HALLOWEEN ENDS

HALLOWEEN ENDS is allegedly the last time that Jamie Lee Curtis, as Laurie Strode, will face the mad killer Michael Myers, but this time there’s another possible killer on the loose, and he happens to be dating her orphaned granddaughter! HALLOWEEN ENDS suffers from some bad, choppy, unexciting direction and has lots of bloody, sometimes gruesome violence and abundant, gratuitous foul language, but it has some good twists and warns viewers about the ubiquity of horrible evil and how it can pervade people’s inner being.

The movie opens four years after Michael Myers slaughtered a bunch of people in Haddonfield, Illinois in 2018, the 40th anniversary of his first escape from the mental institution. Michael just vanished after the last incident, even though he seemed to grow stronger and stronger with each person he killed.

Meanwhile, Michael’s nemesis, Laurie Strode, has decided to move on with her life and not worry about Michael’s possible return. She’s always watchful, however, and is writing a book about her experiences to help the public deal with such evils as Michael Myers.

Meanwhile, Laurie’s granddaughter, Allyson, a nurse, runs into a young mechanic named Corey Cunningham. Three years ago, Corey was a college engineering student. While babysitting a bratty young boy on Halloween night, Corey accidentally knocked the boy down three flights of a spiral staircase when Corey busted down the door to the attic after the boy locked Corey. Since then, the community has ostracized Corey. Also, Corey’s mother is a screechy harridan, though Corey’s stepfather treats Corey very nicely.

Allyson starts falling for Corey. Reluctantly, he agrees to go to a Halloween party with her. She wears a cheap cat mask and gives Corey a cheap scarecrow mask. They seem to have a good time at the party. However, when Allyson seems to abandon him and Corey is confronted by the mother of the young boy who died, Corey thinks Allyson doesn’t really care about him. He angrily leaves the party.

Walking home across a small bridge, Corey is confronted by four teenagers, two boys and two girls, who harassed him the other day at a convenience store when he refused to buy beer for them. The lead bully disingenuously offers to make peace with Corey, but Corey ignores him. A fight ensues, and the lead bully ends up tossing Corey over the side of the bridge. The bully says it was an accident, but the other teenagers think he pushed Corey. Whatever, the four teenagers take off in the lead bully’s car.

Under the bridge, someone drags Corey’s body into the nearby sewer tunnel. Corey wakes up the next day and discovers that a weakened Michael Meyers has been lurking in the storm drain. Michael stares into Corey’s eyes and finds a kindred spirit.

Later, Corey and Allyson make up. Corey starts talking to her about getting away from Haddonfield, perhaps together. However, after Allyson introduces Corey to her grandmother, Laurie warns Allyson that she sees evil lurking in Corey’s eyes. She warns her granddaughter about the relationship, but Allyson thinks Laurie’s just being paranoid.

Will Laurie’s suspicions about Corey turn out to be right?

Within the conventions of the horror movie, the characters are often faced with a potentially fearful situation where the “normal” order of things is disrupted. This disruption can be graphed by “binary oppositions,” i.e., Life/Death, Human/Animal, and Civilization/Jungle. For example, Dracula upsets the boundary between Life and Death because he is both alive and dead, the Wolf Man confuses the line between the Human and the Animal because he is both a wolf and a man, and King Kong upsets the boundary between Civilization and the Jungle when he escapes the theater to wreak havoc on New York City. Faced with this chaos, the characters must try to restore order by repairing the balance, frequently by killing or banishing the monster responsible for the disruption. Once the chaotic monster is destroyed or banished, the characters are then able to begin their lives anew. In many modern horror movies, however, the monster sadly is often victorious. This is different from past horror movies during the Golden Age of Hollywood, where the monster may return for a sequel after meeting an apparent death. For example, in SON OF FRANKENSTEIN from 1939 (the last time Boris Karloff played Frankenstein’s monster), the monster survived the explosion from the previous movie, THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, and a mad shepherd named Ygor finds him lurking around the sulfur pits created by the explosion.

The HALLOWEEN movies, originally created by John Carpenter (ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and STARMAN) and Debra Hill, envision a monster who straddles the Natural World and the Supernatural World. Thus, Michael Myers is a live man with a real family, but he also has unnatural strength and is called a “boogeyman.” HALLOWEEN ENDS is the third in a new trilogy of movies featuring Jamie Lee Curtis’ character. In the previous movie, HALLOWEEN KILLS, Michael Meyers kills nearly all the people heroically trying to stop him, except for Laurie and her granddaughter, Allyson. So, the second movie in the trilogy ends with no victory over the monster at all. Also, the ending is capped by a corny proclamation during the climax that Michael is evil incarnate and that he can’t be killed or destroyed but becomes more powerful the more people he kills.

In HALLOWEEN ENDS, however, Laurie’s discussion about evil is more thoughtful and less occult, although her granddaughter, Allyson, appears to be given a Tarot reading by another woman in one scene. For example, Laurie warns the potential readers in a book she’s writing that evil is ubiquitous and can pervade people’s inner being. Her comments about evil and human nature, coupled with the movie’s ending, are biblical, but in a light, undeveloped way, because neither she nor the movie presents any spiritual solutions to this problem of evil. The movie also never explicitly mentions God or Jesus.

Finally, despite some good twists, HALLOWEEN ENDS suffers from some bad, choppy, unexciting direction, especially in the first half. HALLOWEEN ENDS also has lots of bloody, sometimes gruesome violence and gratuitous foul language. So, while HALLOWEEN ENDS might not be abhorrent like the previous movie, MOVIEGUIDE® believes it’s excessive and unacceptable.