Halloween Ends (2022) *
Okay, but can it really? Can Halloween, at long last, please just fucking end? I knew, after the last-minute self-immolation of Halloween Kills, that whatever came next wasn’t going to be good, but I hardly expected Halloween Ends to compete with Halloween: Resurrection for the Worst in Franchise championship belt. This movie doesn’t even offer the dubious “I can’t believe you fools made this as a Halloween sequel” charm of Halloween III: Season of the Witch or Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers. Indeed, its gravest defect is that director David Gordon Green and his ever-expanding roster of co-writers didn’t make any single coherent film at all. In what I’m coming to recognize as the defining failure mode of the present era’s truly terrible movies, Halloween Ends is merely a mulch of competing and often contradictory undeveloped premises, held together with a thin and flimsy glue of producers’ notes.
I’ll admit that it gets off to a great start, though. A year after Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney, one last time) escaped from official custody and embarked upon the bloodiest one-man massacre ever seen in a small town like Haddonfield, Illinois, the community remains haunted and twitchy. When the sun rose on All Saints’ Day, 2018, there was no sign of the killer anywhere, as if his Halloween rampage had been all a bad dream. Mind you, his victims were just as dead by the light of day as they had been in the dark, and Haddonfield became noteworthy over the ensuing twelve months for its excessive rates of suicide, random violence, and deaths of despair. Still, life goes on, and as we return to the little town, two of its richest residents (Candice Rose, of Husk and The Unseen, and Jack William Marshall) are heading out to a Halloween party, leaving their little boy, Jeremy (Jaxon Goldenberg), in the care of up-and-coming college-aged nerd Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell, from Dark Hearts and The Monkey). Jeremy does not find Corey nearly as impressive as his parents do (at the very least, he was hoping for a pretty girl), and after the babysitter declares bedtime just as a TV broadcast of The Thing was reaching the Good Part, the kid devises a prank that has special resonance for any inhabitant of Haddonfield. He rigs things to look like a prowler has let himself into the house, and cornered him in the storeroom at the top of the huge spiral staircase at the building’s center. Corey falls for it hook, line, and sinker, at which point Jeremy sets Phase II in motion, barricading the babysitter in the very same room. The pair’s struggle over the door reaches its climax just as Mr. and Mrs. Allen return home from their party. Corey forces his way out at last, accidentally knocking Jeremy over the banister close behind him, and the kid plummets four stories to shatter his head on the hardwood floor of the grand foyer. It’s the first thing his parents see upon shutting the front door behind them. And worse still, Corey happens to be still holding the kitchen knife that he picked up when he thought he was about to throw down with a would-be kidnapper. Cue opening credits.
Immediately after that, however, Halloween Ends blows it completely by walking back two whole movies’ worth of character development for Laurie Strode (still Jamie Lee Curtis) and her granddaughter, Allyson (still Andi Matichak). Nevermind that Halloween and Halloween Kills portrayed Laurie as an irreparably broken personality, so thoroughly self-optimized for an anticipated rematch with Michael Myers that she was incapable of handling regular life. And nevermind that Allyson was a teenaged hardcase who always took her mad grandma’s side in the neverending battle between Laurie and her daughter, Karen, over the ex-Final Girl’s lifestyle of obsessive preparedness. Laurie got better, channeling all her grief and paranoia into the writing of a memoir called Stalkers, Survivors, and Samhain, which reads like the world’s most obnoxious LiveJournal blog. Allyson, meanwhile, decided that her mom was right all along, even though Laurie was right, and Karen paid with her life for underestimating the menace of Michael. Although the pair live together in the charming, sensible, and totally unfortified house that Laurie bought within the Haddonfield city limits to replace the one on the outskirts that she blew up with Michael inside it, Allyson no longer quite trusts her grandmother, and harbors persistent fantasies about getting the hell out of town. Also, Laurie and Allyson might or might not be pariahs now, blamed for some reason by their surviving neighbors for failing to stop Myers from adjusting Haddonfield’s census figures so drastically downward last Halloween; Green and his co-writers can’t seem to make up their minds about that from one scene to the next.
You know who definitely and consistently is a pariah, though? Corey Cunningham. Somehow he managed to avoid a criminal conviction for involuntary manslaughter, or even a civil verdict of wrongful death, but the only people in Haddonfield who seem at all inclined to consider forgiving him for what happened to Jeremy Allen are Laurie and Allyson, who know a true psycho-killer when they see one. No longer the upwardly mobile youth whom we met before the credits, Corey now works at the auto-repair garage run by his stepfather (the delightfully and perfectly named Rick Moose). His mother (Joanne Baron, from Drag Me to Hell and Eyes of Laura Mars), always intensely neurotic and smothering, has done her damnedest to re-infantilize him all the way back to the womb. And on the social dimension, Corey is such a leper these days that even the kids in the Haddonfield High School marching band pick on him. Indeed, that’s the very thing that Laurie intervenes to rescue him from one afternoon in October of 2022, with fateful— and, for many people, fatal— results.
Corey cut his hand to pieces on a broken bottle during the altercation with the Marching Band Bullies, so after lending the boy her jackknife with instructions to slash their tires while their attention is elsewhere, she takes him to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital to get patched up. By a fortuitous coincidence (or, you know, not), Allyson is the nurse who installs Corey’s stitches, and for no very obvious reason, she instantly decides that she rather likes her put-upon patient. Corey isn’t altogether sure that he trusts her at first, but it’s been so long since anybody but his stepdad was anything other than shitty to him that he soon throws caution to the wind and begins accepting her advances. Mind you, there’s some danger in that, above and beyond the risks that always accompany letting one’s emotional guard down, because Allyson already has a boyfriend. Worse yet, that boyfriend (Jesse C. Boyd, of The Craving and Halloweed) is a sheriff’s deputy. Then again, Allyson seems to be nearing the end of her patience with macho swagger and “funny” abuses of authority, putting that relationship very close to its expiration date.
Then Allyson goes and invites Corey to the big Halloween party at the bar run by Lindsey Wallace (a re-returning Kyle Richards). At first the evening seems to go well for both of them, but it drifts further awry with each additional person who catches on to the identity of Allyson’s scarecrow-masked date. Finally (and frankly, implausibly), Cunningham winds up at the bar alongside none other than Mrs. Allen, and her persecutorial harangue sends him fleeing from the building. Trudging home alone, Corey next runs afoul of the Marching Band Bullies, and when he tries to stand up for himself, their leader, Terry (The Dark Tower’s Michael Barbieri), judo-flips him over the rampart of the bridge where they have him surrounded. The ground 20-odd feet below is soft and damp, so Corey isn’t seriously injured in the fall, but his assailants don’t know that, so they speed off before they get into real trouble. That’s when Cunningham experiences by far the strangest and most distressing turn of his already very strange and distressing night: something emerges from a nearby storm drain, and drags him inside. When Corey at last claws his way back to full consciousness in the predawn twilight, he finds himself inside a vast, manmade cavern (what kind of Cape Horn-ass weather do they get in Haddonfield, anyway?!), being watched over by Michael Myers. The killer does make an attempt to strangle Cunningham after he awakens, but his heart doesn’t seem to be in it even before they lock eyes, and undergo some sort of mutual psychic flash, like a spontaneous Vulcan mind meld. Michael releases Corey; Corey escapes from the storm drain; and for the second time in just five years, the lad inadvertently gets blood on his hands, as a tussle with the mad vagrant who lives out of a shopping cart underneath the bridge (Blaque Fowler, from Tainted and The Evil Inside Her) ends with the bum skewered on his own knife.
From that day forward, Corey starts to change. And from that scene on, Halloween Ends loses its entire grip on what manner of story it’s trying to tell. From one angle, you might think of this movie as the world’s most unlikely remake of Christine, with Myers standing in for the evil Plymouth. We’re asked to believe that Corey’s personality is gradually assimilating itself to Michael’s, but since the killer’s whole point as a character is that he hasn’t got a personality, David Gordon Green and company merely settle for turning Cunningham into your garden variety school shooter a little at a time. Or alternately, we could interpret Halloween Ends as a knockoff of It, with the storm-drain-dwelling maniac in the role of Pennywise. Myers is shockingly enfeebled during his initial appearance, having plainly never recovered from the pounding he took throughout Halloween and Halloween Kills, but with each asshole whom Cunningham lures onto the point of Michael’s butcher knife, the more like his impossibly lethal old self he becomes. It seems, at least during this phase of the film, that Laurie was correct toward the end of the last one in her assessment that the act of murder makes Myers something more than human. Meanwhile, as the bond between Corey and Allyson strengthens, the movie flirts repeatedly with setting out on the road to Natural Born Killers country, but it never quite gets around to turning the ignition key. And although the preceding two films (let alone the first act of this one) ought to have put the concept permanently to bed, the mere fact that this is a Halloween sequel with Jamie Lee Curtis in the cast demands that Halloween Ends devote its climax to yet another ultimate, decisive, no-we-really-mean-it-this-time final showdown between Michael and Laurie. There’s a touch of Pastel Grindhouse at play in the climax, too, since it hinges on the possibility of a final rupture between Laurie and her granddaughter. To be honest with you, though, the version of Halloween Ends that I would most like to have seen is the one teased by the sporadic hints of developing romance between Laurie and the now-retired Deputy Frank Hawkins (Will Patton again), which dare to ask, “What if On Golden Pond had been a slasher movie?”
Any one of those premises (well… maybe not that last one) could have made for a peculiar but acceptable Halloween sequel. Most of them, with some serious work, could even be forced into the narrative and thematic frameworks already established by Halloween and Halloween Kills. The trouble is that the filmmakers needed to pick one and then stick with it, instead of jumping tracks from one to the next with every change of scene. They also needed to make up their minds once and for all about some fairly basic character issues. Has Laurie truly journaled her way to health and sanity, or is Allyson the only person who understands that she’s just putting on a brave front? Do the residents of Haddonfield regard the Strode clan as unalterably tainted by their association with Michael Myers or not? Does Allyson long to skip town because she’s hated and feared by her peers and neighbors, or does she just suffer from small-town boredom? Most of all, is Michael Myers infecting Corey with some psychic contagion, or did their meeting draw something out of Cunningham that was always inside him to begin with? It would be alright if some of those questions had complicated or ambiguous answers, but they needed to have answers, and the answers needed to be consistent. Otherwise there’s no telling what’s at stake here, beyond a bunch more Haddonfielders getting knives to the throat, chest, or belly.
Another thing in Halloween Ends that gets on my last nerve is the incontinence with which David Gordon Green throws in incoherent and poorly thought-out callbacks not only to previous Halloween movies, but to John Carpenter’s oeuvre in general. I concede that it’s fun the first time, when Jeremy Allen wants to watch Carpenter’s version of The Thing, just like Lindsey Wallace was watching the Howard Hawks-Christian Nyby version in the original Halloween. And like I said, building this whole movie around an extended Christine riff may be weird, but it would at least be defensible if Green had committed to it. But then you’ve got shit like Corey sharing a surname with that movie’s doomed protagonist to make the connection stupidly literal— or worse, a scene in which he runs down one of his targets in his stepfather’s tow truck as if he were actually driving the homicidal car! Corey copies instantly recognizable Michael Myers gestures under patently meaningless circumstances even before his encounter with the killer, while Myers himself recapitulates kills from the first film in pointlessly exacting detail. Most vexing of all, Haddonfield’s rock radio station has a DJ (Keraun Harris) who functions as a nonsensical cross between Adrienne Barbeau’s character in The Fog and the self-interested shock-jock who shit-stirs his way to an early grave in Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers. There’s never any reason for this guy to be there, as nothing he says over the air contributes anything to the movie’s plot, themes, or atmosphere, and even his admittedly impressive death scene (set to the Cramps’ “I Was a Teenage Werewolf”) is apt to make you wish you were watching Near Dark instead. (And that isn’t even a fucking John Carpenter movie!) This is perilously close to “Family Guy” territory, except that in Halloween Ends, the lazy references aren’t stillborn jokes, but rather stillborn literary affectations. It might be even more annoying, though, when “Hey, remember this thing that happened in some other movie? Yeah, me too.” is meant to impress us with the perpetrator’s erudition instead of just to make us laugh.
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