This was written as a companion piece to a recent episode of Measuring Flicks on Halloween Ends (2022). It’s a Patreon-exclusive, but for a couple of bucks, you can check it out here. There’s loads of bonus episodes and film reviews over there, but this one was too much fun not to share here as well.
Wow. Just…wow.
Over the past several months, I've been getting emails, DMs, and even texts and phone calls from fans of the show, and friends of mine, all saying essentially the same thing:
"Have you watched Halloween Ends yet? Call me when you do. IT FUCKING SUCKS."
Universally. Nobody chirping in with a "Oh, it's not as bad as everyone says," or, "The cinematography's quite lovely." Just "You're going to hate it," over and over again.
Which makes it sort of difficult, after awhile, to go in with an open mind for a deep-dive episode analyzing and responding to the film. I tried mightily, when I sat down to spin this for the show. I thought I might even pull it off--I do (infamously) love almost everything, after all.
I poured a beer. I hit play.
There are some interesting ideas in the first 15 or 20 minutes of this movie.
This is the worst film in the Halloween franchise, without a doubt.
But in fairness, I wonder if it wasn't doomed from the start, locked in by its very title and position as the closer in yet another unnecessary Cash-Cow Trilogy.
Just as Romero's Night of the Living Dead changed so much in the horror genre forever--some for the better, much for the worse--Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings redefined modern genre filmmaking in much the same Monkey's Paw sort of way: fantastic strides forward in visual effects; genre content, and especially fantasy approached in the mainstream with more serious consideration--elves and ents elevated to, unquestionably, cinematic art, rather than relegated to the quirky, animated dustbin which was once their purview. It seemed a new age of epic fantasy and artistically serious, atmospheric genre work was dawning.
But we were all of us deceived.
The main lesson the film industry seems to have extracted from the success of Jackson's fabulous Trilogy was that when you split a single story into three separate films, you can suck three box offices and three home video revenues and three merchandising runs out one idea. Three video games. Three credits for executive producers. Three tax write-offs. And One Thing To Rule Them All:
The All-Powerful Buck.
The Hobbit, as a book, is barely half the length of The Lord of the Rings (the first book in Tolkien's Rings trilogy). It might have been perfect at an Extended Edition 3:48:00, with plenty of room for songs and barrels in rivers and gorgeous scenery and all the rest. But then there'd only be the one blu-ray to sell. The one ticket. So we got three fluffy, padded, sloppy films, three video games, and a boxed set scarcely worth watching once.
The reason the Lord of the Rings Trilogy works is that the original source material is itself a trilogy. One of the most famously well-written and structured trilogies in the history of storytelling. Three films, each adapting one book, to tell a three-part story, with each individual film receiving deep thought and attention from both the original author and the hardcore fans who came along years later to adapt the work.
Just look at The Matrix. The Matrix is one great movie, well thought-out, incredibly well-written, tightly structured and shot, genre re-defining...and then three "Oh my god did you see how much money we just made do it again do it again" in the wake of the first one. One idea, spread like butter over too much bread, until we don't want any more. The proof in this example is the absolutely brilliant animated compilation film The Animatrix: nine directors each tell their own short, unique stories set in the world of The Matrix using their own storytelling sensibilities, their own animation styles, their own creative energies. Tightly contained stories structured carefully to fit within the time constraints of a short. An excellent entry into The Matrix franchise, because rather than trying to stretch something out into more than it is, everything is pared back to exactly what it is, at its best and most concise.
Name another slasher film franchise that is, or contains, a Trilogy. (Human Centipede isn’t really a slasher—more a body horror or shocksploitation—and even though the second one is the best of the three, the third should be illustrative enough of what I'm talking about.)
Halloween II is a direct sequel to Halloween, and it's great. But then Tommy Lee Wallace came along and made one about Stonehenge and killer toys in Halloween III. Even later in the series, when there are undercurrents and subplots flowing from film to film (the Cult of Thorn thing, for example), the films feel as though they stand alone, with recurring characters and side quests appearing from the wings and disappearing again through trapdoors, leaving the essential elements to be formed and re-formed by different writers, directors, and creative visions, film after film. The feeling is much more akin to single issue comic books or collected trade paperbacks: a creative team picks up a certain set of toys in a certain sandbox, shows you all the cool and interesting things they can do with them, then puts them down again and goes off to do something else, leaving them to be reconfigured and re-imagined by the next creative team to pick them up and make them run and jump and laugh and love and kill.
Oftentimes, the Trilogy format leaves me feeling like there was one amazing idea, and then the studio scooped the afterbirth of that brilliant first film into two jars for general release over the couple years after the first.
With the David Gordon Green Halloween Trilogy, there's almost a sense, structurally, that he was taking the franchise back to the beginning: Halloween is, essentially, a reimagining of Halloween (1978), disguised as a sequel. It's beautiful, powerful, visceral, artistic--one of the better entries into the franchise, in my opinion. Halloween Kills is a direct sequel to Halloween (2018), as Halloween II is to the original. Both sequels spend large amounts of time in a hospital, and both follow Michael's killing spree through Haddonfield as the town at large begins to realize what's happening.
But it's here that the Gordon Green update stumbles, where the original Halloween II doesn't (the Rick Rosenthal-directed 1981 version has both one of the most disturbing deaths in the entire franchise and one of the best stuntman burns either Karl or I have ever seen; if Patreon films were eligible for Quill and Filmies awards, the Halloween II burn would have won stunt of the year, without a doubt). Halloween Kills feels like two movies mashed into the space of one. On one hand, it's a movie absolutely wall-to-wall with obscenely brutal deaths--which is its strongest point. This is why we watch a slasher instead of a haunted house flick or an exorcism movie. Inventive and upsetting murders are one of the subgenre's uncomfortable pleasures, without a doubt, and Kills definitely delivers. Only...
Well…why is Michael Meyers suddenly fighting crowds of people in full-blown action movie sequences? He starts off by killing a baker's dozen of firefighters, then moves on to a carful of would-be vigilantes, and wraps up the film by taking on, oh, twenty or thirty citizens of Haddonfield all armed to the teeth (a fight which starts with Michael totally maskless and almost fully-lit). I joked in the fake trailer for the Measuring Flicks episode on Halloween Kills that Michael was secretly John Wick, but the bleedthrough from high-octane action flicks is palpable in the presentation of violence in Kills. It's revealing that despite the phenomenally high body count racked up in the crowd-killing sequences, the most memorable and affecting deaths in the movie are the two couples that are murdered in their homes, and Michael's brutal murder of Cameron near the end.
That's just the kills, though. Halloween Kills dies by its plot and its writing. Both Kills and Ends are plagued by turgid, purple, throbbing veins of overwriting throughout, the thrust of most of which being hammy, preachy social commentary about how fear divides us and how hatred makes evil stronger and so on and so forth. The madness of crowds. The power of therapy. Which...I mean, I guess that's all fine, but why cram it all into weird, stilted voiceovers and clunky, awkward dialogue?
"Evil dies tonight?" Really?
Halloween Ends continues the structural rehashing of the original franchise films in numerous ways. Just as in Halloween III, Michael Meyers is barely present; both films feel like they were originally written to be standalone features all their own, and then were hurriedly shoehorned into the Halloween box to buy a little cheap cachet and built-in audience. Halloween III became a cult classic and a delight because it barely has any Halloween in it at all--it essentially is an unrelated film with a few mentions of Haddonfield and a flash of a mask on a dark screen--and so maintains its inherent internal story structure.
Halloween Ends feels so bent and twisted to fit into the Halloween body cast that it's died from internal injuries, despite roll after gauzy roll of nods and nostalgia wrapped all over the fucking thing to remind us all how much we love it:
Corey returns to the house where he killed his first victim (albeit accidentally), as Michael always returns to and sleeps in his childhood home (where he murdered his sister as a child).
Corey standing outside Laurie's window, partially-obscured by a bush, as Michael did by the clotheslines in '78.
Corey appears out of nowhere behind Laurie, as Michael does in...
Wait a minute.
Corey? Who the hell is Corey?
You don't even have to look very hard to see that the cornucopia of nostalgia employed in Halloween Ends has been weaponized and applied not to the film as a whole, or to Michael (who in this film is so weakened and diminished a figure as to be unrecognizable), but to Corey Cunningham, our Gen Z Michael Meyers, in order to legitimize his weird primacy in the film.
We get into it in much more depth in this episode, but my biggest issue with Halloween Ends is this: it doesn't need to be a Halloween story. It isn't, at its core. With the exception of the end of the movie (I won't spoil it, but let's say the last ten or fifteen minutes), this is essentially just the tragic story of a kid who caught a bad break being bullied and ostracized by a small town until he snaps and goes on a killing spree. It's the story of a school shooter, or a mass shooter, or a generic serial killer. Michael Meyers is not a crucial part of this story. Nor is Laurie Strode, or anyone else we've met in any Halloween film outside the trilogy (since most of the OG characters we had left were killed off early and cheap in Kills anyway).
You could remove Michael Meyers and Laurie Strode from this film entirely, replacing them with a generic, aging murderer and a generic survivor of violent crime, and you would get almost exactly the same film.
Halloween Ends is, essentially, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), with a Michael Meyers mask on. Or Stephen King's Apt Pupil, only the kid's mom is Laurie Strode for no reason. If you make a narrow-scope science fiction film set on a distant world, and Darth Vader walks through a couple of scenes, have you made a Star Wars movie, or are you just trying to grab a couple extra handfuls of Star Wars money?