 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 | 🎙️ EPISODE 591: 11.04.22 I famously (famously?) ended my review of last year's pandemic-delayed and very very bad Halloween Kills : I have no real stake in this game, either. I'm no Halloween franchise mega-fan (I wouldn't even call myself a casual one). I wonder what most of them thought of this. I do WANT to say that, because this was such a failure, it negates the proposed Halloween Ends which starts filming in January and is supposedly due October 2022, but honestly I think I am weirdly more interested in that now because I just need to see how they TRY to solve this thing. And that's at least something, right? |
Right out of the gates, conventions and tropes are turned on their heads: the babysitter is a dude; the menacing terrible teens are band geeks, not jocks. This is a movie that never reaches for the easy choices. The biggest and most obvious one being: making somebody else the killer. This guy, the aforementioned male babysitter who becomes the town pariah after a little kid accidentally dies on his watch, is played by Rohan Campbell, a 25-year-old who's been around for a little while but was new to me. And he's excellent as the complicated Corey Cunningham. Corey is good and pure in his heart, but that inciting incident (kind of a lovely pre opening credits short film in its own right, btw) coupled with the fact that the Michael Meyers obsessed town of Haddonfield has seemingly been infected with an a evil, a flippant negative force that's turned most people into horrible assholes, has broken him.
This film is patient, chewing up about 45 minutes before the fateful encounter when Corey meets Michael. The Entity lets him live and in the process transfers some of his evil powers into this new young apprentice. Corey's eyes turn black. He's ready to kill. Another convention is flipped as all of his victims are people the audience hates. Every murder in this, at the hands of both Corey and Michael, feels almost like revenge. Gone are the random innocents so famously preyed upon in this series. Not only did David Gordon Green decide to introduce a new character and make him the main protagonist, he also made that character the murderer, and one we're sort of rooting for taboot! It's so bold and inventive. It wasn't that Halloween Kills didn't take any risks; it's like that movie didn't even know what a risk was. This was so unexpected and such a pleasant surprise.
Until the final fifteen minutes.
Who knows why we got the ending we got. It's muddled and forced and so plainly catering to an audience it didn't give a shit about for the previous 90 minutes. But Laurie (and daughter) are the heroes. Not only do they finally kill Michael, but they parade him down to the junkyard with the entire town and throw his body into a massive meatgrinder. The arc of Corey Cunningham (a legitimately great character) comes crashing down in a mess of sad trombone uncertainty (he kills himself? but then Michael kills him??). This is still so undeniably good for most of the run-time that it's getting a good score and a hearty recommendation for me. But goddam it, they were so close to making a true classic and an almost perfect ending to the series.
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 590 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 592 ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 590 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 592 ⫸
Halloween Ends is a 2022 American slasher film that is the sequel to Halloween Kills (2021), the thirteenth installment in the Halloween franchise, and the final film in the trilogy of sequels that started with the 2018 film, which directly follows the 1978 film. Directed by David Gordon Green and written by Green, Danny McBride, Paul Brad Logan, and Chris Bernier, the film stars Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell, Will Patton, Kyle Richards, and James Jude Courtney. The film revolves around Corey Cunningham, a young man who falls in love with Laurie Strode's granddaughter while a series of events, including crossing paths with Michael Myers, upend his life and render him a murderous outcast. It was released on October 14, 2022.
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