HALLOWEEN ENDS

 

Halloween Ends Movie Review

Halloween Ends starts with a babysitter named Corey watching a brat named Jeremy. The child falls to his death, and Corey may or may not have been the cause. Fast forward a few years, and Haddonfield, still trying to recover from the latest Michael Myers spree, gears up for Halloween. Before I continue, I will warn, there will be spoilers...let me repeat...

THERE

WILL

BE

SPOILERS

If you're a fan of the Halloween franchise, you're probably familiar with the many timelines--if you're not, I'm going to simplify it and only focus on what matters for this film. The original Halloween movie came out in 1978. In 2018, we got Halloween, a direct sequel to the 1978 film (why they titled this one Halloween instead of Halloween Part 2, or Halloween II, or something similar, is beyond me). In 2021, we saw the sequel to that movie (the third film in this timeline), Halloween Kills. This brings us here, to the fourth and (alleged) final Halloween film--at least in this timeline, but we know it's only a matter of time before a reboot of some sort comes along. 

"This contract clearly states I'm done after this"

If you're a fan of--or have at least seen--most of the Halloween films, and you dislike Halloween III: Season of the Witch strictly because Michael isn't in it, you may end up throwing things at your television while watching this movie. While it's not the case that Michael is completely out of the movie, it's no stretch to say he's replaced--if you want to be kind, we'll say he gets a tag team partner.

Tag me in!

You will likely see it coming in the movie, but here's a spoiler warning for this review as well--Corey goes a little mad and becomes the aforementioned partner after an odd encounter that sees Michael drag Corey into a drainage pipe, grab his throat, and then...not kill him. Why? Who knows. But Corey sees the evil, and it possesses him...I guess? As for Corey, Stephen King fans (and John Carpenter fans, for that matter) will immediately recognize the blatant ripoff off of nod to the character Arnie from Christine. 

He's only missing the tape on the glasses

Even more than the look, the development/unraveling of Corey is almost parallel to Arnie--that said, Rohan Campbell did a wonderful job with the character, turning in the movie's best performance. The kills are down significantly from the previous film, and Michael's are down even more. A major complaint with the previous film was it felt more Friday the 13th and less Halloween--this movie kind of felt like neither, but the deaths we do see are gruesome for sure. As has been the trend, there are more nods to the previous films than you can shake a butcher knife at. The are few actual scares, but maybe a surprise or two thrown in. The movie is terribly long--this is a 90 minute flick at best, yet it pushes nearly two hours. After sitting through watching somebody else kill the folks of Haddonfield (and that doesn't even really start until almost an hour in), we finally get Michael vs Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), and to say the ending is underwhelming is an understatement. 

I think even his mask has grown grey hairs

Halloween Ends is as dull and soulless as the two movies that preceded it. We are a culture that is hungry for nostalgia, and there is no shortage of companies looking to cash in on that. But, to quote The Wedding Singer (which I can't believe I'm about to do on this site), "I grew up idolizing guys like Fonzie and Vinnie Barbarino... Do you know what happened to Fonzie and Vinnie Barbarino?... Their shows got cancelled because no one wants to see a 50-year-old guy hitting on chicks." The context here is slightly different than in that movie, but the general idea is similar--perhaps the reason these three movies never should have been made in the first place is because none of us should have ever reached for that nostalgia and wanted to see elderly Laurie fighting elderly Michael. 

On A Scale Of One To Ten: 5

Halloween Ends Movie Trailer