Halloween Ends

Review

This movie really falls into a niche I love known as ‘wet cat gets given a knife’ a la Spree. I’ve heard a lot of people say this movie was terrible and I personally think they are just mean and have no whimsy. However, I will admit that for a Halloween movie, especially in this timeline, this movie is pretty batshit.

This movie starts with the audience meeting Corey who is babysitting on Halloween night and through a series of accidents ends up killing the kid he is babysitting for. Years later he’s still an outcast in the town but he’s just trying to get by. He ends up meeting and bonding with Allyson and goes to a party with her, after they have an argument he gets thrown off a bridge by some teenagers and is dragged into the sewers by Michael Myers. After having a bonding moment with Michael, he escapes and begins acting as an apprentice to Michael, adopting some of his behavior and becoming more aggressive in personality. At this change Laurie becomes concerned and the movie reaches its finale with Corey fully assuming the Michael Myers role going to kill Laurie, when he fails he resorts to killing himself and blaming Laurie and then Michael appears to take back his mask and finish the job. The movie ends with Laurie crucifying Michael on her kitchen island, then strapping him to the top of her car like a Christmas tree, and finally throwing him into one of those compactor things for metal.

First off, I liked Corey, A LOT. For this Halloween timeline, I can see why people wouldn’t like him as he doesn’t really fit with any of the other movies and he’s not your typical slasher killer but he does fit into one of my favorite character types, extremely pathetic, sad man, so I really liked him. He has a bad hand in life with the babysitting accident and then he spends the first half of the movie getting bullied by a bunch of high schoolers so it leads to you rooting for him in the end when he finally snaps and gets his revenge.

I think Laurie and Michael in this movie were still pretty good. Despite being literally decrepit Michael does a really good job of being super intimidating throughout this movie, I really liked his fight in the sewers with Corey and him stalking into the house after Corey’s death was so cool. Laurie fought hard in this movie and I think her final fight with Michael was really good and tense and they did a shockingly good job writing a consistent and well-thought out character for Laurie over three movies.

Laurie’s granddaughter was fine. I wanted her to be killed by Corey, I think that would have been a cool twist where Michael and Corey take everything away from Laurie and then all she has left is killing them but I didn’t necessarily hate that she was in the movie. It just felt like they didn’t really know what to do with her character in this movie, as consistent as Laurie was Allyson made up for it by being an incomprehensible character. I talked about it in the Halloween Kills review where she suddenly becomes a badass even though she should be in shock and I think that when it came to this movie they didn’t know what role they wanted her to play other than ‘love interest’ and so they didn’t bother trying to even create a fully fleshed out character for this film. She doesn’t do anything outside of Corey. All of her big moments are surrounding Corey and helping him, she doesn’t even have a final fight with Corey where she gets the catharsis in a sort of meta way for being side-lined throughout the entire film. Instead she remains on the sideline an when she finally gets a moment of action she only can act as support for Laurie in Laurie’s moment for catharsis. I think I would have been fine with this kind of treatment for Allyson if it happened in Halloween Kills but now that we’re in Halloween Ends she’s officially the most important character beyond Laurie and Michael so seeing her sidelined like this is very disappointing especially since she doesn’t get a moment to personally show down against either Corey or Michael.

I think this movie had a weird amount of fluff in it. Everything to do with the radio station didn’t end up being nearly as important as it seemed like it was going to be. There was also like a whole 5 minutes at the beginning just to recap what had happened in the movies before which was so fucking annoying.

Overall, this movie has it’s ups and downs but the niche it falls in gives it it’s push into being a personal favorite. This is definitely a movie that only a specific group of people are going to like but I am one of those people so despite it’s flaws it keeps its 8/10.