This article contains spoilers for Halloween Ends. It’s streaming on Peacock and in theaters, so we’re fairly confident that folks who want to check this out are going to do so quickly, but let this be a warning to you.
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As with most rebootquels, David Gordon Green’s Halloween was an attempt to take the series back to basics – Real Roots Horror, as it were – and he did a pretty damn good job with it, at least in my opinion. It’s easy to forget just how dire some of the later sequels got or how bitter and viscerally Rob Zombie’s remake duology was received when they were released: Most of the post-Season of the Witch Halloween films in the original series have their defenders, and Zombie’s movies are almost universally beloved by the kind of person who typically throws around sobriquets like “scumbag auteur,” myself included. But beyond any pretensions of carrying on John Carpenter’s legacy or doing right by the original or whatever else, the movie was fun, the kind of rollicking-yet-brutal slasher film that everybody thought had been dead since Wes Craven put nails in its conventional coffin or at least when we stopped wanting to judge or examine America’s (recent) tortuous past once one of the Good Guys got put back in office. It was a crowd-pleasing juggernaut, entertaining vast audiences of horror nerds and casual viewers alike. And, hey, it added another shiny trinket (what’s the horror movie equivalent of a Platinum Record? A gilded kitchen knife?) to what must be a pretty full wall in Jason Blum’s office.
It was then that Gordon Green and Blum and everyone involved pivoted to their second goal: To extract as many eggs as possible from their newfound golden goose. Two sequels were quickly greenlit, to be released in short succession. Based on the goodwill generated by that first one, how couldn’t one be hyped and happy to see what the Halloween brain trust would do with an additional two films? And, hey, at least we’d get two new John Carpenter scores out of it, even if they were dogshit, right? Well, in going down this path, though, they unlocked a secret third goal, one that only becomes fully evident as the credits roll for Halloween Ends. They essentially speed-ran the collapse of a modern horror franchise. Suppose there was a thesis to be made within Halloween about the previous films in the series, with the barbs about there being a “new Loomis” or whatever. In that case, it’s essentially moot at this point: Ends is essentially demonstrating that there just seems to be a guiding arc to how Halloween films go once they get past their second sequential installment. Either you pivot and relegate Michael Myers to a TV screen in the background of an otherwise-unrelated masterpiece, or you’re bound to lose yourself in some sort of thicket of thorny weeds and barb-wire bristles.
To Gordon Green’s credit, he at least only alludes to there being a sort of supernatural aspect of Michael Myers’ abilities, unlike the trio of pre-H20 sequels. There’s sort of a weird evil-recognizes-evil aspect here that’s soon paired with Michael seemingly gaining his strength back from a murder, committed in the sewage drainage pipe he’s been living in since he single-handedly annihilated most of Haddonfield’s fire department and a whole host of mob-mentality-mad townspeople a few years back. There’s no sense of security in the town – they can’t just point to the asylum down the way and say “that’s where he is” anymore, after all – and the tenor of public discourse remains suspicious and stupid, just like it was in the previous film. We witness most of this through the eyes of Lau- excuse me, I mean Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a brand new character who is essentially the series’ Tommy Jarvis (he of Friday the 13th: A New Beginning infamy), a social outcast whose already-shitty life was made all the worse when he accidentally killed the kid he babysat on Halloween in truly hilarious fashion. It’s not so much the content of the scene as it is the way that Gordon Green depicts the series of perfect coincidences it takes to make him look guilty, which is gut-busting once one starts to get the mechanics of this Rube Goldberg machine of presumed guilt.
Anyway, Corey’s opportunities have vanished since that day. College never worked out, he tears apart cars and shovels scrap metal in a junkyard for a living, and his overbearing mother is both his chief persecutor and only source of connection, whose heaps of misery are at least accompanied by room and board. It’s after he nearly gets the shit beaten out of him by a group of Haddonfield High Schoolers (band geeks, no less) outside of a gas station that he meets Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), who, following her house burning down in the failed attempt to finally kill Michael once and for all in Halloween and her daughter and son-in-law getting murdered in the last film, has moved into Haddonfield with her now-orphaned granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). The pair become semi-friends, linked together by their ostracization. Though things have gotten better for Laurie in several ways – she’s got a peaceful domestic life between writing her memoirs and tending to her grandchild – she’s blamed for the whole Myers circumstance in the first place by those around her, unjustly (and kind of unrealistically). But it’s Allyson who really takes a liking to Corey, for whatever bizarre reason. Trauma bonds folks together, and the pair are both, you know, pretty fucking messed up by what’s happened to them. So, they begin a small courtship at a Halloween dance party one night (there’s so many different Halloween events in this movie that it’s hard even to determine where one begins and the other ends, honestly), though the strobes and music fade away once Corey runs into the mom of the kid he kinda-sorta-accidentally murdered. He flees the scene, tells Allyson that she can’t fix him, and promptly gets his ass actually kicked by those band geeks, who just so happen to stumble across him on his way home and push him off of an overpass.
It’s with this head trauma that we’re able to finally reach that point I outlined so very long ago – almost eight hundred words – and Corey meets Michael, his new best friend. One could practically just cue up Harry Nilsson as he goes about town like he’s a symbiote-covered Tobey Maguire, shedding his nerdy glasses, riding a motorcycle, picking up Allyson while pissing off her grandmother, and, of course, learning how to murder from his best friend and mentor. Now, I genuinely hate doing what I just did, dropping, bit-by-bit, the whole first act of a film in a review and sucking up all of that space, but I promise you I did so for an important reason. See, Halloween Ends kind of forgets what made Gordon Green’s Halloween fun in the first place – the pace. The movie rolls through its set-up and plotting to get us to the goods, which were ample in supply: the scares, gore and often actually-funny comedy (perhaps the contribution of Danny McBride, who is still one of the credited screenwriters here even if it’s really hard to tell if he did anything this time around) fill out most of those remaining 90 minutes after some fifteen or twenty minutes of set-up. For all of Kills’ faults, it at least pretended that it wanted to provide you with some sort of dopamine rush, and it has a few good kills and fun scenes tossed throughout the runtime. Ends, on the other hand, chooses to do the same old “Let’s examine the mind of an outcast young man as he barrels down a road towards murder and mayhem” shit that you can find in approximately two hundred other films and countless Netflix streaming shows, some of which are even based on real people.
It’s a kind of understandable narrative impulse to try and link the traumatizer and traumatized in some tangible way to further explore that bond, but it’s antithetical to Gordon Green’s approach, given that he spent the whole first film trying his damnest to let us know that Laurie Strode and Michael Myers were not related by blood like they were in the previous movies (and especially with Zombie’s, where evil is implied to be genetic, though the whole film ultimately feels like Gordon Green coming up with and failing to properly articulate a “nurture” rebuttal to Zombie’s “nature”). Instead, their descendants – one actually so, one who just happens to really like masks and kitchen knives – link up and form the kind of drearily dull romance that makes up something like 60 percent of the film’s runtime. It’s nice when someone – Blum, perhaps, or maybe the suits at Universal – metaphorically whacks Gordon Green over the head with the fact that he’s contractually obligated to make the movie earn its colon-less subtitle, and the final half hour of the movie has some of the mayhem was once the primary focus of this reboot trilogy, rather than a meager side-helping to go with a more-than-generous portion of the same old boring exploration and elucidation of the way capital-t Trauma messes with folks. It’s now the primary focus of the damn trilogy. I blame myself and other critics for our emphasis of that facet rather than driving home the fact that it was a beneficial and tempering accompaniment to the fun to be had in the first film, for why we’re sitting through a Halloween film in which Michael Myers has had his evil outsourced. But, again, there is some fun to be had with this last half hour. There’s a fun and gnarly kill involving a DJ’s tongue, Curtis gets a swell Ripley-in-the-Power-Loader moment with Not-Michael Myers, and how the film ends is so genuinely ridiculous and moronic that it nearly approaches the sublime. Consider that Ends’ equivalent of Jason Takes Manhattan or Jason X, depending on wherever your Friday the 13th collectible Blu-Ray boxset ends.
In truth, one could probably have made a decent sequel out of aspects of Kills and Ends, much in the way that one probably could have made two decent Hobbit movies out of the three Peter Jackson wound up directing instead of Guillermo Del Toro. It, at least, might have been able to keep up with the pace Gordon Green and company worked so hard to establish in Halloween, and its stupid attempts at profundity would have been an affable feature rather than its ponderous point. But Gordon Green’s career has never been about doing one particular thing well, over and over again, and as much as I admire his willingness to change genres and styles, it’s pretty clear at this point that his ambitions for that first film were ultimately too humble to resist a two-film order and the praise that his light attempts at gravitas received. It’s strange how much of his prestige work – you know, the good shit he made back before he linked up with the Apatow crowd and has occasionally done so since then – feels like it’s being referenced here amidst the stew of Carpenter and horror one might expect. There are bits that remind me of the small-town hope-in-the-bleakness of Snow Angels (a damn good movie that features a great Sam Rockwell performance) or the naturalism of George Washington or even the survivor’s guilt he smartly portrayed in Stronger. And there are also glimpses of what could have been: An adorable conversation between Curtis and Will Patton, returning for this outing as well, as they wander the aisles at the local grocery store and subtly flirt while shooting the breeze about how the former sheriff’s now learning Japanese feels like a clip from the kind of movie he be making now had Pineapple Express not come a-calling. But, alas, we have his Exorcist rebootquel to look forward to on the horizon, and if Halloween Ends is any indication, they’ll probably just bypass that brief return-to-form that series had with its third film and head straight into Exorcist: The Beginning-levels of turgidity.