The Doctor’s Diagnosis: F
Rob Zombie, rejoice. Somebody may have finally made a Michael Myers movie as bad as your Halloween II and I didn’t think that was scientifically possible. Halloween Ends is a catastrophic trainwreck of a film. Everything about it is so misguided and ludicrous that I nearly went passed anger and became bemused by it. This is the angriest that I have been in a theater for a horror film since the 2019 version of Black Christmas, a film that has its own floor devoted to it in cinematic hell.
In my reviews of the previous two Halloween movies, I noted that I am tired of the Laurie Strode vs. Michael Myers story and I wished that the franchise would do something else. I said that “as lame as it may be, Halloween 6 was at least going somewhere. It was going somewhere stupid, sure, but it was at least going somewhere.” I guess I should have been more specific, as “different” and “good” are not synonyms. The plot of Halloween Ends is certainly different, but it makes the nonsensical plot of Halloween 6 seem like it was meticulously crafted for years through the combined creative efforts of Homer, Shakespeare and Tolstoy. The complete lack of basic logic in the story arc and character motivations makes me pine for the more straightforward notion that Michael is somehow a hitman for a druid cult.
I think that the first two paragraphs about summarized my feelings here, so be aware that I will be spoiling this movie. I simply can’t articulate everything that’s wrong with it without going into the plot, so be warned. If you want to discover this shitshow on your own, stop here, see the movie and then come back. We’ll be sad together.
We begin on Halloween night, 2019, one year after the events in Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills. A wimpy, mopey dufus named Corey (folks, this asshat is our main character) is hired to babysit a rich kid and accidentally kills him by knocking him off a balcony (thankfully my theater wasn’t very full because I erupted in laughter at this). Flash forward to the present and Corey has been branded a killer and ostracized by the residents of Haddonfield (although he seemingly never faced any jail time despite shouting “I’m going to kill you!” and brandishing a knife as the kid’s parents arrived). He spends his days working in a junk yard and being bullied by some extremely non-intimidating teenagers, even though Corey is in his 20s and significantly larger than these kids. He is also becoming increasingly unhinged due to his constant mistreatment by the town and he seemingly isn’t aware that he can just move somewhere else.
Meanwhile, Haddonfield has become a depressing and violent place with murders and suicides rampant because…..I don’t know, insert pretentious commentary about grief here. Laurie has finally moved on with her life, though she is inexplicably accused by the townspeople of somehow inciting the events of the previous movies (I guess they suspect that she caused the prison transport bus to crash, I don’t fucking know). But she has finally moved on. Sure, she became a reclusive, alcoholic survivalist for 40 years when her friends were butchered by a maniac, but her own daughter can be butchered by the same maniac and she’s as jolly as an elf on Christmas Eve. Her granddaughter, Allyson, immediately falls deeply in love with Corey because, as the survivor of a serial killer’s rampage, her panties would get wet upon meeting an accused child murderer that spends most of his time getting beaten up by teenagers and rummaging in a scrap yard. All of this just adds up perfectly.
At this point, we’re about an hour into the movie and you are probably wondering the same thing that I was wondering: Is Michael Myers even in this movie? Oh, indeed he is. Corey stumbles across him in the sewer, where he has apparently been living as a hobo for the last four years. Why is he doing this? How is he doing this? Is he having pizzas delivered to the sewer tunnel like a fucking Ninja Turtle? All good questions that go unanswered. Michael spares Corey’s life because he sees potential evil in his eyes, because that’s apparently something that Michael does. Corey then becomes Michael’s apprentice (!) and they start killing people together like a slasher version of Batman & Robin. Eventually, Corey decides to take matters into his own hands, wrestles Michael to the ground in their Ninja Turtle lair and takes his mask. So, yeah, the unstoppable killing machine that shrugged off bullets and stab wounds while fighting 20 armed people at once in the last movie is taken to the ground by a dude that cowers at the sight of high school kids.
Corey dons the Myers mask and goes to kill Laurie because, I don’t know, he’s evil now or something. Laurie takes him down and finally, with about ten minutes left in the movie, Michael arrives on the scene. Laurie and Michael fight for the final time for the third time, she wins (which makes her 2-1 in their final battles) and then they strap his body to the roof of a cop car, parade him down the street and throw him into a grinder to assure the town that he is finally dead. All of the townspeople show up for this and follow his body, even though I have no idea why they all showed up. Maybe all the townspeople were in a Michael Myers Funeral Parade group chat together and today was finally the day that it came in handy. Even the police, all of whom would be fired, had no way to know Michael was alive, let alone at Laurie’s house, since Laurie called it in as a suicide.
Aside from the fact that none of this movie makes any goddamn sense, I’m also not sure what it’s trying to say. This latest round of Halloween movies has become obsessed with social messages (because fuck knows we needed that) and this one seems concerned with trauma and oppression being the source of evil. That theme makes no sense with Michael, who has no inciting trauma linked to his killing spree, so we need a new character (Corey) to cram a message down our throats. So I guess the movie is saying that Corey’s actions are through no fault of his own, but are the result of the oppression hoisted upon him by the townspeople because they think that he killed a kid? Not only does this completely miss the point of Michael Myers as a character and why the original Halloween was so effective, it makes for a disturbing commentary on personal accountability for violence.
The movie isn’t scary, either. Michael Myers is largely sidelined and Corey is the least frightening replacement imaginable. There are only a few kills, only one of which is gory, and suspense is nonexistent. It isn’t even really a horror movie until over an hour into it, at which point most audiences will probably already have fallen asleep. Horror and even its own villain are low on the priority list for Halloween Ends, instead focusing on bullshit meditations on the nature of trauma and violence that are of very questionable social value and have no place in a frigging Halloween movie.
The Halloween franchise has taught me a lot about perspective. When I saw Halloween 6 in a theater in 1995, I thought the series hit rock bottom. I thought the same thing sitting in a theater in 2002 watching Halloween: Resurrection. Then Rob Zombie said “hold my beer” and brought out a shovel to show me just how deep rock bottom can actually be. I’m not sure if Halloween Ends is as bad as Zombie’s Halloween II, and I will never watch either again for the sake of a definitive comparison, but it comes closer than I ever imagined that it could be. As much as I love Halloween and a part of me would be sad to see the series end on such a whimper, please let this truly be the end because I don’t want to see if rock bottom can, in fact, possibly go lower.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Ends#/media/File:Halloween_ends_poster.jpg
