Halloween Ends Review

Review of Halloween Ends (2022) by screenqueeen: 👍 3/5

the thirteenth night in the lonesome hooptober day 41 film 37 cats: 0

95/100

i may have some kind of upper hand coming to these movies as late as i have. i happened to miss nearly all the marketing noise surrounding the end of this whole venture into... whatever David Gordon Green was trying to do here. but i actually like this the most of all three, sadly almost entirely by default. i can see what they were trying to do. but this still feels like a disconnected argument from KILLS that honestly should have been in that film. and this even continues from the re-hashed threads of RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS to move into (surprise!) re-hashed threads of REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS, cramming in a new Jamie but making it a himbo with a name i've never met a single zoomer bestowed with (unless i'm out of touch). he gets about a full film's worth of character development bullet points crammed into about half the time and is almost there with a found family allegory versus the blueprint this lifts from, focusing instead on blood relations and "finishing what they started" as if it's a birthright to anyone with surviving next of kin to offload. i did like the subplot between him and Allyson, the first real drama to come of these movies and does a better job of what OBSESSION tried to do while still being a shitty movie overall.

i am disappointed that the majority of this is just stuff that should have been in either of the previous two movies, KILLS especially. because the themes explored feel more natural to come in the same conversation as what individual people turn into once every one of them unite under a singular cause, the reasons for which they're being done a largely uncommunicated patchwork of misunderstanding, assumption and hate that overlap or contradict each other. a lot of this smells like a page one rewrite and even still has the air of "a lot of the people who worked on this got really mad at each other" so the aesthetic of HALLOWEEN III's 'fuck it let's make a hard left and really own it' is grafted onto this. they even used the same typeface of III to try and sell that.

things seep through the cracks that show what a lackluster approach this whole trilogy has been. 'WEEN 18 and KILLS are some kind of nu-HALLOWEEN/HALLOWEEN II that wants to build up stakes and crash them down but cannot put weight into any of it that actually matters. Strode held a grudge against a man for 40 years who killed some people she knew and tried to kill her but offs his daughter and she then decides to let it go* and "liberate herself from fear and rage and embrace life." we could have had a whole thing where she felt so distant from Karen that love for her flew out the window decades ago when she started growing into the spiteful, hate-fueled self-identifying perpetual victim who has been "praying for the day" Michael is released so she can have her cake decorated with the icing of a self-promised catharsis. we never got any real moments between mother and daughter and i still have trouble reading that she's even her daughter (being adopted would've also been interesting and kind of funny if she was going to end up getting killed anyway to then get disregarded).

a friend of mine has been waiting (hopefully not with baited breath girl, i rarely can get on modern horror's level) to see my thoughts and feelings towards these flicks and she put it pretty accurately -- because hey, these movies are all pretty boring -- by saying that these are "not amazing, barely even good." put that shit on whatever boutique label will eventually get the rights to redistribute a new boxset on bluray/4K/8K/VHS/i dont fucking know anymore, CED?

but i have good news for z-list stephen king film fans, the Mangler makes a pivotal appearance in a sequence i would immediately point to as the polar opposite of the sequence from SPIDER-MAN 2 "careful, he's a hero" jesus metaphor.

in the end these things are pretty much as dull as the brunt of b-house's catalog but it's been Officially Licensed® so this was a bigger deal. shoulda went to space.

*early on there's a montage (lol) of Laurie taking care of her granddaughter with voiceover of a book she's writing and she gives Allyson a necklace with both of her dead parents' wedding rings on it. as Allyson looks like she's about to start crying Laurie just pats her shoulder and gets up to walk away towards the kitchen. like this bitch has always been distant and you never wanted to spend time on that? fuck you David.