Halloween Ends almost seems like a fitting name for this film, but it would be better to call it Halloween Is Dead, because they just killed this franchise, and that is in the worst way possible. People enjoyed the first reboot of this Halloween trilogy, and there were some that really did not like the sequel, but I was still on their side for that one, but this, this was such a far dive off the deep end that I could not even defend this one. It seemed like it had some potential roads that it could have taken, but instead of choosing a good lane, it just drove full speed into the median and crashed and burned.
Halloween Ends starts with Corey, a guy taking a gap year before starting college, coming over to a nice house to do a baby-sitting job. The kid seems a little weird, but it was mainly just trying to fake out the audience. Corey and the kid start watching monster movies, and then the kid plays a prank where he disappears and Corey freaks out. He is trying to find him, when the kid locks Corey in a room on the third floor, and when Corey breaks down the door, he knocks the kid over the rail right as his parent are returning, and he splats down right in front of them.
Fast forward a year or two, and Corey is not in jail, but working at a salvage yard for his (Step?) dad. He also basically has a scarlet letter placed upon him. Everyone shuns him and gives him dirty looks. He gets beat up by some high schoolers, and Laurie, Jamie Lee Curtis, takes him to the hospital where Allyson, her daughter works, and she essentially sets them up. Allyson is interested, but Corey is very standoffish at first, but eventually he warms up to her, and they start to go out. They go to a Halloween party together, but the mom of the kid who died starts going at Corey, so he flees. While fleeing he gets beat up by the high schoolers again, thrown off a bridge, dragged into the sewer by Michael Myers, allowed to leave in the morning, and then he kills a hobo. The spiral goes down form there.
Before I go further into the discussion about how bad this movie is, and what it could have done differently, I would like to take a moment and talk about parents in these movies, not just the Halloween movies, but in other spooky flicks as well. Parents always just seem to leave on Halloween night and are gone for obscenely large amounts of time. I understand many of these movies were filmed before the 2000s, but there had to be some amount of parental responsibility. They always pawn off the kid onto the older sibling or a babysitter. I thought parents were supposed to walk around while their kids trick or treated.
In Hocus Pocus, which I never thought I would start a sentence with those words, the parents went to a party, and they did not return until the sun came up the next day, and the kids did not even think it was that weird. Then in the original Halloween all the parents go out again, and it is not even that late, and Tommy does not even get to go trick or treating, he just gets bullied and falls on his pumpkin. Poor kid. Also I would like to point out how weird it is that no trick or treaters came to the house in the original Halloween movie at either of the baby sitting houses. They clearly show multiple times that there are kids out trick or treating, and no one ever stops at any of the houses. At least in Halloween Ends this is addressed, when the parents say that they are leaving a bowl of candy on the front steps. Parents be better, but also it might have been movies like these that lead to more parent involvement during Halloween. So in a way these films are public service announcements on why you should be a good parent and walk around with your kid as they trick or treat.
Back to Halloween Ends, which also have parents that flee on Halloween, and clearly, they learned nothing from their own town’s history. So when Corey gets dragged into the sewer by Michael Myers, for some reason Michael does not murder him, although he does choke him for a period of time. My guess is that Michael sees something in Corey’s eyes that reminds him of himself, so he lets him go, and Corey immediately proves him right by killing a homeless man. Now that could be argued as self-defense, but due to his reputation, there was no way he was going to report that he killed someone else, even if it was an accident.
So this starts the spiral. There is a term in psychology known as the self-fulfilling prophecy. This is basically when a person has expectations placed on them by others, or they are viewed a certain way, and eventually it leads to the prophesy coming true. It is a common reference in education classes, especially those that are behavior based. So if you tell a kid or a class that they are bad, then they are going to start believing it and then acting out more. In this case, the whole town was telling him that he was a murderer, and eventually he started to believe it, and he started to murder innocent people. The people he was murdering were not the nicest of people, most of them were doing things that were not great, but they were not murderable offenses by any means.
One area that the movie could have done to change it up would have been to take a Fight Club twist. For most of the movie the only person that saw Michael was Corey, or at least that saw Michael and survived. So it was possible that he could just be inspired by some vision of Michael, but at the end, Michael goes to Laurie’s house, and he is killed. This lack of Michael also made the movie feel like it was not a real Halloween movie, but knowing he was lurking in the background just muddled everything. This movie could have been better, if it focused on the idea of an accidental murderer, and the hate they get from the community, but then turning that guy into a murderer makes that seem like they could have been right, and he really was a murderer. Halloween Kills also tried to have some social activism about the dangers of the mob mentality, but it did this in a manner that was good enough.
For the big finale, the town finally learned that they really had to destroy Michael’s body to make sure that he was dead. So Laurie cuts him open in multiple spots to make sure he has totally bled out, and then she drags him outside, and with her daughter and the help of the police, she ties him to the top of her car. Then the town has a funeral procession to the junk yard, where Corey worked, which somehow was now cleaned up, even though less than an hour before, five people had been murdered there, but there was not a sign of the carnage. Once at the junk yard, the town lifts Michael off the car, and they basically crowd surf him to the shredder. The daughter turns on the shredder, and Lorie pushes him in, and that is that. It was like the end of the Joker, when he just killed the last night host, and then the mob breaks him out of the car and pass him along like a savior. After Michael killed so many people, one would think they would have just dragged him to the shredder and spit on him, it just seemed weirdly referential to carry him in the way they did.
The opening sequence of the movie was good, and the opening credits with the Halloween music always hits, and when Michael grabbed Laurie’s hand and the music dropped, it did give me chills like a Halloween movie should, but they tried to go so many weird ways that were not what one would expect from a Halloween movie that I cannot stand by this film. It was bad. I cannot say it is not worth watching, but it is close. I know the franchise will probably be gone for some years now sadly, but it needs to be brought back and soon, because this left a bad taste in my mouth that will last. Just make a new Michael, get rid of Laurie, and do something completely new. I give this movie two stars.
New Rankings:
Halloween Ends: 2 Stars
Young Frankenstein: 4 Stars
The Blob: 2.5 Stars
Dracula: 2 Stars
A Return to Salem’s Lot: 2 Stars
The Fly: 3 Stars
38 at the Garden: 3.5 Stars
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