Halloween Ends

It’s a year later on from the events of Halloween Kills and the town of Haddonfield are still struggling to cope with the aftermath of Michael’s rampage, the mob rule that over took the town and the fact that Michael is still out there… somewhere.

Corey is asked to babysit Jeremy as the regular babysitter is sick. His mother is concerned as Jeremey took the events a year before to heart and is worried that the bogeyman (Michael) is going to get him. Corey promises he’ll look after Jeremy and they will have a good time. It turns out that Jeremy has been pulling the wool over his parents eyes as he’s more than happy to sit through a horror movie and then play a game of hide-and-seek.

While searching for Jeremy, Corey finds some odd things around the house like the front door being open and a knife missing from the kitchen counter. Starting to panic, Corey runs around the house before making his way upstairs to the attic. Searching around he hears the door slam and finds that he’s locked in.

Panicking, Corey starts to kick at the door becoming angry when he can hear Jeremy laughing at him from the other side. With one final heavy kick, the lock gives way and the door swings open, smacking Jeremy in the face, knocking him backwards over the railing and on to the entrance hall 3 floors below, just as the parents arrive home.

Corey was arrested and charged with aggravated manslaughter and even though he was cleared his life became a mess. He was unable to attend college to do the engineering course he’d picked and was stuck working as a mechanic at his stepfather’s workshop. The locals all thought that Corey got away with murder and treat him very badly.

Picking up the story 4 years later, Corey’s approached by a group of teens who want him to buy them alcohol but when he refuses they beat him up, causing him to slice his hand open on a broken bottle. Laurie Strode witnesses all of this and takes Corey to the local clinic where her granddaughter, Allyson works as a nurse.

As Allyson is patching Corey up they seem to connect over being outsiders who have gone through a terrible and similar trauma. On a night out, things seem to be going well for the pair, but Corey is recognised by Jeremy’s mother who is getting drunk at the bar and Corey lashes out at Allyson before leaving.

The teens who accosted Corey a few days before, see him walking down the road and decide to attack him again, throwing him off of a bridge leaving him for dead. Corey is dragged into the sewers by Michael Myers who begins to strangle him to death, only to stop when they lock eyes like there is a strange connection between them.

After being released by Michael, Corey starts to go down a dark path and Laurie starts to see Michael hiding in Corey’s eyes. Trying to warn Allyson that Corey might not be what he seems just drives the couple closer together and a chain of events begins that will rip Grandmother and Granddaughter apart and threaten to destroy the very fabric of Haddonfield.

Halloween Ends, But Is It A Fitting One?

🎃Warning! Spoilers for Halloween Ends ahead!🔪

When I initially heard they were bringing Halloween back in 2018 I thought that we were in for another reboot so I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was a continuation of the story with Jamie Lee Curtis reprising her role as Laurie Strode.

2018’s Halloween was both an reboot and a sequel that allowed a new audience to access the franchise while providing fans of the 1978 Halloween a partial continuation of the Strode storyline. With Halloween Kills, we got both a sequel to the 1978 and 2018 films as well as providing a damning indictment of following mob mentality, taking the law into your own hands and getting it horribly wrong.

And with Halloween Ends, we knew that we were getting to the coda of the Strode/Myers saga and I was interested to see how the finale would play out considering some of the ways that they have dispatched Michael in previous films.

Yes, I know that Halloween II, Halloween III: Season Of The Witch, Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Myers, Halloween 5: The Revenge Of Michael Myers, Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers, Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later and Halloween Resurrection didn’t happen in this revised version of the Halloween Universe but they had some truly epic Michael Myers deaths, I mean who could forget the decapitation scene at the end of Halloween H20?

What we got with Halloween Ends was more of a vehicle for introducing a new Michael in Corey, with Myers taking a back seat for the majority of the film. Yes, I get that we can see through Laurie’s book that she thinks that evil is a force that attaches itself to someone, and that Michael recognises that evil within Corey (through the terribly contrived flashback in his eye sequence) which is why he lets Corey go. And that Laurie, having seen the evil in Michael’s eyes is now seeing it in Corey’s eyes which is why she’s afraid for Allyson.

But I have to ask: what was the point?

Both Corey and Michael are dead by the end of the film so the whole storyline was pointless. It’s not like Michael’s evil infected Corey and was therefore a threat of spreading to the whole town, Corey already had that evil inside of him which he just finally embraced.

The issues between Laurie and Allyson felt very artificial and were, again, pointless as it was all resolved within 15 minutes of screen time.

And Michael’s eventual death? What a let down!

There was a bit of a battle between Laurie and a weakened Michael but to just have him pinned to a kitchen table with a couple of kitchen knives and a handily situated fridge was not the way I thought he’d go out. I was honestly hoping that, as we’d been building to this moment for over 40 years, it would have a little more gravitas to it.

The town got closure when Laurie bunged Michael into the car shredder in the scrapyard, but did the audience get their closure? I didn’t. I was just left rather deflated at what a wasted opportunity and waste of time the entire film was.

With all of the talk of evil attaching itself to a person, and evil being able to recognise evil it begs the question if Laurie has an evil streak in her as she could recognise it in both Michael and Corey, but we never get an answer to what could have been an interesting plot point.

And did evil in Haddonfield die when Michael and Corey died? Because the actions of the town in Halloween Kills and their attitudes in Halloween Ends say otherwise but this is yet another loose end that is never looked at.

Halloween In Name, Not In Nature

Given how Halloween Kills was left, this really should have been an epic showdown between Michael and Laurie. Laurie’s finally settled into a “normal” life having moved into Haddonfield into a proper trap-free home. She’s starting to build her life back up and Michael’s return turns that completely upside down. And it doesn’t even matter one bit to the plot.

It’s not talked about, it’s not even hinted at, it’s just completely glossed over in favour of Allyson and Corey’s storyline which we know won’t be going anywhere, because how could it?

If they really wanted to push the boundaries, why not have Corey bring Allyson to the dark side with him? She hated the town as much as he did and had as many skeletons as he had. She could have killed a weak Michael in the sewers at Corey’s insistence and gone on the rampage across town with him making the final confrontation between Corey and Laurie much more of a focal point of the film, giving it much higher stakes as we wouldn’t know what way Allyson would go.

Instead we got what felt like 2 separate films mashed together with neither story fully working.

When I saw that there were 4 credited writers (Paul Brad Logan, Chris Bernier, Danny McBride and David Gordon Green) I had a feeling that this would be a bit of a mess plot wise and I was right. I get the impression that a pair wrote a first draft and the studio wasn’t happy so brought on someone else to do a rewrite and then a rewrite of a rewrite which is why the film’s plot isn’t cohesive and doesn’t really provide us with a proper ending to the trilogy.

Overall I found Halloween Ends one of the more shallow entries out of any of the films of the franchise and a disappointing ending to a trilogy that started to link evil and society’s actions to repercussions and ended up with a poorly executed finale with little substance and even less to say.

What do you think? Am I being too harsh? Do you think Halloween Ends worked as the final episode in a saga spanning 45 years or were you left wanting more? Let me know in the comments below.

Watch Halloween Ends just so you can say you’ve watched every Halloween film ever made or if you want to see an annoying kid get their comeuppance.

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