The night HE... didn't really do much of anything
Unlike the other major horror franchises, the Halloween series has made room for so many mutually-incompatible narratives - there are five different branches of continuity distributed between thirteen films - that there's a sense in which "this isn't 'really' a Halloween film" is sort of an empty thing to say. Heck, the 1982 release Halloween III: Season of the Witch has literally nothing to do with the other 12 movies, so the series has allowed itself room to be very capacious for a very long time now. So I cannot and will not say that Halloween Ends "doesn't feel like a Halloween movie". There is no "feels like a Halloween movie" in the first place. What does a Halloween movie feel like? A formulaic '80s slasher movie like Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers? A zippy, quippy thriller like Halloween: H20? A grim wallow in human darkness like Rob Zombie's Halloween II? A scattered barrage of gore effects, like this film's immediate predecessor Halloween Kills? No, there is no one thing that is "a Halloween film".
So let's retrench to simpler, less emotional claims, such as Halloween Ends "is a giant sucking sack of shit". And it doesn't feel like a Halloween film, on top of it, not even to the limited degree that a Halloween film should, at a bare minimum - maybe even the only minimum that it's actually fair to apply to such a heterogeneous grab-bag of disparate movies - evoke something of the traditions of Halloween as it is celebrated in the United States. Added bonus if it feels like it plausibly takes place in late October in the Midwest, a target that has been missed by more than half of the series. Though two of the films that hit it were the two immediately leading into Ends, Halloween 2018 and the aforementioned Halloween Kills, made by the same director/cinematographer combo, David Gordon Green and Michael Simmonds. And to its credit, Halloween Ends is closer to the "feels like an Illinois autumn" end of the spectrum than the "feels like spring in Pasadena with about two dozen dried leaves scattered around" end. It does not, however, feel very much at all like it needed to take place on Halloween, except for an opening scene that is by some distance the best part of the movie.
That opening scene introduces us to 21-year-old Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), who is not at all equipped to be a babysitter, but on October 31, 2019 he cheerfully agrees to do so anyway, being as he is a Good Kid. By the time the night is over, he will have accidentally knocked a young boy named Jeremy (Jaxon Goldenberg) off of a third-floor landing, causing the child's skull to explode in a puddle of blood about three feet across. Three years later, Corey has - shockingly - become a social pariah in his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, enduring the leering taunts of just about everybody who crosses his path. One of the exceedingly few exceptions is Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), a pariah in her own right; in the wake of the massive killing spree perpetrated by mental institution escapee Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) on October 31, 2018, the people of Haddonfield have largely agreed that it was all her fault.
We here arrive - and the film has barely started! - at the point where I think it's impossible to imagine that Halloween Ends serves as the grand finale to 44 years of horror movie history spanning 12 preceding movies; I don't even think that it can plausibly be argued that this is a satisfactory resolution to a trilogy that started in 2018. Why, pray tell, would the Haddonfielders decide that Laurie was the one who brought Michael back after 40 years safely locked away at Smith's Grove, so much so that she should be ostracised and shunned? Why, if she spent the entire four decades between Halloween (1978) and Halloween (2018) lurking in a survivalist shack, swallowed alive by the trauma of a horrible night when three of her friends died, waiting for Michael to perhaps escape from the asylum and maybe come back to Haddonfield where he might target her specifically, would she then spend the next four years, following a full-fledged massacre of nearly 50 souls including her own daughter, during which years Michael has remained at large, cheerfully adopting an optimistic can-do pie-baking attitude? Why is the last film in the grand saga of Michael Myers one in which Michael receives considerably less than ten minutes of total screentime?
Put bluntly, Halloween Ends is best though of as a standalone movie, one that benefits in no way to being compared to any of the films preceding it, except insofar is that it always benefits every movie to be compared to Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers and Halloween: Resurrection, since the odds are extremely good that the comparison will be flattering. Certainly Ends doesn't build on any of the earlier movies; the closest it comes to actually drawing on our knowledge of the series to flesh out and deepen its own story is that it's taking many of its cues from the inordinately pretentious and dumb monologue given to Laurie at the end of Kills, where she suggests that Michael is something like a social construct, or mind virus, or some such thing. That's what underpins Ends's murky, messy thematic push, which is something to do with how society makes its own monsters, but also the monsters are already inherent in bad people, who might have been good people if only they weren't pushed into being their worst selves. It is a movie in which Michael Myers is both pointedly just a man, curdled by hatred and cruelty, but unworthy of the exalted status given to him by a terrified population, and also The Embodiment Of Pure Spiritual Evil, and also Pure Evil is something you can catch from touching, like herpes or pubic lice. Which is what happens to Corey when he encounters Michael in a storm sewer (the Pure Evil part, not the public lice). In hardly any time, the young man has been consumed by a dark selfish rage that drives him to murder. This tells us something about living life in the 2020s, possibly involving trauma and possibly involving toxic masculinity, but that's really mostly just a guess because "trama" and "toxic masculinity" are the current favorite buzzwords of filmmakers trying to forcibly Make A Social Point with their movies rather than provide a functional story or pleasurable genre exercise, and not because the film as produced does much of anything to put those ideas forward
In addition to is general thematic incoherence, Halloween Ends has another point where it gets hung up: Corey is absolute nonsense. He's our main character, I am stunned and appalled to say, with Laurie's function being to first try to hook Corey up with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak, who is flat-out playing a different character than she was in the last two, though to be fair, the four-man screenwriting team have largely forced her into it), and then to try to split them up after Allyson falls immediately in love with Corey mere hours before he catches a bad case of psycho killer. Allyson's main function is to be the primary person in harm's way as Corey's descent into depravity kicks into overdrive. Michael's main function is to not exist until the last act, when the filmmakers cynically attempt to fashion a grand scale "the last face-off between Michael and Laurie" climax that is not in any way related to the first hour and a half of the actually-existing Halloween Ends, though I'll say on its behalf that I think the movie to which it is the appropriate ending seems like it would have been a ton of fun, and I think it's too bad that Green and company didn't make that movie instead.
Given the particular nature of the ways in which Halloween Ends flops about like a dying fish as a story, it's not really a surprise that the filmmakers have clearly decided that they don't really want to make something so gauche as a slasher movie, perhaps having scratched that particular itch so extremely hard with Halloween Kills. Building the entire film around Corey has completely hamstrung them. Since this is basically an anti-hero story with him as a protagonist, it can't adopt anything like the usual slasher formula, and since it's trying to be serious about its themes, whatever the hell they are, it doesn't want to be a vicious little piece of exploitation, until very near the end when it starts trying very hard to shift protagonist duties over to Laurie. Mostly, the film is just fucking boring, watching a sad, pathetic young man transition, both arbitrarily and slowly, into an angry, aggressive young man, as very little actually happens besides the legacy characters shuffling around in a holding pattern, waiting patiently for the part where they can start screaming for this or that reason. It's not the worst Halloween, though it's too damn close, and it might not even be the dullest Halloween, but at 111 bone-dry minutes, it's a strong contender for the dreariest, most unwatchable Halloween. The only comfort I have is that no slasher film that ever put "this is the last movie" right there in the title ever proved to be correct, and a few years down the line, when we get a sixth line of continuity, I have faith that it cannot possibly be such a dreary turd as this.
Reviews in this series
Halloween (Carpenter, 1978
Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1989)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chapelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)
Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)
Halloween Ends (Green, 2022)
So let's retrench to simpler, less emotional claims, such as Halloween Ends "is a giant sucking sack of shit". And it doesn't feel like a Halloween film, on top of it, not even to the limited degree that a Halloween film should, at a bare minimum - maybe even the only minimum that it's actually fair to apply to such a heterogeneous grab-bag of disparate movies - evoke something of the traditions of Halloween as it is celebrated in the United States. Added bonus if it feels like it plausibly takes place in late October in the Midwest, a target that has been missed by more than half of the series. Though two of the films that hit it were the two immediately leading into Ends, Halloween 2018 and the aforementioned Halloween Kills, made by the same director/cinematographer combo, David Gordon Green and Michael Simmonds. And to its credit, Halloween Ends is closer to the "feels like an Illinois autumn" end of the spectrum than the "feels like spring in Pasadena with about two dozen dried leaves scattered around" end. It does not, however, feel very much at all like it needed to take place on Halloween, except for an opening scene that is by some distance the best part of the movie.
That opening scene introduces us to 21-year-old Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), who is not at all equipped to be a babysitter, but on October 31, 2019 he cheerfully agrees to do so anyway, being as he is a Good Kid. By the time the night is over, he will have accidentally knocked a young boy named Jeremy (Jaxon Goldenberg) off of a third-floor landing, causing the child's skull to explode in a puddle of blood about three feet across. Three years later, Corey has - shockingly - become a social pariah in his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, enduring the leering taunts of just about everybody who crosses his path. One of the exceedingly few exceptions is Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), a pariah in her own right; in the wake of the massive killing spree perpetrated by mental institution escapee Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) on October 31, 2018, the people of Haddonfield have largely agreed that it was all her fault.
We here arrive - and the film has barely started! - at the point where I think it's impossible to imagine that Halloween Ends serves as the grand finale to 44 years of horror movie history spanning 12 preceding movies; I don't even think that it can plausibly be argued that this is a satisfactory resolution to a trilogy that started in 2018. Why, pray tell, would the Haddonfielders decide that Laurie was the one who brought Michael back after 40 years safely locked away at Smith's Grove, so much so that she should be ostracised and shunned? Why, if she spent the entire four decades between Halloween (1978) and Halloween (2018) lurking in a survivalist shack, swallowed alive by the trauma of a horrible night when three of her friends died, waiting for Michael to perhaps escape from the asylum and maybe come back to Haddonfield where he might target her specifically, would she then spend the next four years, following a full-fledged massacre of nearly 50 souls including her own daughter, during which years Michael has remained at large, cheerfully adopting an optimistic can-do pie-baking attitude? Why is the last film in the grand saga of Michael Myers one in which Michael receives considerably less than ten minutes of total screentime?
Put bluntly, Halloween Ends is best though of as a standalone movie, one that benefits in no way to being compared to any of the films preceding it, except insofar is that it always benefits every movie to be compared to Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers and Halloween: Resurrection, since the odds are extremely good that the comparison will be flattering. Certainly Ends doesn't build on any of the earlier movies; the closest it comes to actually drawing on our knowledge of the series to flesh out and deepen its own story is that it's taking many of its cues from the inordinately pretentious and dumb monologue given to Laurie at the end of Kills, where she suggests that Michael is something like a social construct, or mind virus, or some such thing. That's what underpins Ends's murky, messy thematic push, which is something to do with how society makes its own monsters, but also the monsters are already inherent in bad people, who might have been good people if only they weren't pushed into being their worst selves. It is a movie in which Michael Myers is both pointedly just a man, curdled by hatred and cruelty, but unworthy of the exalted status given to him by a terrified population, and also The Embodiment Of Pure Spiritual Evil, and also Pure Evil is something you can catch from touching, like herpes or pubic lice. Which is what happens to Corey when he encounters Michael in a storm sewer (the Pure Evil part, not the public lice). In hardly any time, the young man has been consumed by a dark selfish rage that drives him to murder. This tells us something about living life in the 2020s, possibly involving trauma and possibly involving toxic masculinity, but that's really mostly just a guess because "trama" and "toxic masculinity" are the current favorite buzzwords of filmmakers trying to forcibly Make A Social Point with their movies rather than provide a functional story or pleasurable genre exercise, and not because the film as produced does much of anything to put those ideas forward
In addition to is general thematic incoherence, Halloween Ends has another point where it gets hung up: Corey is absolute nonsense. He's our main character, I am stunned and appalled to say, with Laurie's function being to first try to hook Corey up with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak, who is flat-out playing a different character than she was in the last two, though to be fair, the four-man screenwriting team have largely forced her into it), and then to try to split them up after Allyson falls immediately in love with Corey mere hours before he catches a bad case of psycho killer. Allyson's main function is to be the primary person in harm's way as Corey's descent into depravity kicks into overdrive. Michael's main function is to not exist until the last act, when the filmmakers cynically attempt to fashion a grand scale "the last face-off between Michael and Laurie" climax that is not in any way related to the first hour and a half of the actually-existing Halloween Ends, though I'll say on its behalf that I think the movie to which it is the appropriate ending seems like it would have been a ton of fun, and I think it's too bad that Green and company didn't make that movie instead.
Given the particular nature of the ways in which Halloween Ends flops about like a dying fish as a story, it's not really a surprise that the filmmakers have clearly decided that they don't really want to make something so gauche as a slasher movie, perhaps having scratched that particular itch so extremely hard with Halloween Kills. Building the entire film around Corey has completely hamstrung them. Since this is basically an anti-hero story with him as a protagonist, it can't adopt anything like the usual slasher formula, and since it's trying to be serious about its themes, whatever the hell they are, it doesn't want to be a vicious little piece of exploitation, until very near the end when it starts trying very hard to shift protagonist duties over to Laurie. Mostly, the film is just fucking boring, watching a sad, pathetic young man transition, both arbitrarily and slowly, into an angry, aggressive young man, as very little actually happens besides the legacy characters shuffling around in a holding pattern, waiting patiently for the part where they can start screaming for this or that reason. It's not the worst Halloween, though it's too damn close, and it might not even be the dullest Halloween, but at 111 bone-dry minutes, it's a strong contender for the dreariest, most unwatchable Halloween. The only comfort I have is that no slasher film that ever put "this is the last movie" right there in the title ever proved to be correct, and a few years down the line, when we get a sixth line of continuity, I have faith that it cannot possibly be such a dreary turd as this.
Reviews in this series
Halloween (Carpenter, 1978
Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1989)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chapelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)
Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)
Halloween Ends (Green, 2022)
Categories: crimes against art, horror, needless sequels, slashers
