Halloween Ends (2022).
The Review.
Out of all the Halloween films, this is by far the most bizarre, and that is saying a lot in a world in which they made a Halloween film without Michael Myers that featured killer masks that melted kids faces after being activated by microchips and a TV special. It’s also the worst.
We start with a wealthy family that’s headed to a Halloween party in 2019. Corey, a local high school senior, is called upon to babysit. It all seems fine until the two seemingly start to hate each other for no reason and during a disagreement, the kid is flung three stories to the ground, dying in front of his parents as they walk in the front door. How the kid gets off the hook is anyone’s guess, but we then jump ahead to present time and he’s labeled the neighborhood psycho. Why he and his family haven’t left town is again, anyone’s guess. Corey went from a kid with dreams of being a mechanical engineer to working at a scrap yard. Ronald, the guy who runs the scrapyard, gives Corey a motorcycle and tells him, “This will help you get to work on time.” Then a scene later, we learn that he’s Corey’s dad, and if his kid is constantly late to work, maybe he could just like…give him a ride. We also find out that there are four caricatures of high school bullies who have targeted Corey because they’re just like…mean all the time, I guess.
The Strodes still live in Haddonfield too. Laurie, who is writing a book about her experiences with The Shape, used to live in a fortress while Michael was confined to a mental institution for forty years, but has moved into a normal house after Michael went missing super close by. She introduces her daughter to Corey after she saves him from the bullies. They go on one date that doesn’t end well, and then they’re madly in love. Like, “Let’s burn this whole town down, I’ll be the match” kind of stuff. This nonsense goes on for about 45 minutes until the bullies dump Corey off of an overpass, where he’s dragged into the sewer by Michael Myers, who, instead of killing him, looks him in the eyes and lets him go, and now they’re best friends. Michael Myers shows him how to stick a knife in someone and now we have a duo! At one point though, Corey gets mad and walks into Michael’s sewer hole, tackles him and then rips his mask off and just leaves with it for some reason and Michael, a man who was shot, stabbed, beaten, and run over in the last one and just stays on the ground for some reason. So now we kind of have two Michael Myers walking around. It’s cool though, even with one of the cops gone missing, there are no other police officers around unless they’re delivering vegetables and talking about cherry blossoms.
This script is a textbook example of character idiocy. None of them act intelligently, and I’m going to spoil the ending here, so buckle in. Corey, dressed in full Michael Myers garb, walks into Laurie Strode’s house to kill her. She apparently knows he’s there somehow, and arms herself with a revolver. He walks upstairs, and she shoots him twice in the chest and he falls to the first floor of the house. The recent Halloween films don’t care about physics or the way human bodies work, so Corey is fine at the bottom of the stairs as Laurie comes down to kill him…or so we thought. Instead of using the last two bullets on Corey’s face, like a normal person would do, she shoots them into the wall and yells, “YOU CAME HERE TO KILL ME, SO KILL ME!”, and then he stabs himself in the throat so that her daughter will think she killed the love of her life. Got ‘em! Oh, but again, it’s a Halloween film, so even him bleeding out from a slit jugular for a few minutes didn’t kill him.
Michael finally comes for Laurie, but isn’t able to beat up an old woman for some reason. Somehow they pin Michael Myers down on the kitchen island and slice his neck and wrist, and while it seems like he should be dead, they also thought he was dead last time and they didn’t finish the job, and look how that turned out. “Not dead enough.”, says Allyson. YES, THEY’RE GOING TO FINISH HIM OFF. It would be easy enough to just saw the guys fucking head off using the many knives she has available within arms reach. Instead, in a farce of theatrics, they tie his body to the roof of a car, drive with him to a junkyard with the ENTIRE TOWN in tow, CROWD SURF HIS BODY OFF OF THE TOP OF THE CAR, and drop him in a garbage compactor.
This fucking film cannot take place on planet Earth. There are some bad Halloween movies - 6, Resurrection, and H20 are certainly not my favorite, but Halloween Ends is absolutely the worst Halloween film ever made. The only good thing about this film is the John Carpenter score. Seriously, fuck this film. How do you make a good, final Halloween film? With Laurie hunting Michael. That’s it. Not with her chilling in her house all the time waiting for Michael to come find her eventually, and then having her try to whack him with a fire extinguisher.
