion to the Michael Myers saga…
After we tell Corey’s story instead for the first, like, 70 minutes of runtime!
This movie seriously has the cajones to spend the vast majority of its running time showing the descent into madness of a character NOT EVEN ALLUDED TO in the first two movies of the trilogy! If you re-read that Halloween Kills review I linked above, you will see hoe upset I was that the movie crafted this entire story about how maybe Judy Greer’s character was on the verge of being possessed by The Shape next, only to puss out in the end and kill her.
Then this movie just does a worse version of what they built up one movie ago, and now with a character no one cares about!
Oh my god, I just… I don’t understand. You told a story that was RIGHT THERE. You HAD IT. You did an interesting thing, and then you fumbled the ball at the goal line and tried to recover it with your asscheeks. What are you doing?!
Don’t worry, though… Michael IS in the early going here! Why, he has about 5 minutes of total screen time where he randomly befriends Corey as the latter’s rage is simmering inside him over having been ostracized, bullied, and attacked. That’s the movie we came to see! The one where an old, crippled Michael Myers needs this geek’s help to kill a dude. Whereupon he has what I can only refer to as a Myersgasm and gets some of his mojo back.
I’m telling you: I wish I believed they did all of this on purpose just to screw with us.
Anyway, Corey starts killing people. Laurie realizes he is evil. He turns Allyson against Laurie with the power of his erection.
This all sets up the climax which turns into a WWE Rotating Door Promo Battle Royal of Laurie vs Corey, Laurie vs Allyson, Corey vs Michael, Laurie vs Michael, Allyson vs Michael. And by the end of it, we get a final, seemingly very definitive ending to the struggle of Haddonfield Vs Michael Myers.
All right, with all that in mind, let’s move into our new (unless you follow the podcast, which you SHOULD) segment:
TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS
In the interest of objectivity, I strive to find multiple things I liked and disliked about all movies, no matter how I feel about them overall!
+Somehow simultaneously the BEST and WORST scene in the movie is the conclusion of Laurie’s struggle with Corey (who, by the way, beat up his senpai Michael and stole his mask earlier). Laurie has shot Corey and set him up for a fall to prove that she was right all along about him, and then Corey plays his trump card: he stabs himself in the throat to make it look like Laurie killed him so Allyson will hate her! It was the biggest “HOLY SHIT” moment (in the good way) in a movie that had several “Holy shit” moments (in bad ways).
(I did say it was also the worst because at least for the first hour-plus, this movie had some nuts and was trying something new and unexpected. But Corey’s death also sealed our fate: we were back to the final confrontation being Laurie and Michael, which is stale)
+The movie is entertaining enough in the base slasher mold. I wasn’t ever bored. And there is a part of me that sees movies just swinging hard for the fences like this one did (and Malignant, for instance), and just gets obsessed with the “WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?” of it all. I was engaged in whatever the hell this flick was shooting for! It’s the “stop and look at a car crash” kind of mentality, but it worked!
-Oh, where to start on the Downs? Nothing here feels cohesive at all with what came before it. Your feelings on 2018 and Kills, be they separate or as part of a series, can be what they are, but this entry genuinely feels like it was written by someone who never watched them and only heard a whisper of a rumor what they were about. Allyson and Laurie are COMPLETELY different characters here. Michael’s obsession with his sister’s window is never mentioned. Haddonfield goes from “EVIL DIES TONIGHT” to “Eh, this is fine, whatever” for no reason. The lack of coherence to the previous two movies is MIND-NUMBING.
-In the Halloween franchise tradition of Weird One-Note Victim Characters, we got: the roving group of band kid bully/murderers (What?), the radio DJ tough guy whose clothes and personality are from the distant past, and Corey’s obsessive mom who is maybe in love with him and says things like “I can smell her on you”. Seriously, Ends? You’re following up the respectable cast of characters from Kills (Big John / Little John, the nurse and doctor couple) with these jabroneys? Poor showing.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Just… not a great effort here from everyone involved. I really struggled with a second Up, and both of my Ups are kind of back-handed, as it were. Halloween Ends is mostly just maddeningly baffling. It feels like everyone involved just panicked and borrowed a screenplay from another movie. I will never ever ever believe that when they started this trilogy, THIS was always where they were going. It’s inconceivable.
Just the sheer spectacle of “what on earth are they doing” at least made my viewing of this a confused delight, but that will not hold up on multiple viewings. This is destined to be a flick I like less and less every time I watch it. But at least I’m less concerned I’ll talk myself into liking it now that I wrote all this out.
