Harefooted Halloween: Halloween Ends

What I Liked: They wanted to pass the torch (or knife I suppose) to a young fella to keep the homicides going because hey, Michael’s old.  Technically he’s not supernatural so it stands to reason.  And this isn’t a bad idea.  The filmmakers invest everything they got into this by building up backstory and having almost the entire movie be about the new guy, Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell (A Miracle on Christmas Lake)).  And then they wiz it all down their leg by the end.

What I Didn’t Like: A lot of the shit they threw in here doesn’t really make much sense.  First off it’s important to know this takes place four years after Kills.  Laurie’s (Jamie Lee Curtis (The Tailor of Panama)) not a survivalist armed to teeth waiting for Michael to return anymore.  She’s a regular person living in town now writing a book about her experiences.  The thing is Michael’s still at large having disappeared into the night at the end of the last film so I don’t know why she’s suddenly not all that worried about him anymore.  She patiently waited for him to come for her for forty goddamn years (which he did validating her extreme preparedness) but another four years is taking shit too far?  Everything’s ok now?  And the townspeople hate her because they think she’s somehow responsible for Michael’s actions.  This series got the progression of Laurie backwards.  She should be trying to live a normal life in the 2018 Halloween and then between Kills and Ends she shields herself in a fortified home packed to the gills with weapons.  Anyway, Laurie’s granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak (Assimilate)), instantly falls in love with Corey the moment they meet.  Putting aside the two actors not having great chemistry together, this relationship comes across contrived with Allyson continuing to pursue the guy despite him admitting to murdering someone and not reporting it.  Michael has been living in a sewer pipe for the past four years with his mask still on and we don’t know why he stopped killing folks.  This is abrupt and out of character.  Corey befriends Michael and becomes partners in crime with him which is as weird as it sounds.  And I guess Michael listens to him and follows his commands?  The citizens of Haddonfield can sense Corey has turned evil (except Allyson) and yea, they’re right but they have no evidence he’s done anything wrong.  All the victims are such assholes who you want to see get maimed (a complete turnaround from Kills where too many nice innocent people died).  The action is edited horribly.  I don’t think it’s shot particularly well and during those scenes they follow the current trend of very dim lighting adding yet another layer of obstruction.

Overall Impressions: You have to ignore the title and all the marketing surrounding the movie hyping it as a culmination of this current set because it’s misleading to an extent.  In reality it’s completely separate from its predecessors in just about every way.  The impression I’m getting from most folks is they feel like they were fooled by a bait and switch with Michael being sidelined for the majority of the runtime and Corey taking over as the main character.  And I’ll admit I felt this way at first too.  But once you push beyond that and view it as a standalone entry I think you’ll come around to appreciating what the filmmakers tried to do, even if it ultimately fails.  Structuring a Halloween picture around someone or something other than Michael Myers is an idea worth delving into.  Ignoring the stupid half baked Thorn cult crap from a couple of the sequels they only truly attempted this one other time with part III and that didn’t go over so well.  And that seems to be happening again.

The biggest head scratcher in this whole thing is they setup Corey to be the new Michael, go right up to the finish line but then at the last second change their mind.  This makes the picture come off like a total waste of time.  If they were going to abandon the central plot point and have it be Michael by the end anyway then what the hell are we doing?  None of this mattered.

In this trilogy (really quadrilogy because the original ’78 installment is part of this) Ends is definitely the most noteworthy entry but I honestly don’t know if I like it better than Kills and that was dumb as shit.  The thing is Kills is way more in line with a traditional Halloween movie and there’s a certain comfort in that.  It’s almost more frustrating to sit through a film that is so confident and concentrated on a specific direction only to change course in the last moments.  On top of that the big showdown between Michael and Laurie feels tacked on and redundant.  It’s not like this is the first time they’ve squared off.  We’ve seen these two duke it out a few times over the years (including just two movies ago!) so yet another rematch isn’t something I care that much about.  Sadly the whole situation ends up being a lose-lose.

Other huge horror franchises have tinkered with the notion of transferring evil to a new host so it’s sorta remarkable it took a Halloween this long to go there (and even though magical shit isn’t supposed to exist in this specific universe individuals can still be corrupted in the real world).  In Jason Goes to Hell the spirit of Jason is passed via giant slug worm from one person to another turning them into monsters and in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 Freddy recruits a high school teen to become his protégé.  But we don’t even have to go back that far.  Curiously the 2021 Candyman explores the same exact territory as Ends except does it much more effectively.

So I almost liked it.  Doing different stuff than the same old bullshit is fine and the angle they went with isn’t terrible.  But the execution takes a nosedive when they destroy what they took the time to build.  Look, none of the sequels, these or the others, come very close to being a worthy successor to the first.  And while they all have their own special issues Ends surprisingly has the most going for it.  Sure, the thing is kinda sloppily put together and I laughed out loud more than once at a part that wasn’t supposed to be funny but the concepts it lays out are somewhat intriguing.  I’m really interested to see how this particular installment plays years from now.