This was a weird one.

Not bad-weird, but strange enough that a one-sided discussion like this necessitates the disclosure of…

*From far away, across a desolate, blasted land, comes the tolling of ancient bells*

…spoilers (the spookiest thing of all).

Away we go.

Part the First: Some Grisly Context

You’re probably aware that Halloween Ends is the, uh, end to the most recent trilogy of Halloween films. For the uninitiated, just bear with me: the original Halloween (released in 1978), was followed by a number of sequels of varying quality. The franchise went dormant in 2009, only to be revived in 2018 with the creatively-titled Halloween – which ignored the events of every prior movie in the series except for the 1978 original. The 2018 Halloween was followed by 2021’s Halloween Kills and 2022’s Halloween Ends. For the sake of everyone’s sanity, I’ll try to keep my references contained to the original film and the “modern” trilogy.

Now that we’ve dealt with the nomenclature, let’s get to the setup. The Halloween franchise tells the story of one Illinois man’s eternal war against neglectful babysitters. The guy with the white mask and mechanic’s outfit – Michael Myers – wanders the town of Haddonfield on a neverending search for unprofessional childcare providers, who inevitably take the form of horny, drunk, and/or stoned teenagers (who he subsequently murders). You won’t see Michael Myers going after an au pair – no sir. Mike’s got respect for the game. He’s all about discipline. It makes Haddonfield a very high-stakes place to have a babysitting job, but, hey, there’s not a lot of local competition.

This isn’t to say that Michael only kills teenaged babysitters; he takes time out of his schedule to massacre a truly staggering number of first responders (not cool, dude), curb-stomp a doctor, bludgeon and strangle a pair of podcasters, and slice his way through what is essentially a very angry Halloween-themed bar crawl.

Imagine if he had a gun. Or don’t. That might be too close to real life.

The throughline of these movies – up until Ends, which we’ll get to – has always been one babysitter’s ongoing struggle with Michael’s arguably-too-high standards of professionalism for the childcare industry. In the first movie, Laurie (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) leaves the kids alone, like, once and he tries to stab her to death! What happened to a slap on the wrist?

Her struggles with Michael leave Laurie both traumatized and grimly determined to finish her foe off once and for all (oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that Michael may or may not be immortal). Over the course of the original Halloween, the 2018 sequel, and 2021’s Halloween Kills, Laurie and Michael’s battle leads to losses on both sides (by the end of Kills, Laurie’s daughter and son-in-law are both dead, and Michael’s covered in burn wounds, down two fingers and had the ever-loving shit beat out of him by an angry mob), and I was curious to see how Ends would cap off their decadeslong rivalry…

…which it did, but not how I expected.

Part the Second: A Macabre Tableau

Look, I’m not going to lie. I broke this post up into parts solely because I wanted to use the phrase “macabre tableau,” and I was too lazy to find somewhere to cram it into the body of the review.

Totally worth it.

For those of you who haven’t clicked away in disgust, let’s get to the twist that makes Halloween Ends so weird: it isn’t really about Laurie. Or Michael, for that matter. Sure, they’re in the movie, but they serve more as supporting characters for two-thirds of its runtime.

I would describe Halloween Ends as 1 ½ movies stuffed into the overstretched skin of a single film. The first of these is a good movie; remaining half a movie is…half a movie, and that’s rarely going to make for a satisfying watch.

The “good movie” to which I am referring is also the reason I opened this review by characterizing Halloween Ends as “a weird one.” Ends’ plot takes place in the present day, but it opens with a flashback to Halloween night on 2018 (when Halloween ’18 and Kills were set). Sure enough, there’s a babysitter and some death involved, but not how you’d think: the babysitter, Corey, accidentally kills the twerp he’s supposed to be watching, with a more shocking example of staircase-based death than anything you’ll find on Netflix. Cut to the modern day, and Corey – despite being cleared by the legal system for the kid’s death[1] – is stuck working a dead-end job at a scrapyard, living at home with his creepily overbearing mother and getting bullied by band geeks.

Yeah, you read that right. The bullies in this movie are fucking band geeks. Corey, my dude, you’re a grown-ass man. This should not be a problem. I get that he’s hesitant to do anything violent given his past, but the movie never spells out any legal implications to Corey standing up for himself, which makes him come off as a tremendous wuss.

Until, that is, Laurie sees him getting bullied and helps him slash the band kids’ tires. This scene both perfectly encapsulates Laurie’s newfound, devil-may-care attitude and serves as a lead-in to one of the film’s major subplots – the romance between Corey and Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson. Was it a little weird that Laurie was so anxious to set an accidental child-killer up with her only living blood relative? Yeah. Does it help move the plot along? Also yes.

Corey goes on to have a series of bad days that end with the band kids throwing him off a fucking bridge. He doesn’t die, though.

See how Michael Myers hasn’t made an appearance in this part of the review? Well, that happens in the movie, too: almost half its runtime elapses before we get to see the big goof, when Corey encounters the masked marauder in his subterranean lair. Yeah, since Halloween Kills, Michael basically became king of the mole men, and no, it’s never explained. Michael decides to let Corey go, ostensibly because he sees something eeeeevil in Corey’s eyes.

Then things get nuts. Corey starts luring people into the sewers so Michael can kill them – the film implies that Michael is regaining his physical strength through the murders. As this is happening, Laurie is becoming increasingly suspicious of Corey – and his scary eyes, which you’d think she might’ve noticed earlier (say, before she cajoled her granddaughter into dating the guy). Corey decides to take matters into his own hands, and (somewhat comically) beats up Michael and takes his mask before killing the absolute shit out of the band kids who’d been tormenting him.

At this point, the movie seems to realize, “oh, fuck, we still gotta have Laurie fight Michael,” and does everything in its power to make that happen. And it does! The setup is just a little silly (and ends up shortchanging Corey’s story by making his death a forgettable aside to the final showdown).

Some quick bullet points:

• I spotted some fun callbacks to earlier instalments in the series (hello, knitting needles!) and I’m sure franchise aficionados will have a field day trying to pick them all out
• Laurie’s final battle with Michael is better than expected, but not as good as their confrontation at the climax of 2018’s Halloween – which I still count as the high point of the modern trilogy
• The script could have used one more round of editing – some of the dialogue is extremely on the nose, and at least one prominent instance of interpersonal drama could have been avoided entirely had one character literally pointed three feet away to where Michael’s mask was lying on the ground
• The gore is gory (but never shudder-inducing)
• We are, thankfully, spared the hamfisted moralizing that was present in Halloween Kills

Part the Third: How to End a Franchise

It’s not like Michael’s coming back from getting thrown into an industrial shredder. His head fucking exploded! Absent some cloning-based shenanigans, he’s deader than Chester A. Arthur.[2]

So, did Ends do a good job at, uh, ending things? Not really. There’s a difference between ending something definitively (i.e. throwing the villain into an industrial shredder) and ending it well (developing and concluding character arcs in satisfying, logical ways and paying off setups from earlier instalments, while also throwing the villain into an industrial shredder).

It all comes down to Corey, I think. Not that he’s a bad character – quite the opposite! He’s a good character whose story should have been broken up across the previous movies, to allow more screentime for Laurie and Allyson in the finale. We don’t really need to see that much of Michael for the film to be effective – but we should get a better sense of the effect he’s had on the main characters through his previous actions, and we don’t really get much of that here.[3] If Corey had been introduced in Halloween ’18, briefly appeared in Halloween Kills, and then been a major focus of Halloween Ends, his appearance here wouldn’t feel like an abrupt lane change for the story, but rather a natural tying-in of a plot strand the audience was already familiar with. As it is, the shift in focus is somewhat jarring at first – and even more so at movie’s end, when the Laurie-Michael conflict returns to center stage.

At the end of the day,[4] Halloween Ends is a decent horror movie that might have been better had it not been saddled with the duty of capping off an entire trilogy. Had that trilogy been designed with Corey’s story running in parallel to Laurie’s…who knows? What we got is what we got, and it wasn’t bad.

Just weird.

Rating: 7.5/10 (+.25/-1)

---

[1] I can’t remember if the movie ever mentions the specific charges. You’d think he’d at least get hit with manslaughter, right?

[2] Died Nov. 18, 1886.

[3] For example, it might have been nice to have some flashbacks detailing how Laurie and Allyson dealt with Karen (Laurie’s daughter/Allyson’s mother)’s death in Kills.

[4] October 31^st, specifically.