HALLOWEEN ENDS (2022)
I've made no secret about this; I am a huge Halloween fan. Halloween is my favorite horror franchise. Period. The franchise has certainly had a murky history, with its share of ups and downs. I have my biases and periods in the series I prefer over others (any Halloween film with Donald Pleasence is the gold standard for me. ANY). Above all, I only ask one thing when it comes to new Halloween films: treat Michael Myers well. To me, this is his franchise. To me, I don't go to Halloween films for anything else. And I'm guessing for most of us, if you're all being honest with yourselves, you all go to these movies for the same reason: Michael Myers.
David Gordon Green and Danny McBride's Halloween trilogy has been an interesting experiment to say the least. I feel Halloween 2018 (we'll call it H40) has only grown better with time, at least for me. I recently watched it again in a movie theater and I very much enjoyed it yet again. It's not perfect by any means, but I feel the film, by and large, nails what has made the Halloween franchise so enduring and endearing for over four decades. Halloween Kills is not nearly as good as H40, I'll admit. But for everything that doesn't work in that film, nearly every section with Michael Myers does work. Michael Myers, and how he was menacingly portrayed, really saves the film for me. I'll watch both H40 and H-Kills again and again for these reasons.
Halloween Ends fumbles the ball entirely for one major reason (and you can probably guess what that reason is): a terribly poor treatment of Michael Myers. Michael Myers barely does anything in this movie, and what he does do is underwhelming and head-scratching. It doesn't help matters that the trailers and marketing sold us on an epic showdown between Michael Myers and Laurie... and that comprises the last five minutes of the film.
But...
Nestled in this movie is a very intriguing story about a brand new character and how, maybe, the town of Haddonfield is actually the real source of evil. However, this story isn't set up in any way by the previous films. And given how intimately connected the previous films were to each other, this story comes across as jarring, tonally different, and alien to the story we were following for two entire movies.
If H40 and H-Kills worked for you, more or less, I get the feeling that this film won't. If those two movies didn't work for you (then why did you even bother watching this to begin with?) I get the feeling you probably will enjoy this film. This movie comes across to me as the Halloween film for people who don't like Halloween films (or at least the majority of Halloween films).
I apologize in advance as this review will be a big one.
So let's dig into it!
INITIAL IMPRESSIONS
There are many interesting elements to this movie and ideas that have potential for exploration. I feel the movie is well acted and the social commentary is not quite as ham-fisted as it was in H-Kills. There are a few fun homages here and there such as characters watching John Carpenter's The Thing on television whereas characters in the original Halloween were watching Howard Hawk's The Thing on television. This film also seems to draw heavy influence from Stephen King's Christine (also wonderfully adapted by John Carpenter into film). There's even a touch of Natural Born Killers for a bit, which is left unfulfilled. Also, Laurie's new house appears to be the same house from Halloween 4 and Halloween 5, which was nice to see.
The movie has a few great set pieces such as the open prologue narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis in which she describes the horrors of Michael Myers hanging over the down like a pall of despair, people dying and being killed even without Michael Myers being there. The first major scene with our new protagonist, Cory, and his babysitting stint going horrifically wrong, I felt was quite potent. And there are some fantastic kills towards the latter half of the film that will stick with you too.
But the film leverages its potential at the expense of its main characters: Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. Michael Myers is barely in the film, maybe a paltry ten minutes if that. Instead of making those ten minutes count, Michael Myers is largely ineffectual and seemingly out of place in the story. His inclusion in the film feels like an afterthought or hastily tacked on at the last minute. He's weak, feeble, acts wildly out of character, and inexplicably on the opposite end of the spectrum from where we last saw him in H-Kills with no explanation given. There is no connectivity between this Michael Myers and the Michael Myers from H-Kills. He's a shell of his former self in this film and completely unnecessary to the plot.
Similarly Laurie is portrayed jarringly different from the previous two films. I was not a fan of her "Sarah Conner" impersonation from the first film, but at least she remained consistent from H40 to H-Kills (as did Michael Myers). Just like Michael, we meet an inexplicably different Laurie Strode. Her character has moments of continuity with the previous films, but overall feels largely like a different character. Still, she's wonderfully portrayed by Jamie Lee Curtis and is given far more to do than Michael Myers. Yet, she is merely a side character to the central plot, a passenger rather than the driver of her own story.
This film introduces a new character not seen in the previous films; Cory Cunningham. The film centers around him in which a tragic accident sends him spiraling down to becoming a serial killer and Michael Myers' successor. His journey parallels Arnie Cunningham's from Christine with a slow descent into madness, evil infecting him from within... or from without? I don't know because the central message we're getting from the film, through Laurie's dialog and other allusions, is that Cory becomes infected with evil from within yet it presents the idea of evil being passed to him externally through direct contact with Michael Myers and the cruelty of Haddonfield's citizenry. There's also a Norman Bates parallel with Cory's mother. Nature versus nurture? Internal versus external? The film can't seem to make up its mind.
I like the idea of the town of Haddonfield as a character itself, a dark dour battery of evil, slowly bringing down everyone within it to varying degrees of darkness. I like the idea of the dual evils, external and internal. But all of this runs contrary to the intent of the original 1978 film, the film which director David Gordon Green and writer Danny McBride founded their trilogy's premise upon: the randomness of violence, violence without reason or consciousness. If the point of eliminating Halloween II (1981) from the continuity was to bring Michael Myers back to an unconscionable source of evil, this movie undermines that intent by exploring the origins of evil. Did the town turn Michael into a monster? That's the whole conceit of Cory's story and he is meant to be a parallel to what happened to Michael. So, which is it? This feels like, to me, the film retreading ground from Rob Zombie's Halloween duology, in particular the extremely divisive elements explaining away Michael's motivation.
This film, to me, draws from a few previous Halloween films, namely all of the divisive films in the series. With Michael barely being in the film and what little he is in it feeling like a wildly different character altogether, feels reminiscent of Rob Zombie's Halloween II and "Hobo-Myers." Michael's demise in this film recalls his "permanent" demise in H20. His living in the sewers and eating rats recalls Halloween Resurrection. And Michael's overall lack of presence and the characterization of Haddonfield feels more akin to Halloween III: Season of the Witch. All of these elements are among the more divisive in the series, polarizing with fans alike.
Everyone has their own preferences and films in the series that work and don't work with them. If H40 was attempting to distill everything that worked for audiences from the series, this film comes across to me as a distillation of everything that doesn't work for most audiences from the series. In a certain way, this film feels like "the Halloween film for people that hate Halloween films." If I could characterize Halloween Ends any better, it's another example of Hollywood "subverting audiences' expectations," a phrase which, by and large, has become synonymous with divisive, polarizing, and franchise shattering films.
Again, I feel the story told in Halloween Ends has potential, not as a main entry in the Halloween series, but rather as a spinoff, similarly to how Halloween III stood apart from the rest (a film notorious for being outright rejected by audiences for years, people only coming around to it decades after the fact). Again, that movie was a Halloween film for people who wanted no more of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode. In a weird way, this new story is ruined by the inclusion of what most of us wanted: Michael Myers. The specter of Michael Myers hovering over the town works, but the actual presence of Michael being there fails abysmally. Michael is poorly treated in this film and would benefit greatly by being removed from the film entirely. In isolation, without Michael Myers, the story of Halloween Ends is intriguing, but the mishandling of Michael (and Laurie too I guess) is what ultimately makes the film so unsatisfying.
The story told in Halloween Ends comes across as the wrong story to tell at this time. No plot threads or through-lines from the previous films are followed up on, leaving me to think that there was no plan for a trilogy when they started with H40. Halloween Ends feels like a different trilogy's finale, not the one that should've concluded H40 and H-Kills.
Overall Ranking: 4 out of 10
Cory's story feels like it was meant to be another movie and a different ending was smashed onto it. The ideas are intriguing and filled with potential, but there is virtually no cohesion with previous films and sketchy cohesion within this film itself. And that end fight scene (which felt completely tacked on and unearned)... what the hell was that? We finally get Michael Myers back and he is hilariously defeated and ground into hamburger. That's like making a sequel to Jaws in which a barracuda does most of the killing throughout the entire film. And when Bruce finally appears, he's killed off by the first fishermen he encounters.
I've only seen the movie once and, frankly, I don't feel the need to watch it again. My gut reaction after the film ended was disappointment. From the moment the movie started I instantly had the feeling something was wrong from the music. The last two films began with the ominous notes of the score, setting a terrifying tone for the film. This film begins with music from the Haddonfield radio station, which plays into elements of the movie to come, doing anything but establish a tone. The feeling setup with this music was anything but Halloween. It's a nitpick, I know, but it seemed to foreshadow how "different" this film would be from the others and, ultimately, how I ended up feeling about the movie by the end.
For more of my thoughts on the Halloween franchise, check out these previous posts below
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