HALLOWEEN 2K23 BONUS #3: A Review of "Halloween Ends"

It's humorous to me to think Michael's so old in the universe in this movie, if he wasn't living in a sewer eating rats and
hacking teenagers to pieces, he'd be sitting on his front porch complaining about Democrats.

Yeah, you knew this was coming given the context of the previous "bonus" post. Once again, Happy Halloween 2023 to all of you, and welcome back to Spoiler Alert! I'm here today to catch myself up (at least for the time being, until they make more) on all the existing Halloween movies, since a couple new ones came out while I was on a blogging hiatus in 2021 and 2022.

"Trust me, Mr. DJ. This hurts me a lot more than it
hurts you."

Halloween Kills, as we discussed in our OTHER bonus debuting today here, is a giant, farcical dud of a horror movie. "Evil dies tonight"... "Forty years ago"... "evil dies tonight"... "forty years ago"... "Evil dies"... "Forty years"... blah blah blah. A shamelessly dumb sequel that tried to disguise its inadequate storytelling and Monty Python-level characters with a couple cool kills and some grim savagery. Not enough. The movie still blew chunks. I'll still watch it, but I won't necessarily enjoy it, it's like a requirement since it's the middle chapter and key characters are killed off. So having gotten that... I was dreading the supposed "final chapter" in this reboot trilogy by Blumhouse coming out the very next year. Turns out, I had nothing to worry about because Halloween Ends kicks ass. WHAT? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

In a move literally nobody expected, not even me, Halloween Ends rebounded and accomplished what Kills fumbled on. Somehow, in keeping with the "reboot" style of filmmaking where originals are mimicked/copied slightly but other stuff is very discretely but effectively changed... Halloween '18 mimicked the original '78 Halloween, Halloween Kills very poorly but at least tried to do Halloween II from 1981... does that mean Halloween Ends since it has Michael Myers in it will try and do Halloween 4?? Which in and of itself was already a reboot-quel to Halloween '78? NOPE. Halloween Ends got even more brave than Kills, and in my opinion, succeeded much better by reboot-quel'ing Halloween III: Season of the Witch. You know, the one that didn't have anything to do with Michael Myers? The one everybody hates for no reason? How does it do that? How about having the balls to minimalize Laurie's screentime, cut Michael's screentime down to basically here and there and then ten minutes in the third act... and focus the ENTIRE rest of the fucking movie on some fuck named Corey?? What sounds like a fresh load of ass on paper, ended up being a ton of fun in the theater. Let's dig into Halloween Ends.

"Laurie, do you--"
"Want out of this franchise like I'm a trapped dog chewing
on its own leg to get free? Yes."
"--know where they keep the minced garlic?"

On Halloween night in 2019, one year after the events of '18 and Kills, 21-year-old Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) babysits a young boy named Jeremy Allen (Jaxon Goldberg), who pulls a prank on him by locking him inside the attic. Just as Jeremy's parents (Jack William Marshall, Candice Rose) come home, Corey kicks the door open and accidentally knocks Jeremy over a staircase railing to his death. RIGHT there, the movie kicked me right in the balls and roped me in by having the balls to kill a kid brutally in the first five minutes. Corey is then arrested for intentionally killing Jeremy but is cleared of manslaughter, with outcasting results.

Three years later, the town of Haddonfield, Illinois, is still reeling from the aftermath of Michael Myers's latest killing spree in 2018, while Michael (James Jude Courtney, Nick Castle) has vanished. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is writing a memoir and living with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). Meanwhile, Corey is working at his stepfather's salvage yard. On his way home one day, he is accosted by high school bullies and injures himself in the process. An observing Laurie brings him to the doctor's office where Allyson works. Allyson and Corey develop a relationship... I don't know, somehow... and later attend a Halloween party, where Corey is confronted by Mrs. Allen. Corey leaves the party and runs into the bullies who throw him off a bridge. He is dragged into the sewers and choked by Michael, who eventually lets him go. Here we see Michael in a state we've never seen him in before... weak, tired, brittle, destitute, barren and completely unmotivated. As he crawls out, Corey is threatened by a homeless man. In a struggle, Corey stabs the man to death and flees.

"Michael, please, don't kill me! You won't learn how I saved
fifteen percent or more by switching to GEICO!"

At a dinner date, Allyson’s ex-boyfriend harasses her, leading to Corey later luring him into the sewer to be killed by Michael. Allyson is passed over for a promotion at work, in favor of a nurse who is having an affair with the doctor. Later that night, Corey kills the doctor at his home while Michael kills the nurse... a horrifically-inspiring tag-team of terror! An unknowing Allyson plans to leave Haddonfield with an insistent Corey because of the past trauma, while Laurie realizes Corey is infected by Michael's evil. Something I didn't quite understand about the movie is I didn't know if it was truly something Michael "passed on" to him, or if it was just a disease of Corey's mind ending up making him insane. I prefer the latter, the former is a little too supernatural for me, but I mean Michael himself is also supernatural so I guess it's not that big of a deal. Anywho, Laurie finds Corey sleeping in the spot where Jeremy died, and offers to help him on the condition that he distance himself from Allyson. Corey retorts by blaming her for the events that have occurred in Haddonfield and says if he cannot have Allyson, no one will. Isn't that the calming thing you wanted to hear from your granddaughter's would-be boyfriend?

Corey returns to the sewers where he successfully fights Michael for his mask and embarks on a rampage, murdering the bullies after luring them to the salvage yard, one of who accidentally kills Corey's stepfather. He goes on to kill his mother and a DJ at a local radio station, who had taunted him earlier. At the Strode house, Laurie fakes a suicide attempt to lure Corey to her, whom she shoots down the stairs. Corey then stabs himself in the neck to frame Laurie for his death in front of the arriving Allyson, who leaves in distress. Michael suddenly arrives, retrieves his mask... which by now I noticed and remarked has to reek to high hell, and kills Corey. A fight ensues in Laurie's kitchen, and Laurie manages to pin Michael to the kitchen table and slit his throat. After a struggle, Allyson, convinced of the truth behind Corey's death after receiving a call from Deputy Frank Hawkins (Will Patton), returns to help subdue and finally kill Michael by slicing his wrist.

"God, kissing the future Haddonfield serial killer star of
Halloween is so hot!"
"What?"
"What?"

In a truly ballsy ending, Laurie and Allyson take Michael's body to the salvage yard by police escort, attracting the residents of Haddonfield, who follow them in a procession, and dispose of it in an industrial shredder. For the first time ever, as far as I'm aware, this is the first time where we have seen Michael Myers definitively die at the end of a Halloween movie. I mean that guy is D. E. A. D. You see his head burst in the shredder like his body explodes like a balloon full of meat. You are not getting up from a bolt of lightning or satanic ritual from that. In the ensuing days, Allyson and Laurie reconcile, and Allyson leaves Haddonfield while Laurie finishes her memoir and rediscovers her romance with Hawkins...

... and thus brings the curtain down on the Blumhouse/Carpenter/Curtis Halloween reboot trilogy. You are not going to find a more definitive Halloween sequel ending than that... and I'll reiterate my controversial opinion, because I did find myself in the minority with it; the vast minority. I loved this movie. I thought it was a welcome, fresh take on the mythos and a worthy, trilogy-concluding movie. I thought by minimalizing Michael's screentime, cutting down Laurie's role, and maximizing the focus on Allyson and this psycho dude Corey was just the right move this third movie needed in the trilogy needed. I thought it was fresh, and when it's fresh in a horror movie, it's unpredictable... and when it's unpredictable, it's gripping and even scary again. People were lambasting this movie when it first came out and it was pretty much a repeat of when Halloween III: Season of the Witch came out forty years before it. "Michael's not in it enough", "the story's too radically different", "I want to see the same old shit again". This movie did not need to do the same old "Michael comes home" shit over again. This movie delivered terror and brutality fine without Michael Myers. All this movie had to do was give Michael and Laurie their final showdown it advertised in the last act, and it did. That was the only requirement. I did not care how they got there, and because of that, I thoroughly enjoyed the route they took to get there. Thumbs up.

Since Corey takes front and center as a wounded duckling who became a violent psychopath fueled by hate and revenge, Michael goes from being an unstoppable horror villain impervious to conventional weapons to being old, decrepit, and a broken shell of a serial killer who serves as Corey's "sensei of slashing" so to speak... another exciting twist. Which was weird! I mean the movie takes place in 2022; in the in-movie universe, that would put Michael at sixty-five years old. He's literally a senior citizen, I mean he qualifies for a discount breakfast at Denny's, and he hasn't killed since 2018. It tries to tell us, or at least imply, that Michael's power derives from his murdering. The supernatural force that John Carpenter always touted about? The one that drives him. Supposedly it is controlled and fueled by his killings. That's retroactively adds depth to the mob scene from Kills, where Michael appears to be getting overpowered, but then all of a sudden he comes alive, becomes super strong, and just knifes and stabs and mercs everyone around him. I thought his partnership and eventual betrayal with Corey was just what the doctor ordered. It fools you into thinking Michael's just going to take a backseat the whole movie and in the final fifteen minutes he just pops back up and goes "Nuh uh, boy. This is still my show" and just kills Corey in cold blood.

This is how white people look in sports stadiums when the
PA system goes ♫Sweeeet Caaaaroooline♫

The final fight with Laurie and Michael, the icing on the sundae, the whole reason this trilogy got sold to get made in the first place, fits the mold of the movie and satisfied me. It was brutal, violent, bloody, intense, and we got the ending that Laurie, after forty-four years, deserved. To see Michael Myers die, even if the previous shitty sequels jerked us off with false deaths, diversion tactics, and misleading Michael kills, still was surreal. We've seen Michael "die" numerous times, but like I said earlier... this time he's deader than disco. I mean he's up shit creek without a paddle. If they renew the contract and do a fourth one, the way they try to explain him coming back from that will be so monumentally stupid it'll suck me out of the rest of the movie. Thankfully, with this being Jamie Lee's final outing as Laurie, John Carpenter's final involvement in the franchise, and Blumhouse's final Halloween release under their current contract, this movie brought the curtain down in a number of ways and it was a satisfying conclusion and I don't see them doing the stupid 80's slasher sequel re-hash tactic shamelessly in any way shape or form.

Halloween Ends ends the trilogy in a satisfying way. It's a fun new take on the Halloween and Michael Myers/Laurie Strode mythos, the character of Corey Cunningham takes a front-and-center role in this story and somehow knocks it out of the park in terms of being scary and feeble at the same time... and the kills in this movie are top-of-the-line brutal and violent. It is quite the Halloween movie, and I put it higher on my list than some of the others. I loved it in the theater, and I loved the rewatch I did when it came out on digital/video. It holds up, it's solid, it's a fun time, and thank GOD it's fresh. I fully recommend Halloween Ends. To me, the Blumhouse reboot trilogy stands as a great first entry/reintroduction to the story, and has a satisfying, wildly unpredictable conclusion at the end. I just look at Halloween Kills as that weird, cartoony middle chapter.

That's it for Halloween 2K23! Thanks for reading, stay safe out there, and HAPPY FRIGGIN' HALLOWEEN!