HALLOWEEN ENDS (2022)

Studio:     Universal/Blumhouse
Director:    David Gordon Green
Writer:     Paul Brad Logan, Chris Bernier, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green
Producer:  Malek Akkad, Jason Blum, Bill Block
Stars:     Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell, Will Patton, Kyle Richards, James Jude Courtney, Jesse C. Boyd, Joanne Baron, Omar J. Dorsey, Michael Barbieri

Review Score:

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Summary:

Laurie Strode encounters a new evil in Haddonfield that draws Michael Myers out of hiding for a final faceoff.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

On Halloween Night in 2019, Jeremy Allen pranks his babysitter Corey Cunningham, an 18-year-old neighbor, by locking him in the attic and taunting him about Michael Myers, who has been missing since his rampage one year earlier. Frustrated, Corey kicks open the locked door, which inadvertently knocks Jeremy over the upstairs banister. Jeremy’s parents return home just in time to witness their son fall to his violent death on their floor.

By 2022, Laurie Strode now lives a peaceful life in a normal Haddonfield home with her granddaughter Allyson while writing her memoir “Stalkers, Saviors and Samhain,” which discusses how the people of Haddonfield were corrupted by Michael’s evil. Instead of going to college like he had planned, Corey now works in an auto yard for his father Ronald and is treated as a pariah by the community.

On her way to work as a nurse at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, Allyson gets pulled over by Officer Doug Mulaney, an ex-boyfriend who is still interested in Allyson. While attempting to flirt, Mulaney mentions that Allyson’s muffler is loose.

Outside of a gas station, Haddonfield High School seniors Terry, Billy, Stacy, and Margo insultingly hassle Corey. Laurie intervenes after Terry’s shove causes Corey to gouge his hand on broken bottle glass. Laurie befriends Corey by offering him a knife to slash the teenagers’ tires.

Knowing her granddaughter needs a date for a costume party, Laurie brings Corey to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital for treatment so he can also meet Allyson. Corey and Allyson have a bonding moment after Corey observes Dr. Mathis talking down to Allyson, who is angling for a promotion. Corey offers to fix Allyson’s muffler. Allyson invites Corey to the costume party.

Laurie runs into former flame Frank at a grocery store. Outside the store, a woman named Sondra angrily accuses Laurie of provoking Michael Myers, who crippled Sondra’s sister.

Allyson and Corey attend the costume party at Lindsey Wallace’s bar. After drinking and dancing, Corey finally begins loosening up, but regresses into his shell following an uncomfortable encounter with Jeremy Allen’s upset mother. Corey vents his frustration by telling Allyson he isn’t a project for her to repair before walking off alone.

Terry and his three friends harass Corey on his walk home. Billy crushes Corey’s glasses. Terry throws Corey over a bridge and into a small homeless encampment in the underpass below.

Michael Myers pulls Corey into the sewer where he has been living and killing additional victims for four years. Michael begins strangling Corey, but lets him go after recognizing something sinister in his eyes. Realizing he survived an encounter with Haddonfield’s boogeyman, a vagabond demands that Corey go back into the sewer to retrieve Michael’s mask. The vagabond pulls a knife, which Corey uses to kill him in self-defense.

Corey comes to Laurie and Allyson’s house the next day. Laurie becomes uncomfortable after seeing that Corey now has the same eyes as Michael Myers.

Corey apologizes to Allyson for his outburst the night before. Corey then takes Allyson to the Allen house, which is now abandoned, and recounts the events that led to Jeremy’s death.

Concerned about Corey, Laurie goes to speak to his mother Joan. Joan blames Laurie for the town’s mistreatment of Corey because Haddonfield needed a new boogeyman after Laurie’s disappeared.

Corey and Allyson discuss their family tragedies at a diner. Corey proposes burning down Haddonfield together. Officer Mulaney interrupts to openly flirt with Allyson, who turns him down, in front of Corey. The encounter briefly turns tense when Mulaney begins insulting Corey.

Allyson rides home with Corey on his motorcycle. After dropping her off, Corey leads Mulaney, who had been following Corey in his car, to the underpass. Corey tricks Mulaney into entering the sewer where he and Michael Myers murder Mulaney together.

Corey returns to Allyson’s house disheveled. Allyson still takes Corey upstairs to have sex. With Michael Myers secretly stalking her from a distance, Laurie observes Allyson and Corey’s initial interaction from outside.

Laurie tells Lindsey about the evil she saw in Corey’s eyes. Lindsey introduces Laurie to Jeremy Allen’s father Roger. Roger recounts how he wanted to forgive Corey, but he became disturbed by a silent encounter recently where it seemed Corey had become a different person who is now on a dark path.

Dr. Mathis brings home Allyson’s coworker Deb, who beat out Allyson for the nurse’s promotion by regularly flirting with Mathis. With Corey wearing the scarecrow mask Allyson gifted him for the costume party, he and Michael Myers murder Mathis and Deb together.

Corey takes Allyson to the radio tower at WURG to continue their conversation about leaving town. DJ Willy the Kid insults Corey as well as Allyson’s grandmother prior to kicking them off the property. Corey sees Laurie watching from a parked car nearby.

Joan kicks Corey out of her house for dating Allyson. Corey spends the night sleeping in the Allen home on the exact spot where Jeremy died.

When he wakes up on October 31st, Laurie confronts Corey inside the Allen house with a cryptic conversation about evil. Laurie offers to find help for Corey while warning him to stay away from Allyson. Corey angrily reminds Laurie that she started “this” by inviting him into their lives. Corey threatens that if he can’t have Allyson, no one will. Corey also claims Laurie secretly hopes Michael will come back for her. Laurie vanishes.

Corey calls Allyson with a message that they need to leave Haddonfield that night because her grandmother wants to kill him. After that conversation, Corey returns to the sewer and wrestles Michael’s mask away from him.

Allyson has a rebellious confrontation with her grandmother over Laurie’s accusations of seeing Michael Myers inside Corey. Allyson blames Laurie for causing the deaths that destroyed their family while packing her things to leave with Corey.

At night, Corey lures Terry and his three friends to his father’s auto yard. Corey stabs Billy through his eyeball. He then drives a tow truck into a fence that pins Margo against the ground. Stacy also dies. Roused by Terry, Ronald arms himself and Terry with guns to investigate the commotion. Terry inadvertently shoots Ronald in his forehead when he steps in to shield Corey. Corey burns Terry’s face with a blowtorch before stomping on Margo’s head. Still wearing Michael’s mask, Corey goes on to murder his mother at home, and Willy the Kid and a receptionist at the radio station. Meanwhile, Allyson becomes concerned after Corey fails to meet up like they planned.

Secretly aware that Corey is now inside her house, Laurie calls in her own suicide and points a gun at her head, but she shoots a pumpkin instead. The ruse allows her to catch Corey with his defenses down. Laurie shoots Corey until he falls through a railing onto the floor below. Laurie dares Corey to kill her. Corey retrieves his knife, but when he hears Allyson’s car pulling up outside, Corey reminds Laurie of his threat that no one else can have Allyson and stabs himself in his throat. Allyson enters just after Laurie removes the knife, making it seem as though she killed him. Allyson drives away angry. Michael Myers enters the house, retrieves his mask, and finishes off Corey by twisting his neck.

Allyson realizes her grandmother is in danger when Frank calls to say officers are responding to her suicide call. Allyson also discovers Laurie was telling the truth about Corey after finding the radio station in flames.

Laurie and Michael Myers engage in a brutal fight in her kitchen. Laurie ultimately pins down Michael by stabbing a knife through each of his hands and pushing her refrigerator down on his leg. She also slits his throat, but Michael uses the last of his strength to tear one of his hands free so he can strangle Laurie. Allyson returns home in time to rescue her grandmother. Laurie then uses a knife to slice open a vein in Michael’s arm so he can continue bleeding to death.

Frank arrives with the police, including Sheriff Barker. As a way to help Haddonfield heal, Laurie and Allyson tie Michael’s corpse to the roof of Allyson’s car and lead a procession through Haddonfield with a police escort that draws numerous neighbors and survivors, including Sondra’s sister and Julian. The procession ends at Ronald’s auto yard, where Laurie and Allyson put Michael into machinery that pulverizes his body.

Some time later, Allyson finally leaves Haddonfield. Frank visits Laurie and she implies she’s finally ready to take up his offer of seeing each other romantically.

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Review:

The word most commonly used to describe “Halloween Ends” by people who’d seen it prior to its public premiere was “polarizing.” After confirming in an AV Club interview that he liked the film, franchise founder John Carpenter added, “It’s a very, very interesting movie.” And in the lead-up to its release, the creators of “Halloween Ends” kept calling it “different” while critics continued predicting it would be “divisive.”

Even though those quoted terms essentially confirmed “Halloween Ends” would challenge any and all preconceived audience expectations, I passed off this noise as probable hyperbole. Okay, the movie might not go down a previously traveled path, but how wild would the creative risks really be?

Then I watched the film for myself. And whenever a scene took an unanticipated turn that elicited surprise delight from me for its bold choices, I sometimes grinned from the imagined anger of toxic fans whom I could already hear hysterically crying about “Halloween Ends” being “The Last Jedi”-like “ruiner” of the series.

I deliberately avoided digging into the outraged takes on social media and the internet after finishing the film. I knew I didn’t have to read them because the manufactured hatred would be completely predictable. From that “Last Jedi” comparison to the “Where is Michael Myers?” complaints, it was painfully obvious how naysayers would misinterpret metaphors and invent bad faith criticisms to fit whatever narrative of negativity they’d already written in their heads. A little later, I did end up indulging in a few shallow rabbit holes of “worst horror movie ever” grumbles, and couldn’t help but chuckle because, yep, fuming fandom was indeed following its typical script for how to hate a sequel in this online age where the worst people too often have loud voices.

It would take ten times as much space to take down all of the eye-roll-inducing takes that spectacularly misread the things “Halloween Ends” does, and does spectacularly well. But I’m going to use this “review” to briefly rebut some of the broader blather that seemingly stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the “Halloween” franchise even is at this point, and what it’s been throughout its six-decade history. As for a concise review of the film itself, I’m not sure anyone can summarize it more succinctly than Brian Collins of ‘Horror Movie a Day’ did with, “It’s a bad Michael Myers movie, but ultimately a good Laurie Strode one. Your mileage will vary depending on whose presence is more important to you in these things.”

It’s true. Michael Myers isn’t in “Halloween Ends” all that much, and when he does appear, he isn’t the same Michael Myers he used to be. In a shining example of how viewers will always find something to gripe about one way or another, a big complaint about “Halloween” 2018 (review here) and “Halloween Kills” (review here) was, how does Michael Myers possess such superhuman strength when he’s a senior citizen who hasn’t done anything but sit silently in an asylum for 40 years? Well, now Michael is 65 years old, and “Halloween Ends” finally treats him like his age. So the complaint naturally had to swing to, why he is he so weakened and able to be overpowered by someone one-third of his age?

When John Carpenter called Michael Myers the embodiment of pure evil, people conflated that to mean he was a supernatural force. That’s not who he is in this trilogy. Michael represents faceless evil, yet he’s still mortal. “Halloween Ends” explores the idea of how Haddonfield’s collective fear transformed a mere man into a boogeyman. What happens when those fears find a new focus is that the power transfers too, figuratively unmasking Michael as an old man who isn’t at all the juggernaut he once was, which in turn puts him on more equal footing with Laurie for their final faceoff.

It’s additionally funny that some folks find it unfathomable that Michael has been living underground for four years, as if he didn’t pull a similar disappearing act between “Halloween 4” (review here) and “Halloween 5” (review here), or “H20” (review here) and “Resurrection” for that matter. Staying off the grid between October holidays is part of his M.O. The giant missing persons billboard directly above his current lair isn’t exactly trying to hide the fact that he’s still getting in new murders here and there, either.

Besides, if anyone only wants a movie where Michael Myers just kills people, there’s an immediately preceding entry literally called “Halloween Kills.” We already have ten other movies where the menu’s main course features Michael Myers going on a slaughter spree. Now that we’re a dozen movies deep, director David Gordon Green and his co-writers finally asked, how can we deepen the fiction without rehashing everything we’ve already seen? Thus they develop a multilayered story that radiates outward from lines leading directly back to Laurie Strode, allowing Jamie Lee Curtis to take big bites out of her character like previous scripts rarely allowed. “Halloween Ends” shows Laurie as a protective grandmother, as a community pariah, as a love interest anxious for the normalcy her trauma denied her, as a survivor, as a fighter, and simply a person. “Halloween Ends” and Curtis combine to give a classic Final Girl character the overdue admiration she’s earned, but didn’t necessarily receive in earlier films.

“Halloween Ends” puts a clue in plain sight that reveals where it’s headed right away. Following a shocking prologue that’ll leave unaware audiences shaking at the sudden spectacle, opening titles utilize the distinctive blue font from “Halloween III’s” credits sequence. “Halloween III” was of course famously hated for not featuring Michael Myers, though popular opinion gradually smartened up as the formerly maligned movie was revisited reverentially in the following decades. Duplicating that font is “Halloween Ends’” way of telling us that it too will not rely on Michael Myers, which is likely to cause controversy, but it might also be seen in a brighter light with the passing of time.

That “Halloween Ends” will eventually come to be judged less harshly in hindsight is another prediction I keep seeing, and I believe it to be true. Time will be favorable to the film because its universal social themes about broken relationships, redemption, lives unfairly crushed by terrible circumstances, and the struggle for closure aren’t built to impress immediate reactions, especially from those who don’t want small town melodrama meddling with masked maniacs slashing babysitters.

For those who believe otherwise, I don’t know what to tell them that they’d actually be willing to hear. If they think it’s outrageous for a woman with an incredibly tragic past like Allyson’s to be drawn to the darkness in a “bad boy,” perhaps they could use additional education on the genesis of domestic violence dangers. If they’re disappointed that Lindsey Wallace only appears in a sensible cameo, where she’s just a bartender retaining an understandable little link to Laurie, there’s still “Halloween Kills,” where she’s an underprepared and wholly unlikely vigilante improbably going after the guy who gave her nightmares for life. If they find it preposterous that Haddonfield continues to be haunted by a macabre murder spree in 1978, and a more massive one in 2018, maybe they should remember that Amityville is still known for a lame haunted house hoax that’s older than these movies.

And if they truly think “Halloween Ends” really is one of the worst horror movies ever made, well, then they’re unbelievably lucky that this is as bad as it gets for them. Not only is “Halloween Ends” not even close to being the worst “Halloween” movie, it’s one of the franchise’s best.

Why? Because in addition to its dramatic depth, “Halloween Ends” delivers a unique experience unlike anything else in any of the Michael Myers continuities. That’s a big breath of fresh air for a franchise that’s frankly coasted on formula, nostalgia, and narrative nonsense for far too long.

The only reason Laurie retroactively became Michael’s sister way back when is because Carpenter and Debra Hill were desperate to meet their deadline for “Halloween II” (review here) and that was the motivation they concocted over a nightly six-pack of beer. “Halloween 6” (review here) later became all about marrying the muddled mythologies that were trying to make sense of cults, tattoos, mystery men, and pagan holidays. Stewards of the series had to keep throwing established information away and rebooting timelines because of how unsustainable the saga was. But sure, go off on how “Halloween Ends” is supposedly a laughing stock of ridiculously implausible fiction.

People keep saying “Halloween Ends” takes “big swings” like the series hasn’t been wielding a daring bat since the first sequel. Those same people forget that many of those big swings were also big whiffs. We can disagree on where the ball lands, but “Halloween Ends” takes a swing that actually makes contact. And aiming for the fences is something all aging horror franchises ought to try, or else their greater risk will be dying in a dull rut of routine.

Review Score: 80

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