Franchises: Halloween. Halloween Ends (2022)

When you look at the Blumhouse Halloween trilogy in retrospect, it's interesting how much history repeated itself, specifically in relation to the franchise's first three movies. First, we had Halloween 2018, a fairly low budget flick that, despite the legacy of the IP, really didn't have much to lose, but ended up becoming a massive hit and was well-received by both fans and most critics. Then, three years later, we got Halloween Kills, which, like Halloween II, was seen by many as a needless direct sequel that upped the body count and gore, and largely involved a hospital. Despite it not getting as many good critical notices, and fans being more split, it still proved a considerable financial hit. And then, the very next year, comes Halloween Ends, which, like Halloween III: Season of the Witch, went in a direction that few were expecting. While not as drastic a diversion as that film, or even as different from the status quo as Rob Zombie's second one, what people were expecting from the hype and especially the marketing, which was very misleading, was not at all what they got. And many were not happy about it, with some even calling it one of the franchise's worst. So the question, as usual, is what do I personally think about Halloween Ends? Well, first off, as much as I'm always up for seeing Michael Myers again, I wasn't chomping at the bit for Ends when it came around, for several reasons. One, though I enjoyed Halloween 2018, despite the issues I had with it, and did have some gory fun with Halloween Kills, I thought the latter was a fairly big letdown. Second, after both H20 back in 1998 and Halloween 2018 proclaimed themselves to be the final confrontation between Laurie and Michael, only for each to renege on it, I looked at both the title and marketing for Ends with something of a cynical eye, like, "Really? This time, it's the final battle?" I didn't doubt that this would be the last in this timeline, as well as likely the last to be directed by David Gordon Green and to star Jamie Lee Curtis, but I just looked at the trailer, with its hyperbolic proclamations that, "THIS HALLOWEEN, THEIR SAGA ENDS," and thought, "Eh." I was still going to see it, obviously, but with very tempered expectations.

In the months leading up to October of 2022, I began hearing rumors that Ends took a very different turn, with some comparing it to Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning, saying it involved a copycat killer, while others said that Michael himself was barely in it. Then, when October arrived and the movie was released, I saw Cody Leach's TikTok "first impressions" video, where he sees a movie in the theater, then comes back out and quickly gives his thoughts, on his YouTube channel and he said, "Whoo-hoo-hoo, motherfuckers about to be mad as hell!" And then, when he dropped his spoiler-free video review, the thumbnail had him making an, "Oh, crap!" face, with the caption, "You're Gonna Be MAD!!!" Shortly afterward, I went to ScareFest Weekend in Lexington, Kentucky for the first time in many years and the people I talked to who had seen it were not happy (when I told one guy that I hadn't seen it yet, he told me I wasn't missing much). It was kind of disappointing to hear that the grand finale to this trilogy had proved to be so divisive, and the reason for this that I gleaned from Cody's spoiler-free review was that Michael Myers was, indeed, not in it very much, and that the big confrontation between him and Laurie, the very focus of the marketing, happened near the end and was so short that it came off like an afterthought. That said, he still enjoyed it more than most, but talso found both Halloween 2018, which he ranked slightly higher, and Halloween Kills to be very disappointing, so I wasn't able to gauge what I would think about it from that. Still, like always, I was going to reserve judgment until I saw it for myself, which I finally did the first weekend in November. I saw it that late due to circumstance, and as a result, I and the person with me were the only ones in that theater, which was actually the second time that happened (the first time was The Meg, which we saw a full month after it was first released).

So, do I understand why so many people don't like Halloween Ends? Yes. Does it subvert expectations in just about every way possible? Very much so. Do I dislike it as a result? Surprisingly, no. While it's probably never going to make it into my personal top five of the franchise, and it does still have some issues, I find this to be a better movie than Halloween Kills. It's slower-paced and not nearly as gory as that movie, but I think it tells its story better and is much more focused. I personally like the character of Corey Cunningham, I think Jamie Lee Curtis gives one of her best performance as Laurie, I do still get a thrill out of her final confrontation with Michael, as abbreviated as it is, and when I saw it in the theater, the ending rather affected me. And above all else, I can appreciate and respect the filmmakers' decision to try something different, feeling that we got plenty of Michael slicing and dicing people in the previous two movies, especially Kills. Now, as Cody Leach suggested, it might've been a better idea to do this as a sort of spinoff rather than in the movie that was supposed to bring the story home, and I also feel that the approach they took with it harmed the point they were trying to make, but I like that the risk was taken, even if it's still not perfect.

Haddonfield, Illinois. Halloween night, 2019. A year after Michael Myers' horrific killing spree and subsequent disappearance, 21-year old Corey Cunningham arrives at the Allen household to babysit young Jeremy while his parents are attending a company party. Later that evening, Jeremy, who proves to be a little brat, pulls a prank and tricks Corey into the attic, locking him in. Just as Jeremy's parents arrive, Corey kicks the door open, sending Jeremy falling over a stair railing to his death. Three years later, in late October of 2022, Laurie Strode is now living with her orphaned granddaughter, Allyson, and writing a memoir about both her experiences and Haddonfield's as a whole, with Corey's accidental killing of Jeremy being one of many tragedies that have plagued the town since 2018. As for Corey himself, while Jeremy's death was officially ruled an accident, he's now become a pariah among the townspeople. His hopes for college dashed, he's now working at his stepfather's salvage yard. On his way home from work one day, he stops at a gas station and refuses to loan a group of high-schoolers some money. He's then mocked by them for what he did, causing him to injure himself out of rage. Laurie, who witnesses this, helps him get back at the bullies and takes him to the doctor's office, where Allyson works. She helps treat his injury and later takes her car to the salvage yard under the pretense of wanting to see him. She invites him to a Halloween party at a local bar, where he does have fun, until he runs into Jeremy's mother, who angrily accuses him of intentionally killing her son. Storming out of the bar, and rebuffing Allyson when she tries to comfort him, Corey runs into the same bullies on his way home, resulting in a fight that sends him falling over the edge of a bridge. As he lies unconscious, he's dragged into the sewers, where he awakens the next day. Trying to escape, he encounters Michael Myers, with something passing between them before he escapes his grasp. Running out of the sewers, Corey is threatened by a deranged homeless man and murders him. Now profoundly changed, he reunites with Allyson and their relationship deepens, with him encouraging her to come with him and leave Haddonfield behind... and burn it down on their way out. Meanwhile, Laurie begins to feel that Corey has become tainted with Michael's evil, and Corey, by beginning his own murder spree, reignites Michael's bloodlust, sending him on a collision course with Laurie.

Paul Brad Logan

Feeling that he and Danny McBride should bring in new writing partners for each film, David Gordon Green brought in writers Paul Brad Logan and Chris Bernier to help write Halloween Ends, at the same time he and McBride were working with Scott Teems on Kills. Like Teems and Jeff Fradley before them, these were writers whom Green and McBride had known for a while, with Logan having written Green's 2014 film Manglehorn (he would also write the novelization for Ends), while Bernier had worked with him on some films that ultimately didn't get made. Like before, they intended on making Ends as different from its predecessors as possible, intending for this one to be both a love story and an exploration of the lasting effect that both Michael Myers and Laurie Strode have had on Haddonfield, and how another person can become a psychopath like Michael. If nothing else, they were aware that this approach was a major risk, with Jamie Lee Curtis herself saying in an interview that it would, "Make people very angry," although John Carpenter complimented them for keeping things from becoming repetitive.

I'm not sure, but I think I remember glancing at a link to an article where David Gordon Green said he felt that he kind of blew it with Halloween Ends. Like I've said, it was definitely a gamble, and it didn't quite pay off, as Ends ended up being the least commercially successful entry in the trilogy (although it's still the third highest grossing film in the entire franchise, right behind its two predecessors), but I can still respect the thinking behind it and the decision to go ahead with it, despite the risk. After both he and Blumhouse left Halloween afterward, the two of them tried to make lightning strike twice with another dormant horror franchise, with The Exorcist: Believer, which Green not only directed but co-wrote with Danny McBride and Scott Teems. As with Halloween, they planned on making this the first in a trilogy, but while the movie did well enough commercially, the lambasting it got from both critics and fans led the studio to put the kibosh on the trilogy, with Green walking away from the franchise altogether. Never say never, but I think it's doubtful we'll see him behind another major horror franchise.

While I never had a problem with Jamie Lee Curtis' actual acting, I felt that the portrayal of Laurie Strode in the past two movies, especially the first one, went way too hard in trying to depict her paranoia and PTSD over what happened to her in 1978. But in this one, I think she's one of its biggest strengths, as we can see how, in the four years since Michael's last rampage, which killed her daughter, she's attempted to move on with her life and not let fear control her. She and Allyson are living together, she's writing a memoir to make sense of everything and put it behind her, and is clearly in a much better place, mentally. She's still awkward when it comes to performing some typical everyday tasks, as she leaves a pumpkin pie in the oven too long, but for the most part, she's doing well, having stopped drinking and seen a therapist, and has become the epitome of a cool older lady and grandmother. One of her first scenes is helping Corey Cunningham get to his feet after he's bullied at the gas station and, taking out a large knife, asks him, "So, do you wanna do it, or do you want me to?", referring to the bullies' car tires. She then takes him to Allyson's doctor's office, clearly intending to hook the two of them up, and later at home, she's talking about it to her and Lindsey Wallace while she's carving a jack-o-lantern, declaring, "You know, you need to find someone that can let go. That makes you want to rip off your shirt and show grief your fucking tits and say, 'You know what? Let's go!'," while giving two middle fingers as she's holding pumpkin innards in her hands. Shortly afterward, she runs into Frank Hawkins at a grocery store as he's buying some meat and comments, "Jesus, Frank, have you ever heard of a vegetable," before tossing him a can and saying, "They're good for you." And when Allyson is frustrated after Corey storms out of the Halloween party when he's confronted by Jeremy's mother, Laurie finds her angrily smacking the microwave in the kitchen. She tries to calm her down, when she angrily yells, "Just let me be mad! Why can't I be mad?!", and Laurie calmly answers, "You can. You can be mad. You can be very, very mad, and you can smash things. Just be careful. It's addictive." That calms Allyson to the point where she admits that she does like Corey.

However, not everything is great for Laurie, as we see that she's something of a pariah in town herself, due to her connection to Michael. Not only do people like the bullies mock her for it, but when she's leaving the grocery store, she's accosted by Sondra Dickerson's sister, who blames Michael's attack on her and Phil on Laurie herself, saying, "You tempted and you provoked that man, when you shoulda left him alone." This a sentiment that Willy the Kid, Haddonfield's local DJ, who also happens to be a massive prick,

shares when he confronts Allyson and Corey at one point. And Corey's mother, Joan, partly blames Laurie for his becoming an outcast, saying, "Because your boogeyman disappeared, they needed a new one." Speaking of Corey, while Laurie initially feels sympathy for him due to their both not being very popular in town, she begins to notice the disquieting change in him after his first encounter with Michael. She later tells Lindsey that she saw the same sort of darkness in Michael's eyes, when she saw his face in

1978, in Corey's, a feeling that's confirmed when she meets Jeremy's father, Roger, and he talks about a frightening interaction he had with Corey recently. She tracks Corey down to the condemned Allen house, where he's been staying, and tells him that she knows what's happening to him: "You know, there are two kinds of evil. There's the evil that exists as an external force that threatens the well-being of the tribe. Survival depends on understanding and awareness and fear of physical threat to our daily lives. The other kind of evil lives inside us, like a

sickness, or an infection. It's more dangerous because we may not know we're infected." She goes on to tell him that she can relate to him, saying, "We're both fucked up," then adds, "I wanna help you, Corey. Let me help you, or let me find help for you. You can't have her. Allyson is not equipped for this relationship, and I will not let her get hurt." But when Corey refuses to stay away from Allyson, saying that it's Laurie's fault because she's the one who invited him into Allyson's life, Laurie leaves and tries to warn her granddaughter. But by this point, Corey has poisoned Allyson's mind against her, saying that Laurie wants to kill him, and she attempts to leave with him.

Seemingly distraught over this to the point of suicide, Laurie reports one to the police, then feigns shooting herself in order to lure in Corey, who's now murdered a number of people while disguised as Michael. There's an awesome moment where he enters her study, only to find her pointing the gun at him, asking, "Did you really think I'd kill myself?", before shooting him several times and sending him crashing through the stair railing. Confronting him and daring him to kill her, she's shocked when he instead stabs

himself in the neck. And she, very stupidly, pulls the knife out, just as Allyson comes in. Naturally, she thinks Laurie made good on a supposed promise to kill Corey and leaves, resulting in Laurie becoming genuinely suicidal. Then, on top of that, Michael himself shows up, regains the mask and knife that Corey took from him, and Laurie has to face her personal demon for the final time. It proves to be a brutal fight, with both of them determined to finally kill each other, and though Laurie manages to subdue

Michael by basically crucifying him to the kitchen island, unmasks him, and slits his throat, he frees one hand and grabs her by the neck. As he attempts to choke her to death, Laurie has reached a point where she's content to just stand there and let him do it, as flashes from Halloween night in 1978 and 2018 run through her mind the harder he grips. When I saw this in the theater, I thought they were both going to die together, and I would've been fine with that, as downbeat as it would've been. But instead, Allyson, having learned the truth about Corey, comes running

back in, frees her from Michael's grasp, and helps her kill him. By the end of the movie, Laurie has found peace of mind, finishes her memoir, and looks prone to rekindle her relationship with Hawkins, which is definitely the kind of ending she deserved (I think either this or the scenario of her dying in this manner would've been infinitely better than how she went out in Halloween: Resurrection).

After, like Jamie Lee Curtis, being almost totally side-lined in the previous movie, Andi Matichak gets a lot more to play with in her final performance as Allyson. Like her grandmother, Allyson is trying to move on from what happened to her four years before, but while she's not as paranoid and reclusive as Laurie was for forty years, she's not doing too well, either. Namely, she's stuck in a lousy job as a nurse at the local doctor's office, with a boss who often belittles and berates her, and a slutty chatterbox of a co-worker who gets a promotion that Allyson was counting on because she's sleeping with the doctor. She also dated a local police officer at one point and, while it's never said exactly why they broke up, given how he tends to annoy her, it's a good guess that he was a possessive jerk. Allyson later admits that, after Michael murdered her parents, she wanted to leave Haddonfield and everything behind, but didn't want her grandmother to be alone, so she stayed for her sake. And while the two of them are clearly much closer than they were before, it's obvious that Allyson does feel trapped. Things start to change when she's introduced to Corey Cunningham, whom she takes a liking to and feels she can relate to, given what the people of Haddonfield tend to say about her. But while her inviting him to a Halloween party ultimately ends disastrously when he's confronted by Jeremy Allen's mother, Corey comes back to talk to Allyson after his fateful encounter with Michael. He takes her to the Allen family's old house and explains what happened in 2019, and she, in turn, tells him that she not only knows the story but has felt like she personally knew him before Laurie introduced them. He then starts to encourage her to do what she thought about before and, not only leave it all behind but, "Burn it to the ground." Things really start to take a turn in that direction when Doug harasses them at a diner and, after Corey, unbeknownst to her, has Doug murdered, he and Allyson sleep together that night. And when she gets sick off all the awful people in Haddonfield that she has to deal with, she agrees to leave with Corey.

The third act where I kind of turn on Allyson, specifically in this confrontation she has with Laurie when she's packing to run away with Corey. Granted, he lied to her about Laurie threatening him, but the way she absolutely refuses to listen when Laurie tries to warn her, throws it in her face when she tries to say that she sees in Corey what she saw in Michael, and says that she wants to either finish off or let Michael kill her, or wants everybody to be as miserable as her, is really frustrating. And then, when Laurie says,

"You have to believe me," Allyson says, "Believe you? You want me to believe you? Because of the hysteria that you caused, when I trusted you, my friends are dead. My parents are dead. You're the one that's capable of fucking harm!" Um, what the fuck? Now she's blaming Laurie for what Michael did, like just about everyone else in town? Then, she goes to meet up with Corey, but is unable to find him, unaware that he's out murdering every one of his personal enemies. She even goes to his house, right

after he's murdered his mother, but obviously gets no answer at the door. And then, she just happens to drive back home to find Corey seemingly dead on the ground by Laurie's hands. This turns her completely against her grandmother and she leaves, right before Michael shows up to finish Laurie off. However, when she sees the radio station in flames, and gets a call from Frank Hawkins about Laurie having reported a suicide, Allyson realizes something is wrong and rushes back home in time to save her from dying and help kill Michael. Afterward, they reconcile and Allyson leaves Haddonfield, but while I should be happy, the awful stuff she said to Laurie really soured me on her, and it sucks that it happened so close to the end.

I know a lot of people hate him, but I find the character of Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) to be kind of interesting. He starts out as a somewhat nerdy but, otherwise, average and good-natured kid who's looking ahead to college. Unfortunately, despite all of his good intentions, he gets stuck with having to babysit Jeremy Allen, a little brat who mouths off to and disrespects him constantly once his parents leave. And then, Jeremy pulls a prank that leads to Corey accidentally killing him just as his parents arrive home, leading him to be charged with aggravated manslaughter. Though he's ultimately acquitted, he finds himself treated as a pariah by most in town, who call him everything from a child killer to a pedophile. He also runs afoul of local teenage thugs who mock, harass, and literally push him around every chance they get. His chances of college dashed, he now works at his stepfather's salvage yard, and when he's at home, he has to put up with his overbearing, possessive mother, Joan. Though he still comes off as fairly meek and unlikely to fight back, there's clearly a rage bubbling within him, as when the teenagers, particularly Terry Tramer, first corner and bully him, he breaks a glass bottle in his hand. Thus, he's more than willing to slash their tires when Laurie presents him with the means to do so. She then takes him to see Allyson at the doctor's office, where she treats his hand, and he encourages her to stand up to the dickish and sleazy Dr. Mathis, as well as asks her if it's worth it to put up with such crap for a job promotion. They make small talk, with Allyson asking him to fix her car, and she also asks him out, eventually inviting him to a Halloween party, which she originally wasn't even planning on going to since she didn't want to go alone. Though initially hesitant, he does end up going and has a good time, until he runs into Jeremy's mother, who accuses him of murdering Jeremy. Distraught and frustrated, he runs out of the bar, and when Allyson chases after him, telling her that she understands how he feels, he tells her that she doesn't and that she should spare herself the heartache of being with him. And then, on the way home, the bullies harass him again, with Corey, who saw how abusive Terry's father is to him when they were at the salvage yard, bringing that up to explain why he's such a douche. An ensuing struggle leads to Corey falling over the side of a bridge and landing near a drainage pipe leading into the sewer system. While he's unconscious, Michael pulls him inside, which is when everything begins to change.

After a literal face-to-face encounter with Michael when he awakens, only for him to escape his grasp and the sewer system, Corey finds himself profoundly changed. He's immediately accosted and threatened by a deranged homeless man, who pulls a knife on him and demands he go back in there and take Michael's mask; in retaliation, Corey overpowers and stabs him to death and then, clearly shocked by what he's done, runs back home, heads to the bathroom, strips off his clothes, cleans himself up, and looks at

himself in the mirror. That's when it becomes very clear that Corey is not the same person he was before. He goes to make up with Allyson, and the two of them take a small walk, during which he takes her to the Allen family's old house, shows her the spot where Jeremy fell to his death, and talks about what happened. Then, at a diner that night, she tells him about how she wanted to leave Haddonfield following the killing spree in 2018 and when she explains why she didn't, Corey tells her that she needs to break

away from her grandmother and stop trying to protect her from her own demons. He also tells her that he's not afraid of the townspeople and what they think anymore, and when Doug comes over and harasses Allyson, Corey stands up to him in a very threatening manner, managing to back him off. Afterward, as he's comforting her, Allyson says, "Just burn it all to the ground," and Corey adds, "I'll light the match." He takes her home, only to then find that Doug is following him. He lures him into the drainage pipe and sewer system, where he's attacked by Michael.

Though Doug is initially able to take on the weakened and older Michael, Corey subdues him and tells Michael to, "Show me how to do it." With Corey's urging, Michael stabs Doug to death and seems to regain his strength and killer instinct in the process. And while Corey is, initially, still terrified at what's happening to him, running back to Allyson and telling her as much, as well as asking if Michael let her live or if she escaped, after the two of them sleep together, he embarks on his own killing spree. Along with Michael, he kills both Dr. Mathis and Deb at the former's home, and then gets Allyson to agree to leave Haddonfield with him.

With his possessive mother throwing him out of the house when she learns how intimate he's become with Allyson, Corey takes to living at the Allen family's old house, where Laurie confronts him Halloween morning. When she tells him to stay away from Allyson, he exclaims, "You started this! You brought me in! You invited me! You're the one to blame. You wanna do it or you want me to? If I can't have her, no one will. You wanna help Allyson, let her live her life. She has me now." He then adds, "You should

give in. You should surrender to that feeling you had the first time you ever looked into his eyes. You secretly hope Michael comes back for you. I'm the psycho. You're the freak show." Following that, he calls Allyson, telling her that Laurie threatened to kill him and they need to leave that night. Unbeknownst to her, he proceeds to go on a killing spree, taking out everyone who's made him miserable, such as the bullies, Willy the Kid, and his mother. This is where he feels the most like Roy from Friday the 13th Part V, as he disguises himself as Michael, wearing not

only his own coveralls from his job at the salvage yard but his mask after fighting and managing to take it from him (yeah, I'll go into that later). Ultimately, he goes to Laurie's home to kill her, only for her to fake suicide in order to lure him in, shoot him several times, and send him through the stair railing. But then, instead of killing her, when he hears Allyson pull up outside, he chuckles evilly, reiterates, "If I can't have her," and stabs himself in the throat, making it look as though Laurie murdered him, which she promptly falls into. But in the end, Michael is the one who finishes Corey off when he shows up to reclaim his mask and kill Laurie.

What I don't like about Corey's character is how, rather than being a copycat inspired by Michael, he literally becomes infected with the evil force that drives him. One reason I don't like this is because they don't explain exactly what happens. After waking up in Michael's lair, Corey, while trying to escape, is grabbed by Michael, looks into his dark eyes behind the mask, and we suddenly get a lightning fast montage of everything that's happened to Corey, with shots of Michael interspersed in it.

Michael then lets him go, he runs outside, and he begins to feel himself starting to change. I know I always talk about how it's best if things are kept ambiguous with Michael, but what exactly they're going for here baffles me. In Paul Brad Logan's novelization, he describes it as Corey's mind being opened up to evil, but while I like that inherent concept, I don't like how it's portrayed here. That's something else: as much as I've always felt there was a supernatural edge to Michael, and I'm glad they

started to go that way with Halloween Kills, there's always been that balancing act, and this idea of whatever evil is within him partially going into Corey and turning him into a killer as well pushes it a smidge too far and makes me think of the Cult of Thorn and how Danny Strode was being poised to succeed Michael. And it doesn't just stop at Corey deciding to get back at all those who've wronged him and then leave Haddonfield with Allyson, or killing people while wearing a mask. He begins to take on some of Michael's traits, like his ability to suddenly

appear and disappear, the way he sits up at one point, and his ability to take a lot of abuse, given how Laurie shoots him at least twice, he stabs himself in the neck, and yet, it's Michael himself who finally finishes him off. In fact, Corey's suggestion to Laurie that she should've given in to the evil she witnessed when she saw Michael's eyes after ripping his mask off in the original film suggests that the same thing could've happened to her (and maybe it did a little, given how, like in Halloween 2018, Laurie is still able to suddenly appear and disappear with a sound). And

going back to the novelization, it says that Michael is able to kill Corey because he takes back the evil that he passed on to him (which you can kind of see in the film), driving it even further into major supernatural territory (normally, I wouldn't put too much stock into a novelization, but because this is by one of the screenwriters, I think it gives some of his insights into when he wrote the film itself). I'll go more into this later, but I feel that this approach to Corey becoming a villain hurts what the filmmakers were trying to say.

Before he takes on Michael's persona during the third act, Corey sort of has his own unique image, as he wears the smiling scarecrow mask he had on at the Halloween party when he kills Dr. Mathis and tries to attack Deb (as you can see, it's definitely eerie in its own right). However, his way of killing proves to be much messier and less efficient than Michael's, and he also proves to be explosively impatient, angrily pounding on a sliding glass door when Deb manages to shut him outside. But as I'll get into, when he observes Michael killing Deb, he becomes much more like him when he embarks on his own Halloween killing spree.

As I said, when he's not being shunned by the townspeople or bullied by Terry Tramer and his group, Corey has to put up with his overbearing, smothering, and possessive mother, Joan (Joanne Baron). She's only in a few scenes, but her obsession with her son is clearly a very sick one, as she gives her husband crap for not being there to give him "proper supervision" (like Allyson, Corey likely told her that he hurt his hand while working at the salvage yard than what really happened), and becomes preoccupied with who he's texting at the dinner table, telling him when he refuses to say, "Boys who keep secrets don't get custard for dessert." When Corey comes home after his first encounter with Michael and runs to the bathroom, Joan is banging on the door and yelling at him to open up, rather than just let him be. She's especially nasty to Laurie when she tries to talk to her about him, partially blaming her for the town turning against him when they didn't have Michael to blame for their problems anymore. We also get more of a feel as to how unhealthy her feelings about her son are in this scene, as she tells Laurie, "Your granddaughter should be so lucky as to be with a boy like Corey. He's handsome, he's sensitive. I don't like it when he stays out all night with girls but... he's grown. He can do what he wants." Late in the movie, Joan says she can smell Allyson on him (and you hear her literally sniffing him), that she's trying to take him away, yells at him to just get out, and even slaps him. She immediately backpedals and goes to kiss him... on the mouth, before he pushes her away. Thus, it's not surprising that he targets her during his killing spree.

Corey's stepfather, Ronald (Rick Moose), on the other hand, is a pretty cool guy, and always seems to be trying to do right by him. He not only gives Corey a job at his salvage yard, but also gives him a motorcycle to replace the bicycle he always rides to work on. He's well aware of how possessive and overbearing Joan is, and after the fight that Corey has with her late in the movie, he tells Corey that he hopes he finds happiness. Unfortunately, he gets caught up in Corey's killing spree, as he lures the bullies to the salvage yard to pick them off. Ronald isn't killed by him directly, though; in fact, he actually dies trying to save Corey when Terry aims a rifle at him, getting shot in the head for his trouble.

Unfortunately, Will Patton's Frank Hawkins has the least amount of screentime in the trilogy here, with his only major scene being early on, when he runs into Laurie at the grocery store. Still, he again comes off as a really good guy and the scene between them is very charming as they catch up, with Hawkins telling her what he's been up to (I'm guessing he still works as a deputy, as he shows up at Laurie's home near the end, saying she'd reported a suicide, but we never see him in his uniform). He's also quite happy to hear that Allyson is seeing Corey, whom he calls a good kid who "had a tough break," and adds that it's nice someone is watching out for him. And when Sondra Dickerson's sister makes her feel guilty over what Michael did to her, Hawkins is there for her, asking if she's alright and suggesting that, one day, she join him in a trip over to Japan to see the cherry blossoms. He's not seen again until the end, arriving at Laurie's home after she's already killed Michael. However, he encourages them in taking his body to the salvage yard and destroying his body in the shredder, as an act of healing for the town. And at the end of the movie, with Laurie alone now that Allyson has left Haddonfield, Frank comes by to see her and it's likely they're going to have the relationship they may have had years ago.

Kyle Richards also briefly returns as Lindsey Wallace, but like before, there's not that much to her character. Unlike in Halloween Kills, she's more of a peripheral character, as she's first seen hanging out with Laurie and Allyson at their house, commenting that Laurie knew exactly what she was doing when she introduced Allyson to Corey, as well as shows off a skill at reading Tarot cards. Significantly, Allyson gets the "DEATH" card, which Lindsey explains signifies new beginnings in life, i.e. her relationship with Corey. Lindsey also works at the bar that hosts the Halloween party Allyson takes Corey to, and encourages her to be with whoever she wants. In addition, she holds back Jeremy's mother when Corey has the misfortune of running into her. And in her last scene, when Laurie is concerned about what she's seeing in Corey, Lindsey introduces her to Jeremy's father, who talks about an unnerving encounter he recently had with him.

At the beginning of the movie, Corey couldn't have been saddled with a more hateful brat to look after than Jeremy Allen (Jaxon Goldberg). While he seems fine enough when Corey first meets him, after Jeremy's parents have left and they're watching John Carpenter's The Thing, he's needlessly dickish to him. At first, it just seems to be a teasing sort of relationship, like we saw between Vicky and Julian in Halloween 2018, with Jeremy accusing Corey of being scared because Michael is still out there and telling him that Michael only goes after babysitters (he was clearly spared a lot of details of the 2018 killing spree). But then, when Corey tries to turn the movie off when Norris' head detaches, suggesting they play hide-and-seek instead, Jeremy says, "I wanna watch this movie. And I don't really feel like pretending to be best friends with an ugly-ass, boy babysitter!" The kid may have good taste in movies but, holy crap, did he just out himself as a little turd. Then, of course, he plays a prank on Corey, making it seem as though something has happened and he's disappeared, only to lure him up to and lock him in the attic. He taunts Corey right outside the door, making him angrier and angrier, until he kicks it open and sends Jeremy falling over the stair railing to his death... right as his parents come home.

Jeremy's parents have something of a similar dynamic to Corey's. His mother, Theresa (Candice Rose), acts like her son is the most precious thing in the world, and tells Corey that, after what happened the year before, he's now afraid of the dark, wets his bed, and talks in his sleep, but Jeremy's awful behavior with Corey suggests that was all just him wanting attention and his mother fell for it. And when Corey runs into her at the Halloween party three years later, she lays into him, accusing him of deliberately murdering

Jeremy and saying he doesn't have the right to be out, having fun. Jeremy's father, Roger (Jack William Marshall), on the other hand, despite naturally grieving for his son, is much more likable all around. When Laurie meets him after sharing her concerns about Corey with Lindsey, he tells her, "I always liked Corey. Some kids, you can tell when they're a pain in the ass, but Corey was a good kid. And I just couldn't imagine he'd be capable of hurting anyone on purpose. But with the trial, I just... started spinning with theories. Eventually, I thought, 'Give it up. You're never gonna get closure. There's no such thing.' A couple of years go by, and I'd see him every now and then. See the way people avoided him or, how they made faces behind his back, which, if I'm honest, pissed me off. Because I felt like they took my pain... my despair... and they made it about them." But then, he says, "And then yesterday, I'm on my way to work. There he is. And I think, 'I'm gonna say something. Prove my wife wrong. Let's find a way to forgive this kid.' And I pull up next to him, and he looks at me... and it's not him. At least, not in the eyes. And... I don't know, man. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Right then, I felt like I got my answer. The kid who used to mow our lawn didn't kill my son. I know that. But the guy I saw on the side of the road... was down a dark path. Did the town do this to him after the accident? Or was it always there?"

While not exactly uncommon to the Halloween series as a whole, as opposed to the two previous movies, just about everybody who's murdered here is a shitty person who has it coming. Chief among them are the group of high-school bullies, led by Terry Tramer (Michael Barbieri). Aside from the girl named Margo (Joey Harris), who often speaks up when she thinks the others, especially Terry, are going too far in what they do to Corey, they're all dirtbags, with Billy (Marteen) and Stacy (Destiny Mone) adding to the

verbal and physical abuse. It all starts when Corey refuses to pay for some booze at a gas station when they don't have the ID to buy it themselves, and when they realize who he is, they immediately start harassing him, with Terry calling him a pedophile. He shoves him to the ground when he breaks his bottle of chocolate milk in his hand, spraying it everywhere, and when Laurie shows up to get them off him, Terry, knowing who she is, comments, "Would you look at this? I mean, a psycho meets a freak show. This is a match made in heaven." By the time Corey

encounters them again while walking home from the Halloween party, he's seen how awful Terry's father treats him when the two of them bring a car that Terry damaged to Ronald's salvage yard (while it's never said outright, it's possible that Terry's father is Ben Tramer, the guy whom Laurie had a crush on when she was in high school). After Terry trips him and Billy crushes his glasses, Corey brings up how much Terry's father hates him, which really enrages him. He and Billy attack him together, and Corey ends up going over the side of the bridge they're on. That even horrifies Stacy, who earlier called Corey a "little psycho bitch," but Terry refuses to take responsibility, with him and Billy saying that Corey deserved it. During the third act, Corey lures them to the salvage yard by vandalizing Terry's car and brutally kills them one by one.

No less loathsome is Doug Mulaney (Jesse C. Boyd), Allyson's ex-boyfriend who happens to be a local police officer. Though he ostensibly pulls her over early on to tell her that her car's tailpipe has come loose, it's obvious that he hasn't gotten over her, and this is all but confirmed later on, when he harasses her and Corey at a diner. Quite drunk, he first says that she never called him, and tries to get her to join him over where he's having dinner with some friends. He then recognizes Corey when he confronts him about leaving them alone and sneers at Allyson, "So you call Mr. Aggravated Manslaughter at night when you can't sleep? Hmm? When you see the Boogeyman in your nightmares, you feel safe with this..." That's when Corey jumps up and gets in Doug's face, and Doug backs off, but continues mocking them under his breath as he walks away. He later follows the both of them when Corey takes Allyson home, then stalks Corey, who proceeds to lure him to the underpass and the drainage pipe. There, Doug is attacked and killed by both Corey and Michael.

The two of them next go after Dr. Mathis (Michael O'Leary) and Deb (Michele Dawson), the people who make Allyson's job a miserable one. Mathis, Allyson's boss at the clinic, is just a sleazebag and an asshole, as he berates Allyson when something gets knocked over when he's treating Corey's hand, right after he, noticing Corey looking at her, commented, "Cute, isn't she?" It's also clear that he passed her over for a promotion and gave it to Deb because, unlike her, Allyson wasn't putting out. Speaking of Deb, she's

just an annoying, bubble-headed slut who says whatever is on her mind, with no filters. At the Halloween party, after she learns that Allyson brought Corey, Deb tells Lindsey that he's, "The guy who fucked the old lady at the nursing home," then admits she was kidding and says, "It's actually Corey Cunningham, the guy that killed that kid." Deb gets even worse later, when she rambles to Allyson, "You're fucking him, aren't you? It's like, the perfect story of Haddonfield, in a way: cute young girl falls for local creep. Imagine if your grandmother had fallen in love with Michael Myers, but she didn't. I heard she stabbed him in the neck with a fucking knitting needle." Finally, Allyson calls her out on this, telling her, "What's your problem, Deb? You talk to me like I'm never here. Do you ever just shut your goddamn mouth?" Deb just stares at her blankly for a second, then smiles like a ditz and says, "I know, right? I know I talk too much. I just get so excited by all that Boogeyman bullshit." Thus, no one feels bad when Corey and Michael murder both her and Mathis at the latter's ritzy home, where they intend to get it on.

Willy the Kid (Keraun Harris), the town's local DJ, whose voice is heard on the radio long before he appears onscreen, throwing out all kinds of crazy conspiracies about Michael and suggesting he may return, and who looks like he still thinks it's the 70's, turns out to be another unlikable douchebag when he finds Allyson and Corey hanging around his studio late at night. The minute he recognizes Corey, he says, "What you doin' out here, you ugly motherfucker? You're goin' to scare all the kids." And when Allyson confronts Willy about what he's saying, he goes on, "I don't know who the fuck you talkin' to but, uh, I know who you are. Yeah, I know the Laurie Strode story. She teased a man with brain damage, and then he snapped. Look at you. You're gonna make a little name now, huh? Walkin' around with this dumb bitch right here." Allyson accuses him of just never shutting up and Willy adds, "Once Willy get in your ear, it's like your favorite song stuck in your head." He then heads back inside, saying, "Ya'll get the hell off my property before I fuck ya'll up." It turns out that others have issues with him too, as right before he's killed, a caller takes him to task for exploiting the town's tragedies. Willy, naturally, cuts them off and plays a song, but Corey promptly kills him in a very graphic but fitting manner.

Corey's first victim is actually this homeless man (Blaque Fowler) or vagabond, as he's called in the credits, who lives beneath the bridge near Michael's lair. He's seen a few times early on, going around, talking to himself, and he sees Michael drag Corey through the drainage pipe leading into his lair in the sewer system. After Corey escapes, the man grabs and confronts him, saying he's seen Michael drag other people in there, and questions why he let Corey go. Brandishing the knife that Corey had used earlier to try to defend himself from the bullies, the man demands he go back inside and bring him Michael's mask. Proving to be truly unhinged, he says, "I'm Michael Myers. He not done with you, little fucker." That pushes Corey over the edge and he grabs the man's hand and forces him to stab himself repeatedly.

There are some other returning characters from the previous films to be found here. While he doesn't show up until the very end, after Michael has been killed (as he was unavailable until the end of the shoot), Omar Dorsey does briefly return as Sheriff Barker, endorsing the plan to destroy Michael's body in front of as many people as possible. Among the procession are Diva Tyler as Sondra, wheelchair-bound and unable to talk as a result of Michael stabbing her in the throat before killing her husband, 

and Jibrail Nantambu as Julian, now four years older. Also, according to the cast list, Holli Saperstein is here again as Oscar's mom, but I didn't remember seeing her, until I realized that she's in the opening montage, having just committed suicide by hanging herself. Finally, Nick Castle appears as a flasher at the Halloween party that Allyson takes Corey to, opening his coat in front of Corey to reveal internal organs painted on his body, asking, "See anything ya like?" (Like in Halloween 2018, Castle did shoot a cameo of himself playing Michael in Halloween Kills but it got cut and didn't even appear in the Extended Cut.)

Since we're now back to both day- and nighttime scenes, the visual style of Halloween Ends is more akin to that of Halloween 2018, albeit a tad harsher and with a bit more contrasting (the filter effect they use during the flashbacks to the original film is a prime example of the visual approach they take). The color palette is, for the most part, a bit muted again, especially in those exterior daytime scenes where it's gray and overcast, as well as those in the clinical, clean doctor's office, but there are numerous moments where the film becomes more vibrant, like the lovely

instances of autumn sunrise and sunset during scenes inside Laurie and Allyson's home, the flashing police lights and streetlights during some of the nighttime scenes, and the deep blue that comes off Dr. Mathis' courtyard pool in the scene where he and Deb are murdered. There's an especial amount of color during the Halloween party at the bar, mostly with deep red and orange, as well as sections of blue and yellow. In fact, that's true of the location in general, as the scene where Roger Allen speaks with Laurie while playing pool is a very colorful one, too. In terms of lighting

and shadow, the best environment for that is the cave within the sewer system where Michael dwells, which is wonderfully spooky-looking, with shafts of light coming through vents and grates up near the ceiling, and long, dark tunnels leading to and from outside. Also, during the scene where Corey helps Michael kill Doug, the latter's discarded flashlight gives it a strange, surreal look. Another great example of the use of lighting and darkness is the nighttime scene at

the salvage yard, where Corey murders the bullies, which is not only very dim and shadowy, but has this David Fincher-like lime-green aesthetic to it. And I do like how Laurie and Michael's final confrontation takes place in her dark kitchen, as it's kind of like when he chased her through the Wallace house's kitchen during the original's climax, making for a nice link from the first film to the last.

Like with Halloween Kills, while Ends' cinematography isn't quite as impressive as what we saw in the first entry in the trilogy, it does have some standout moments. The shots looking up and down the height of the Allen house's long, winding staircase can definitely given one a feeling of vertigo, and you understand perfectly that Jeremy had no chance at all when Corey knocked him over the railing at the top. There are also some very ominous shots looking out from within the drainage pipe that leads to Michael's lair, even before we know he's in there, and when

Corey first encounters him, the shots of Michael within the tunnel's walls, especially the close-ups where you can see his dark eyes within the mask after he grabs Corey, are quite eerie, as is the shot of his mask reflected in Corey's eye. After Michael lets Corey go, there's a shot of him sitting in the middle of the tunnel as nothing but a silhouette, while the tunnel itself seems to turn slightly behind him, and it then cuts to an overhead shot of him stumbling outside and crawling back along the ground. Later, when he lures Doug into Michael's lair, there's a memorable shot of

Corey standing up on this ledge, smiling evilly when Doug illuminates him with his flashlight. In addition, there are some instances of prolonged, continuous shots, particularly a locked-off, distant one from inside the tunnel when Corey crawls in there and fights Michael for his mask, which stays in that position the entire time, even when they go offscreen. And there are some POV shots, notably from Corey, like when he goes into Laurie's office after she apparently kills herself, only to find her pointing the

gun at him. Editing-wise, there are some noteworthy montages, such as one at the beginning, after Jeremy has died, that starts slow, with cuts from Jeremy's parents freaking out over their son's death to Corey looking over the railing, but becomes more and more frantic, until the credits sequence begins. After the credits, there's a dramatic one showing the aftermaths of both of Michael's killing sprees; There's a quickly-edited one where, after Corey first encounters Michael, he runs back home, goes to the bathroom,

and strips down to clean himself off. Not long after that, while Laurie is writing in her book about the need to take control of one's life, the film cuts back and forth between her to Corey, now changed, riding over to her home to see Allyson. And when it looks as though she and Michael are going to die together at the end as he chokes her, it cuts back and forth between her seemingly allowing herself to die to shots from the original movie and the two previous ones, illustrating how it's all led up to this. However,

a warning for the epileptic: that party scene early on not only leads into a montage that is edited very rapidly, but also consists of a lot of bright, flashing lights, both on the dance floor and when Allyson and Corey go into a photo booth, and it goes on for over a full minute. (There's actually one point where Corey, while really getting into it, gets down on the floor and gyrates like he's having a seizure. And as the music drops out for a bit and he looks up at Allyson, while

she looks down while standing directly over him, it feels like some kind of fever dream.) They even put a warning on the entrance to the theater where I saw it and, while I initially thought that was hyperbolic, I quickly realized it wasn't. That one shot of it here is only a small taste of it. Finally, if I have one major problem with the cinematography, is that it's sometimes a tad too dark, especially in those scenes in Michael's lair. I get why, but it can still be hard to see what's going on in there or to even make Michael out when Corey goads him into killing Doug. In fact, Michael is often lit very darkly, and while that always does him favors, it also makes it hard to appreciate some details in his mask design and the unmasked makeup, as I'll get into later.

Yet again, the filmmakers had to find a new place to shoot, as when they finally got around to filming after being delayed by COVID-19, the stages they used in North Carolina were no longer available. Having shot his movie Undertow in Savannah, Georgia back in 2004, David Gordon Green decided to head back there for Halloween Ends, using a warehouse as a soundstage. One of the few sets they built there was the downstairs area of Laurie and Allyson's home, specifically the kitchen for Laurie and Michael's final battle. Overall, said home is a nice, three-story, upper

middle class home in town, much more open and inviting that the fortified house where Laurie was living in 2018, and the interiors show that she and Allyson are living fairly comfortably. However, there are reminders of the past here and there, like pictures of Karen, a piece of paper with her painted hand-prints from when she was a little girl hanging on the wall, and numerous newspaper articles lining the walls in Laurie's upstairs office relating to Michael's crimes as research for her book. The first home we actually see when the movie begins, however, is the

Allen household, which, during the opening, is this very upper-class house, with that amazing, spiraling staircase, a study with a grand piano, a comfortable living room with a flat screen TV, and a very nice kitchen with a well-stocked fridge. The only part that isn't so inviting is the dark, spooky attic, where Corey gets locked in by Jeremy, leading into the tragedy that sets everything off. This place kind of becomes Corey's own version of the Myers house, as during the main story, the family has since moved out and

the house has remained abandoned and empty. And late in the movie, when his mother throws him out, Corey starts living in the house himself, sleeping on the floor in the foyer. The place is not as creepy as the Myers house was (though, that could be because we never see it at night when it's dilapidated), as it's mainly just dusty and full of cobwebs, but the large bloodstain from where Jeremy hit is still etched into the floor at the bottom of the stairs.

Surprisingly, Corey's home is quite nice in and of itself, but its interiors are a little cramped, making his mother's presence all the more overwhelming and hard to escape. However, the most upscale home we see during the present story is Dr. Mathis', which is in this Art Deco-style with a courtyard housing a brightly lit swimming pool in its center, a luxurious kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom, with a walk-in, glass shower, and large windows and sliding doors every which way, although the hallways prove to be quite claustrophobic. The filmmakers made use of

other locations they found in Savannah, turning a Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall into Velkovsky's, the bar where Lindsey works, memorable for both the Halloween party and all of the red and blue neon lights decorating its interiors; a gas station where Corey first runs into the bullies, the grocery store where Laurie meets up with Hawkins, and a small diner for Allyson and Corey's first date; converting an office into the urgent care clinic where Allyson works; and an old, abandoned laundromat into both the exteriors and interiors into the WURG radio station, which are quite brightly colorful in and of themselves.

Though it initially looks fairly innocuous and unimportant, the bridge with the Willy the Kid sign, which you first see when Doug pulls Allyson over to tell her about her loose muffler, turns out to be very significant to the story. For one, the area beneath it, where the vagabond lives in a small encampment, is also where the drainage pipe leading into Michael's lair is found, and for another, it's where Corey is dragged into his lair after getting knocked over the edge of the bridge by the bullies. Early on, we learn from a newspaper clipping in Laurie's office that the

Myers house was demolished following the killing spree back in 2018, so Michael has instead taken to living in this cave, which is actually an unused portion of Haddonfield's sewage system amid a network of tunnels, filled with numerous vents and grates, roots dangling down along the walls, and ledges, one of which Corey uses to distract Doug when Michael attacks him. As the only other major set in the movie, its details can be hard to make out due to how it's always really dark, but one thing that you can see is how, when Michael reaches for Corey

and grabs him through a hole in the main tunnel's wall, his mask really blends in with the look of the bricks. And according to the book, Halloween: The Official Making of Halloween, Halloween Kills & Halloween Ends, they added in some cracks and bumps in the walls and pillars that create the vague shape of Michael's mask, one of which you can clearly see, as Doug notices it. The final significant setting is the salvage yard, which is not only where Corey works but is also where he gets his revenge on

the bullies, using how dark and maze-like the place can be at night to trap and kill them one by one. However, the office where Ronald is during this scene, initially unaware of what's going on, looks comfortable enough to be a home, albeit one with a locker room with guns in the back. And most importantly of all, this is where Michael's body is destroyed in the industrial shredder.

As with the other two movies in the trilogy (and even more so than Kills), this one also gives me that Halloween feeling, with shots of trick-or-treaters roaming the streets of Haddonfield and lots of decorated houses, both during the opening in 2019 and the present day; the costume party at Velkovsky's; close-ups of the jack-o-lantern that Laurie carves early on; and horror movies, like John Carpenter's The Thing, playing on the TV, as well as appropriate music on the soundtrack and radio, like Midnight Monsters Hop during the opening. And thanks to

their, yet again, filming during a time of year that gives off the appropriate vibe (in this case, January and February of 2022, not counting some reshoots that June), I can buy it being October, not just in it being overcast and clearly chilly in some scenes, but also with those instances of late afternoon sunlight and sunsets that have a certain feel to them in autumn and/or winter.

As I said in the introduction, even though the basic premise of Halloween Ends alienated a lot of people, it's not one I'm personally opposed to seeing, as I think it's interesting to go into how someone could become a monster like Michael. As always, I never want what made Michael into what he is now to ever be spelled out, but I don't mind the concept of another troubled person deciding to take up his mantle and use it to take revenge on those who've made their life miserable. I'm not even against seeing Corey become a full-on copycat by dressing up in both mechanic

coveralls and the same style of mask as Michael's, making it seem as though he's returned, as Roy did as Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part V. But for several reasons, the filmmakers were far from totally successful in their implementation. As I said earlier, I think it negates whatever point they were going for if they make Corey's descent into evil occur through purely supernatural means. I know what said point is, too, as at the end of the movie, when everything is said and done, Laurie writes in her book, "Evil doesn't die. It changes shape." I've also read that the

filmmakers did research on people behind school shootings to get an idea of how those who've been wronged and/or neglected by a community can eventually be compelled to commit such evil acts, which makes for some interesting inspiration, and they do make it clear early on that Corey has a lot of repressed rage over what he's been through. But his literally being infected by the evil within Michael and not only becoming a killer but also as nigh unstoppable and able to appear and disappear out of

nowhere like him is a different kind of horror than the much more realistic and relatable one we would've had if Corey had instead simply been inspired by Michael. You could've had him encounter Michael, escape, and in his adrenaline rush and attempt to process what happened, kill the vagabond, leading him to realize that he does indeed have it in him, and I think it would've been more impactful.

Going back to what Cody Leach said, it might've also been a better idea to tell this story about Corey within its own movie, as some sort of a spinoff or, rather, as the last entry in a planned quadrilogy as opposed to just a trilogy (everybody wants a trilogy specifically, but there's nothing wrong with spreading your ideas further if three isn't going to suffice), than trying to do it in the movie that's meant to wrap up the main story-line we've been following for the past two movies (and the original). You could still have it play out as it does up to Corey's first encounter with Michael, his

first murder, and attempt to reconcile what happened with his growing relationship with Allyson, but it would've likely been more satisfying if the movie had then focused on Michael slowly but surely making his presence known again after four years of inactivity, leading to his final confrontation with Laurie, however it plays out (be it him dying, both of them dying, or whatever). And after that, you could do one last movie focusing solely on this notion of how, even with Michael gone, there will always be somebody to take his place, with Allyson realizing that the man she

loves has become that person. As always, hindsight is 20/20, and it's easy to say this now, when it's been completed (case in point, the idea of Corey being a character who was present throughout the whole trilogy, despite their making the first movie with no foreknowledge that there would be more), but there had to be a more satisfactory, less overstuffed way to go about this. And had it been done this way, audiences and diehard fans likely wouldn't have felt as bait-and-switched as they were, especially given

the marketing. While the trailers didn't totally ignore Corey, they also didn't play up his significance in the film, nor did they Michael's surprisingly minimal screentime, instead focusing on this being where his and Laurie's saga comes to its close. And the theatrical posters focused on either Michael or both him and Laurie, with one showing them standing back to back, emphasizing their showdown, only for it to happen very close to the end and last just a few minutes.

I do think Ends is a better written movie than Kills, though. While there's still a lot of pontificating dialogue from Laurie about Michael, his impact on Haddonfield, and how she's dealing with it and trying to inspire others, most of that comes from her internal monologue and thoughts as she writes her book, so it's easier to digest. Her lines to Michael before she slashes his throat, "I've run from you. I have chased you. I have tried to contain you. I have tried to forgive you. I thought maybe you were the Boogeyman. No, you're just a man who's about to stop breathing," may

come off as overwritten and akin to something you'd hear from an action hero, but it also does work in that context. The only part I find kind of clunky is her dialogue to Corey about the different kinds of evil (an analogy that John Carpenter himself used in the Masters of Horror documentary), but that was the one exception. Aside from snags here and there, mainly with Allyson, I think the characters are better written, with far less instances of people dying because they do stupid things (and again, most of these people you want to see die, anyway). There are one or two dumb moments, like Laurie pulling the knife out of Corey's neck, making it seem as though she did murder him, but it's not even close to being as egregious as it was in Kills.

Halloween Ends is also probably the best in the trilogy when it comes to humor, in that it has the least amount. In fact, while there is some humor early on, it very quickly goes away following the Halloween party at Velkovsky's, which is definitely the most out there, zany scene, with all the costumes and masks, Nick Castle's weird flasher character, and the craziness of the dance scenes where Corey really lets loose. Other than the vagabond living beneath the bridge, who can come off as unintentionally funny because of the actor's exaggerated performance and

look, there are no major or supporting characters who are meant to be overtly comedic, with the few who are kind of inherently funny in their personalities, like Deb and Willy the Kid, also being major douchebags. Also, the instances of awkward dialogue and interactions have something of a purpose here: they're meant to show how dismissive Theresa Allen is towards Corey even at the beginning, Corey slowly realizing what a little shit Jeremy is, Allyson and Corey attempting to break the ice when they first

meet, and Laurie and Hawkins being two old friends who catch up and make humorous small talk, in the grocery store. Speaking of Laurie, I find some of the humor with her early on, like her burning the pumpkin pie, nonchalantly flipping that knife out and asking Corey if he wants to puncture the bullies' tires, and when she encourages Allyson to find someone who makes her feel good, to be genuinely funny without going overboard.

Ends still has plenty of references to past movies, mainly in how it uses more stock footage, specifically from the original Halloween, than the previous two combined. Most of the in-movies references I recognize also allude to the original, like the flasher asking Corey, "See anything you like?" (Nick Castle told me himself that that was his idea); Laurie looking out the window to see Corey hiding partially behind a hedge next to the street; the use of Don't Fear the Reaper a couple of times on the soundtrack, including

during the first part of the ending credits; a shot from Corey's POV as he takes a butcher knife from a kitchen drawer; a shot of Laurie, Lynda, and Annie in her house; Michael injuring Laurie with a knitting needle during their fight; and the movie ending with some still, empty shots of the inside of Laurie's house. One reference that's subtle but clever is how the opening credits use the same color and font as those of Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Also, during Michael and Laurie's fight, him trying to stick her

hand into the garbage disposal is like that fake-out scene with Charlie in H20. And finally, there are some references to another John Carpenter movie: Christine. Besides Corey having the same surname as Arnie Cunningham and going through a similar character arc (one of the bullies steps on Corey's glasses like how Buddy Repperton does to Arnie's in that movie), the third act scene in the junkyard, where he attacks the bullies in a tow-truck, turning the headlights on suddenly in the darkness before coming at them, with close-ups on the headlights, has Christine written all over it.

Ironically, when we get to this movie, they do what I feel they should've done with Michael Myers in the first place: have him disappear without a trace for years after his last killing spree, making it much easier for me to buy his legacy and reputation than in the previous movies, for reasons I've mentioned there. In the four years since his Halloween 2018 massacre, the citizens of Haddonfield have been left terrified and broken, trying to make sense of what happened and why, leading to various deaths and suicides that had no direct ties to Michael himself but seem to be the result of a blight he left on the town. They even demolished the Myers house and other notable spots connected to him as a means of trying to erase the horrible memories, akin to how they demolished the apartment building where Jeffrey Dahmer murdered and mutilated so many people. So, even though we don't see Michael for the first time in the present story until just over forty minutes in, his presence and impact are strongly felt, including in how Corey is labeled as a creep and a murderer for killing Jeremy. Now, as for how he's implemented in the story, that's another matter. I once described it to a friend as akin to how Gareth Edwards made use of Godzilla in the 2014 film: his first appearance is not until very late in the first act and his appearances afterward are sporadic until the climax, where he finally does have a major role, namely in his final fight with Laurie. Between the two, I would say Michael is more effectively used here, mostly due to his aforementioned lasting impact on Haddonfield and the notion of how, even after he's killed and his body is destroyed, the town's healing process will likely take a long time. But that doesn't change the fact that, despite my admiration for their taking such a different approach, it is disappointing that he has so little real screentime, with most of the movie's kills being committed by Corey dressed up as him. And while I do enjoy that final battle between him and Laurie, it does feel like an afterthought, like the filmmakers remembered late in the game what they'd actually promised with this movie.

In stark contrast to how he was utterly unstoppable in Halloween Kills, Michael is shockingly weak here. When Corey lures Doug into his lair, Doug is able to fight Michael off, and he's only able to kill him when Corey restrains him. He also initially moves in a weak, hobbling manner, acting as though he's slightly paralyzed on his left side, and his breathing is much more ragged and labored. After he manages to stab Doug a couple of times, however, it seems to empower and energize him, as his stance suddenly straightens up and his stabbing becomes more violent.

Thus, when he and Corey attack Dr. Mathis and Deb, he's easily able to overpower Deb and impale her to the wall with his knife. That said, though, Corey is still able to fight, subdue, and take his mask when he decides to go on his own killing spree, and Laurie is able to inflict more damage on him during their fight, as well as mortally wound him, albeit with Allyson's help. This is another aspect of Michael's portrayal here that tends to get criticized and, while the filmmakers have tried to explain it as a combination

of the punishment he took in the previous film, his living in the sewers for four years afterward, and his now being 65, it's hard to swallow, especially given how, despite said beating, he was still in good enough form to slaughter the mob at the end of Kills. Speaking of which, their leaning more into the supernatural side of things there gets expanded on here, with Laurie's quote about Michael becoming more and more inhuman the more he kills being

seemingly validated in how. again, he slightly recovers from his weakened state when he kills Doug. So I guess, if he goes a long time without killing a bunch of people, he gets weak, and even the strength he does get back here isn't enough to keep Laurie from killing him.

The biggest unanswered question about Michael here is why he dragged Corey into his lair without killing him, something the vagabond claims he's seen Michael do to other people (suggested cannibalism, maybe?). And why does he grab Corey, only to let him go? Did he intentionally infect him with his evil, perhaps to carry on his legacy of killing since he feels he's now unable to? Personally, I feel that, while Michael is definitely smart, he's not a mastermind with that kind of a far-reaching plan. For the most part, the only thing on his mind is to keep moving

forward to his next victim. Maybe he dragged Corey in with the intention of killing him, was too weak to go through with it at the time, and then attempted to strangle him but was too weak for that too, and the passing of the evil was a complete accident. And like I said before, intentionally or not, I don't like this idea of whatever evil force that drives Michael and makes him nearly invulnerable being something that can be passed to someone else. I'm glad they still don't explain it, but I really hope they don't ever come back to this concept in any future movies. Regardless, it's

not like Michael and Corey develop any sort of relationship (not that you would expect Michael to, anyway). While Corey brings Doug to him, allowing him to kill again for the first time in a long time and recharge his batteries, I feel that Corey did that just so Michael could, as he himself says, show him how to kill someone. And even though they attack and kill Dr. Mathis and Deb together, I don't think it was an actual co-op. When Deb gets away from Corey, only for Michael to appear behind her and finish her off,

Corey's reaction says he wasn't expecting him to show up, and Michael himself has a similar reaction, in how he turns and sees Corey, before going about killing Deb. It seems like, more than anything else, Corey takes the opportunity to watch and learn how to kill more efficiently, as he proved sloppy and impatient during this first outing. And sure enough, when he embarks on his own Halloween night killing spree, his kills are much more effective. Of course, he also really put himself on Michael's shit list by stealing his mask, which he rectifies when he appears at Laurie's home, retrieves it, and finishes Corey off.

One thing that I think is clear about Michael is that, once he's recharged, he's intent on finally killing Laurie. Immediately after he murders Doug, you get the scene where Corey goes over to Laurie's house late at night to see Allyson, and Laurie arrives home to see them go upstairs through the living room window, unaware that Michael is watching from nearby. While he may not have been actively stalking her in Halloween 2018, and made no effort to go after her at all in Halloween Kills (either because he didn't know where she was or because he had other

priorities), it seems as though he's now ready to get his revenge on her for besting him and leaving to die in her burning house. On Halloween night, he heads straight to Laurie's home, now that he knows where it is, and probably after following Corey there. And once he dispenses with Corey and retrieves his mask, he sets about killing Laurie, with the two of them nearly dying together when he grabs her by the throat after she slashes his own. Speaking of which, that leads me into something I figured might happen here but which I wasn't expecting to affect me the way it

did: Michael Myers dies. Technically, he has died before, as both Halloween II and H20 were each meant to end with his definitive death, only for it to get retconned (though, you can still ignore what came after them, if you so choose), but there's no possible way to get around it here: Laurie slashes his throat, then his wrist, he bleeds out, and just for good measure, and also so everyone in Haddonfield can see, they destroy his body in the salvage yard's shredder. It was actually kind of humbling to see this

villain who had survived so much and had always come back, albeit in different continuities, to be definitely, undeniably, and irrecoverably dead, with literally nothing left of him. This may feel like a strange analogy, but it was similar to the feeling I had the previous year when I saw Daniel Craig's James Bond go out in a literal blaze of glory at the end of No Time To Die: just as it is to see one of your favorite heroes die, it's also quite shocking to see one of your favorite Boogeymen bite the dust. Now, like James Bond, I know we'll likely see Michael Myers again in some fashion, but such a permanent cap on this section of the franchise, after so many hanging threads in the past, did kind of get to me.

Due to his lack of screentime and almost always being shot in very low lighting, you don't get much detail in how Michael looks. You can tell that his mask is now moldy on top of being partially burnt and melted, his outfit is very badly scuffed up and dirty due to it having been four years since it was changed or cleaned (just try to imagine how ripe he must smell), and the butcher knife, which he's kept down in his lair, is similarly dirty but no less dangerous, but otherwise, this is one of the least explicit portrayals of Michael. Where I think they

really miss the mark, though, is how they created this well-done, diseased, scarred makeup for James Jude Courtney's face, as well as an appliance for the hand that's missing two fingers, but in the final movie, you barely get to see much of it due to the dark lighting and how they, as always, obscure Michael's face when he's unmasked. The most you get to see of the latter is during the climactic battle, after Laurie removes his mask, and while you see enough to get the idea, behind-the-scenes photos, like in that book, show that it was a really cool design that the movie itself doesn't do justice.

Halloween Ends is significantly less violent than its predecessor, with only one truly horrific kill, and the amount of onscreen bloodshed is maybe just a smidge or so above Halloween 2018. The first death is that of Jeremy Allen, with him falling down from the top of his house's curving staircase and slamming on the floor below, blood then pooling out from under his body (they made a very impressive silicone dummy of Jaxon Goldberg for the actual fall and impact). When Terry and the bullies make Corey so mad that he breaks a glass bottle of chocolate milk in his hand,

you get close-ups of the nasty-looking cut in his palm, with pieces of glass embedded in it, including when it's treated at the doctor's office. Speaking of Corey, after his first encounter with Michael, Rohan Campbell often wore contact lenses that made his pupils look dilated to suggest how the evil force that had infected him was taking control (he never wears them in scenes between Corey and Allyson, though). And when we see Sondra Dickerson at the grocery store, she has a nasty scar in her throat from where

Michael stabbed her with that busted halogen bulb. Getting to the kills, Corey's first, which is him stabbing the vagabond, is pretty mundane, and the same goes for Michael's. Even though he slices into Doug's neck, then stabs his torso repeatedly, you don't see much due to the low lighting. The violence starts to pick up a bit with Dr. Mathis and Deb's murders, as the former has a plastic bag placed over his head by Corey, who stabs him repeatedly in the neck; Deb's death, on the other hand, is another homage to Bob's in the original, and is only slightly bloodier than that.

The blood really starts to flow during Corey's killing spree, starting with him luring the bullies to the salvage yard. He kills Billy offscreen by stabbing him through the eye with one of his drumsticks; Stacy gets smashed in the head with a lug wrench (again, we don't see the actual attack onscreen); Terry gets a blowtorch right in the mouth, a comeuppance that's way too blurry for you to fully enjoy, especially considering that that was an articulated dummy they used; and Margo, after getting pinned underneath a section of the gate by Corey's tow-truck, gets her head

stomped in, a la Dr. Sartain, and then driven over. Joan's death also happens offscreen (although more was filmed), and you just see her brutalized body when Allyson searches for Corey at his house. But while Willy the Kid's assistant is also murdered out of sight, the same can't be said for Willy himself. Corey grabs him, smashes his face against the table until his lower jaw is badly dislocated and his eye swollen, then takes a pair of scissors and snips his tongue off, with it landing atop a spinning record on the console. During the climax at Laurie's house, Corey, after

being shot, stabs himself in the throat in order to turn Allyson completely against her grandmother, though Michael is the one who finally kills him. During Laurie's fight with Michael, both of them get banged up, with Michael shoving a knitting needle into Laurie's ear, while she pins both of his hands to the kitchen island with knives, stabs him in the chest and armpit (justice for Big John!), and slashes his throat open. He rips his right hand almost completely in half to tear it loose and grab her by the throat, but when

Allyson returns and intervenes, Laurie is able to slash Michael's wrist, causing him to bleed out. And finally, his body is crunched up and destroyed in the salvage yard's shredder, which involved the filmmakers putting a full body replica of James Jude Courtney in an actual metal shredder that they rented.

At the beginning of the movie, we see Corey Cunningham arrive at the Allen household to babysit Jeremy. That evening, as they're watching The Thing on TV, and after he learns what a nasty little shit Jeremy is, Corey storms into the kitchen after telling him that he's going to bed in five minutes. While helping himself to whatever is in there, he hears a clatter in the living room. Going back in there, he finds the room dark, with a table lamp knocked over onto the floor and the TV off. He puts the lamp back

on the table, then hears the sound of the front door creaking. Walking into the foyer, he finds the door halfway open, and the house eerily quiet. He walks out the door, calling for Jeremy, but gets no response. He then starts searching inside the house, looking in closets and under beds. Hearing something elsewhere in the house, he runs through the kitchen, and while walking back, notices that a knife that was on a cutting board on the counter is missing. He hears Jeremy's muffled scream upstairs and makes his way

up there, hearing what sounds like him running and calling for help. Finding the knife on one of the steps, Corey takes it and goes through the door in front of him, which leads into the attic. He looks around, quietly calling for Jeremy, when the door suddenly closes behind him. Running to it, he finds it locked, and hears Jeremy taunting him on the other side. While Jeremy's parents pull up outside, Corey goes from realizing it was all a joke to becoming enraged when the kid refuses to let him out. Yelling at him to let him out, he starts banging on the door and kicking

at it. Just as Theresa and Roger walk through the front door, they hear the loud knocking upstairs and Corey yelling that he's going to kill Jeremy. Corey then kicks the door open and it slams into Jeremy, sending him over the stair railing behind him. Down in the foyer, Theresa asks Roger, "What was that?", right before Jeremy falls to his death from atop the stairs, smashing into the floor in front of his parents. They quickly run to him, realizing that their young son is dead, while up top, Corey looks over the railing, unaware that he's still holding the knife. Theresa looks up at him and yells, "What have you done?!"

The opening credits immediately hit and, this time, they do a Russian doll sort of motif with the jack-o-lantern, which repeatedly sheds its skin to reveal another one underneath as the camera moves closer to it, and at the end of the sequence, a regular pumpkin cracks open to reveal bloody innards. After that, we see a number of images from the original Halloween and the two previous movies, as Laurie's inner monologue for her book is heard. Following the montage, we see the newspaper clippings she has

tacked onto her office wall, then another montage of various tragedies that have befallen Haddonfield since 2018. You first see Corey being taken away in a squad car at the Allen house, which Laurie witnesses, two people dead in a jeep after having been shot to death, and Oscar's mother having hanged herself, wearing a costume akin to the one he was wearing when he was murdered. This leads into Laurie talking about her decision to not let fear run her life like it did before... and that leads into her realizing too late that

she forgot to set a timer on the pumpkin pie she was making downstairs, resulting in it burning and her having to extinguish it. Things proceed slowly for a while, with Allyson being pulled over by Doug Mulaney on the overpass that the vagabond lives under, with the camera then lingering on the nearby drainage pipe, and Corey running afoul of Terry Tramer and the other bullies at the gas station. Following Allyson taking him to the Halloween party, only for him to run into Theresa Allen there and get chewed out, Corey runs out of the bar and heads

home after rebuffing Allyson. That's when he runs into the bullies again, only for a fight to break out when Corey first pulls a knife on them, then tells Terry that the reason why he's such an asshole is because his father hates him. In the end, he falls over the bridge in the struggle and lands near the vagabond's campsite below. The bullies leave him there, while down below, he's suddenly dragged into the nearby drainage pipe, as the vagabond watches.

When Corey awakens in the sewer system, he gets to his feet, looks at his surroundings, and then spots the tunnel behind him that leads outside. He starts down it, when a hand suddenly breaks through the wall and grabs him by the neck. Corey finds himself face-to-face with Michael Myers, struggles to break free of his grip, then looks into his eyes and sees flashes of everything negative he's experienced in his mind. Michael lets him go and Corey, after processing what just happened, runs out of the tunnel, making it back

outside. But, no sooner does he get to his feet and look back in the tunnel, than the vagabond grabs him and threatens him with his own knife to go back in there and get Michael's mask. Struggling with him, he manages to grab the man's hand and get him to stab himself in the gut. Though seemingly shocked at what he just did, Corey stabs him a couple of more times. Stumbling onto his feet, he quickly throws the knife away and runs back home. After cleaning himself up, he heads over to Laurie's home to see Allyson, which

is when Laurie starts to become concerned with what she now sees in Corey. First, she looks out the window and sees him standing partially behind a hedge, and when she comes outside, she finds him gone, only for him to suddenly appear behind her. Apologizing for startling Laurie, he asks to see Allyson and, when she comes outside, asks her to come take a walk with him. The next major sequence comes that night, when Corey, after the two of them are harassed by Doug at the diner, takes Allyson home on his motorcycle. Dropping her off, he heads

on, seemingly unaware that Doug is stalking him. However, when he drives to the overpass, it's clear that he is aware, and when Doug parks his vehicle and gets out, he scans the dark area with his flashlight, initially not finding anything. He then comes across the vagabond's tent and, seeing a figure inside, goes around back and zips it open. However, the man's corpse tumbles out, startling Doug. Immediately, Corey runs up behind him and throws his leather-jacket over his head. They fall to the ground, struggling, when Doug manages to punch Corey off of him. But Corey just runs off laughing, and disappears into the drainage pipe.

Now thoroughly pissed, Doug follows him through the pipe and into the main chamber. Saying that he knows that he killed Jeremy on purpose, he scans the chamber, trying to find him, eventually turning and seeing him standing on a ledge to his right. The two of them briefly stare at each other, both smirking, when Michael suddenly lunges at Doug. He grabs him by the throat and slams him against the wall, but Doug is able to fight him off and break free. Corey jumps down and attacks Doug, knocking him to the

ground. He then turns to Michael, who's lying on the ground, and asks him to show him how to kill. He yells at him to get up and Michael, with a lot of effort, does so, and removes his old butcher knife from where it's stuck in the wall. Doug runs at Corey from behind and hits him, but Corey manages to subdue, then hold him up from behind. Michael hobbles over and slashes at Doug's throat, causing him to collapse backwards onto Corey. Still holding Doug from underneath him, Corey watches as Michael brings the

knife back down onto Doug and appears to be rejuvenated by this act, as his slumping posture straightens up. He proceeds to stab Doug again and again, regaining more and more of his strength, all as Corey watches, before quickly getting to his feet once it's clear that Doug is dead.

The next major scene begins when Dr. Mathis brings Deb home for some late night escapades. After getting Alexa to play some mood music and busting out some champagne, Mathis points Deb to where the bedroom and bathroom are, offering to join her in the shower shortly. Deb finds a box with a silk bathrobe waiting for her in the bedroom, but just as she gets into it and turns on the shower, she hears a loud clang, along with Mathis yelling. Calling for him but getting no answer, and instead hearing more clattering, she turns the shower off. With no more music playing, she

goes through a sliding door in the bedroom that leads out into the courtyard with the swimming pool. Turning on the lights out there, she sees Corey, wearing the scarecrow mask he wore at the Halloween party, murdering Mathis by stabbing him in the throat while smothering him with a plastic bag. Deb screams and Corey, in turn, tosses Mathis' corpse aside and runs at her. She manages to get back inside and slam the sliding door on his hand when he reaches in at her. Recoiling and yelling in pain, he angrily bangs his hands against the glass, while Deb

runs back into the bathroom and grabs her cellphone. She attempts to call the police, looking around the corner at the door, as Corey stops pounding it. Just as soon as the 911 operator answers on the other end, Michael appears behind Deb. She barely has enough time to turn around and see him before he stomps towards her, grabs her by the throat and slams her up against a painting on the wall in the bedroom. Corey, watching from outside as he lifts Deb up, unwraps his bandaged hand. Michael glances at him, then turns

back to Deb, raises his knife, and stabs her right in the gut, pinning her to the wall behind her. While watching all of this, Corey places his bloody, wounded palm on the sliding door's glass, smiling evilly. The next morning, following his and Allyson's confrontation with Willy the Kid at the radio station, Corey awakens in the abandoned Allen house and has his tense exchange with Laurie. After she leaves while he's talking, he destroys the grand piano that's still there in a rage. He heads out to the underpass,

calling Allyson and telling her that they need to leave Haddonfield that night, as well as lies and says that Laurie wants to kill him. Heading into Michael's lair, he fights with him for the mask and, while it takes a few seconds, does manage to subdue him, take it, and crawl out with it. Once he's left, Michael does his classic sit-up and glances back out the tunnel, confirming that he now sees Corey as a target.

At the gas station, Terry and his friends come out to find the word "PSYCHO" scratched into the hood of the former's car. They see Corey nearby on his motorcycle, and he looks at them and rides off, prompting them to pile into the car and chase him down. He lures them to the salvage yard, where the only person currently there is Ronald, who's in the office, watching Hard Target. The bullies drive in, park, and get out, looking for Corey, unaware that the gate they came through is being closed and locked. Finding his motorcycle, Terry opts to chain it to his

car and drag it down the road. Billy runs back to the car, but when Terry yells for him to drive it up to the bike, he gets no response. Running back to the car to see what the holdup is, Terry is horrified when he finds Billy dead, a drumstick jammed in his eye. He tells the girls what happened, when a pair of headlights suddenly illuminates them, sending them both running for the gate as a tow-truck drives after them. Finding the gate locked, Stacey climbs over it, but when Margo tries to follow suit, she gets run down and pinned below it. While Terry runs to the

office to get help, Stacy tries to help Margo, when Corey gets out of the trunk, wielding a lug wrench, and walks around to the other side, where he surprises and kills Stacey. In the office, Ronald gives Terry a shotgun, before arming himself with a Magnum and heading outside to see what's going on. Seeing and hearing Margo yell for help as she's trapped beneath the gate, Ronald runs to her aid. However, as he tries to calm her down, he turns to his right to see Corey standing there, wearing his mechanic coveralls and

holding Michael's mask in his hand. While Ronald is sitting there, stunned to see this, Terry comes running out, aiming the shotgun at Corey. Ronald tries to stop him, but stands up right in the line of fire and gets blasted through the head. After he falls back onto the ground, Corey disappears from where he was standing. Terry comes running and finds not only Ronald but Stacey's brutalized body. And when he lets his guard down while trying to help Margo, Corey, now wearing the mask, comes up behind him, takes the gun from him, and clocks him in the head with it. He proceeds to light up a welder's torch and finish Terry off by putting it in his mouth, as Margo watches. After killing her by smashing her head in with his foot, Corey drives off in the tow-truck, running her over for good measure.

Corey next goes to his home, walks through the front door, and passes by the living room, where Joan is watching a cooking show. As she talks, thinking it's Ronald, he goes into the kitchen, pulls a butcher knife out of the drawer, and walks into the living room, coming up behind the chair she's sitting in. Joan sees his reflection in a glass cabinet across from her and turns around and screams when she sees him standing there, holding the knife in the air. The film cuts to the WURG station, where Willy the Kid is taking call-in requests. While listening to a woman admonish him

for exploiting Haddonfield's past tragedies, he's oblivious to Corey pulling up outside in his tow-truck. He gets out and walks around to the main entrance, past Willy's window. Willy puts on some music, as Corey walks through the door and confronts the receptionist. Unaware that his receptionist is being murdered in the next room, Willy sits there and grooves to the music. Corey comes into the room behind him, grabs and subdues him, then brutally smashes his face into the console, dislocating his lower jaw and knocking out a bunch of teeth, before

cutting off his tongue with those scissors. He leaves Willy laying face-first on the console, his tongue sitting on the rotating record, causing the music to continually skip. Elsewhere in town, Allyson goes to meet up with Corey at the diner. She does notice the interference with the music while listening to her car's radio, but turns it off and goes inside. After waiting for Corey for a long time, only for him to never show, she goes to his home and knocks on the door, not realizing that the reason why she gets no response is

because Joan is lying dead inside. She sends Corey some texts, asking him where he is and clearly feels that something is wrong, while at Laurie's home, her grandmother, after having tried to call her, turns out the lights. She goes upstairs, into her office, carrying a bottle of liquor and a glass, and lights a jack-o-lantern sitting on a shelf. Taking another drink at her desk, and ordering the papers of her memoir, she retrieves a gun from a small safe, then takes her phone and reports a suicide to the police. Ripping off

her necklace, as well as taking off her coat and draping it over the back of a chair, she takes the gun and puts it to her temple. She then turns around, putting the gun under her chin this time, and walks by the jack-o-lantern. Lurking outside the door, Corey hears a gunshot and sees something splatter against the wall. He then edges the door open, only to see the blown apart jack-o-lantern lying on the floor. When he looks up, he sees Laurie aiming the gun right at him.

She shoots him twice, sending him tumbling back through the stair railing and crashing to the floor below. He removes the mask, as Laurie comes down the stairs, walks around him, grabs him by his hair, and shoots the last two bullets into the wall by the stairs. Emptying the spent cases out of the gun and dropping it, she tells him, "You came here to kill me, so do it." Corey takes the discarded butcher knife, but then hears Allyson pull up outside. Smiling and laughing evilly at Laurie, who says Allyson would never be with him, Corey proceeds to ensure that her

granddaughter will never speak to her again by stabbing himself in the throat. He collapses back on the floor, convulsing, and Laurie impulsively grabs and pulls the knife out, just as Allyson comes through the door. Seeing this, she immediately concludes that it was Laurie's doing. Crying at how Corey is apparently dead, she lets out an anguished scream at her grandmother and heads out the door, crying. Laurie then collapses in the doorway between the kitchen and the foyer, looking at her empty gun and clearly wishing she still had bullets left in it. Allyson

drives off outside, when Laurie looks and notices that a door off to her right is slightly open. In the foyer, Michael takes his mask back, then walks over to Corey and reaches for his knife. Corey, still not dead, grabs his hand, preventing him from taking the knife, when Michael grabs his face with both hands. Laurie hears this from the doorway and closes and locks the side door, while Michael, after some struggling from Corey, snaps his neck. Laurie walks across the length

of the kitchen, as Michael, now holding the knife, stands over Corey, then turns his attention to the hallway leading to the kitchen. Elsewhere, Allyson finds that the radio station is burning. She then receives a call from Hawkins, telling her that they got a call from Laurie about a suicide.

Michael walks into the dark kitchen, where Laurie is hiding in a small closet, behind a door with a screened window. He's drawn to something being heated up inside the microwave, when Laurie, noticing that the cap on a window blind string next to her is tapping against the wall, stops it. This catches Michael's attention, and he walks towards the door, holding his knife in the stabbing position. He reaches for the knob, when the thing in the microwave suddenly bursts loudly, distracting him. Laurie then kicks the door open, knocking him back, and swings a small

fire extinguisher at him. She knocks the knife out of his hand and whacks him in the face, but he blocks another swing, then grabs and slams her onto the kitchen island. He grabs her by the hair, wrenches her head back, and smashes her face into a glass cabinet, before flinging her to the floor. He puts his foot on her throat, attempting to choke her, but she manages to kick him in the other leg hard enough to make him get off. She tries to get up and escape, but he grabs her, slams her into the refrigerator, and throws her into the counter by the sink. Grabbing her and

wrenching her up, he forces her over to the sink. She tries to grab a small knife in it, but is unable to, as Michael flips on the garbage disposal. He attempts to stick her hand into it but, at the very last minute, she flings her head back, hitting him in the face. He stumbles back, but then grabs her by the neck and throws her across the island. She lands on the other side, quickly grabs a nearby knitting needle from a basket full of balls of yarn, and waits for him to come around the island. She gets up and comes at him with

the needle, but he grabs her, forces her down onto the island, and jams it into her ear. Screaming in pain, she grabs and pulls at his mask, distracting him to where he stops to readjust it. She manages to pull the needle out, then grabs his knife from the floor and stabs him right in the left hand, impaling it to the island. As he's unable to move, she smashes him in the face, and when he grabs her in retaliation, she forces him down onto the island, then climbs up and pins him there, takes another knife from a drawer in its side, and

sticks him in the chest. He stops moving for a second, and Laurie tries to catch her breath, when he knocks her off and she stumbles back against the fridge. He reaches for her, only for her to stick the knife, which came loose from his chest, through his right palm and force it back onto the island. Taking a nearby frying pan, she uses it as a makeshift hammer and drives it all the way through his hand and into the wood. Now basically crucified to it, Michael continues struggling

to free himself, when Laurie turns the fridge over onto him, pinning his left leg. Finally, she takes one last knife and, after showing it to him, stabs him in his right armpit, driving it deep, and rips it out. As he lies there, still moving but not as violently, she removes his mask, takes the knife, and slits his throat.

As blood gushes out of his slashed throat, Michael suddenly rips his right hand through the knife and grabs Laurie by the throat. She wheezes as he starts to choke her, but rather than fight back, she instead seems to accept her fate and tells him, "Do it. Do it!" Flashes of her past encounters with him run through her mind, ending with when Allyson sliced into his hand to stop him from pulling Karen back down into Laurie's basement. And right then, just as Laurie is about to let herself die, Allyson comes running in, rips Michael's hand loose, and breaks his arm. She

tells Laurie, "I'm not gonna let this happen to you," and with that, Laurie takes Michael's hand and slits his wrist, leading to him bleeding out completely and finally dying. Outside, Hawkins runs ahead of the arriving police units and enters the front door. Finding Corey's body in the foyer, he and the others head down the hall to the kitchen, where they find Laurie and Allyson standing over Michael's corpse. Laurie tells Hawkins that Michael's dead, but Allyson adds, "Not dead enough." With that, in the next scene, they strap Michael's corpse to the top of Allyson's car,

despite the protests of the other cops. They say they intend for this to be an act of healing for Haddonfield, but the cops still say this isn't how things are done. However, Sheriff Barker arrives and tells them, "It is tonight." Everyone gets in their cars and they begin the procession to the salvage yard, joined by more and more townspeople, who either drive in their own vehicles or walk on foot. Once there, everyone gathers around the car, lift up Michael's corpse, and pass him over to the industrial shredder. Laurie walks

up to where he lies, and when Allyson switches the machine on, she pushes him into it. The shredder completely tears him apart until literally nothing is left. As the movie then wraps up, Laurie finishes her memoir, writing about the disposal, adding, "There would be no tombstone, no memorial. The mysteries would be put to bed, and the story, as we told it, was to fade with time... The events of Haddonfield, that created so much violence and bloodshed, finally had resolved. New beginnings lay ahead. Fear moves

through all of us, and we decide when to surrender." At the same time, we see her reconciliation with Allyson, and the latter leaving Haddonfield for good, while Laurie finds Hawkins waiting for her outside her house, having brought her some vegetables. As the two of them sit outside on her front step, the movie ends with several random shots of the house's interiors, with the last one being Laurie's office, where it's revealed that she's kept Michael's mask.

Ironically, for a movie with the word "ends" in the title, the ending was something that changed both during the writing process and filming. A number of endings initially considered were significantly bleaker than the one they settled on, ranging from Laurie committing suicide and Corey rejecting the evil after getting his first taste of murder, to Corey surviving, getting away with his crimes, and convincing Allyson to join him on a cross-country killing spree. Then, when they were shooting, they originally had Michael completely transfer his evil into Laurie before dying,

and she ultimately became a total recluse again upon realizing this. As a result, her and Allyson's final scene took place at her front door, with Laurie being wary of letting her in the house. But after assembling a rough cut, the filmmakers decided to go for a more optimistic ending and re-shot it to what we now have.

Sad to say, but I think Halloween Ends may have the least memorable score of the trilogy. Not that John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, and Daniel Davies don't do good work again, because they certainly do, but it doesn't quite grab me the way the music in the previous movies do. Once again, we get another nice new version of the main theme, this one a bit more low-key than the one we got in Halloween 2018 but with more tempo to it than the main one for Kills. In the actual film, the theme is first heard when we see the drainage pipe, played on a low, strumming guitar, and it's heard again when Corey helps Michael kill Doug, starting out very simply on the piano, but growing a harder, more rock-like edge when Michael starts to re-energize from the stabbing. Finally, we get a pretty epic-sounding version for the montage of clips from the original and the last two movies when Laurie is being strangled by Michael, and the theme, naturally, closes out the ending credits as well. For the first time in the trilogy, we hear the traditional Laurie's Theme from the original, which plays during her monologue at the beginning and the montage from the previous movies, inter-mixed with horrific sounds for the clips of Michael's grisly actions. They also come up with a leitmotif for Corey, which is this sort of melancholic piano theme that you hear when he's first infected by the evil and also plays when he and Michael kill Dr. Mathis and Deb. However, the piece of original music here that I like the most is when Corey kills the bullies at the salvage yard, which is this very eerie main theme accompanied by some hard rock sounds. Laurie and Michael's fight is scored by music that, rather than being full-on energetic and pulse-pounding, is more nihilistic and hopeless-sounding, but does still fit with the action. The "procession" scene is scored with a classic, Carpenter synthesizer sound, culminating in some pounding notes for when Michael's body is destroyed. And the final scene between Laurie and Hawkins is scored to a very soft, sweet melody.

While the previous two movies began with score, the first thing you hear when this one begins is the intro for the WURG radio station, followed by Midnight Monsters Hop by Jack and Jim during the studio logos, first bit of credits, and when Corey arrives at the Allen house. Very fittingly, a crazy song called Halloween by the Dead Kennedys plays during the Halloween party scene. There are also several memorable songs that play during scenes involving Allyson and Corey: Come 2 Me by Johnny Goth when he takes her home after they've run into Doug at the diner, and Burn It Down by Boy Harsher for when the two of them drive out to the radio station (a remix version plays during the ending credits). And finally, Don't Fear the Reaper plays at the top of the ending credits, another nice circle back around to the original Halloween.

Like the other, more off-the-beaten path entries in the series, Halloween Ends will likely get a reappraisal at some point and gain more fans, but will also likely remain very divisive. Given how imperfect this trilogy is overall, it's kind of fitting that the finale wouldn't be an absolute slam-dunk, but you'd also hope it would at least get as much praise as Halloween 2018. But, as I've said, I applaud the filmmakers for deciding to do something different, and I think there is a lot to like here. You have good actors giving good performances, with Jamie Lee Curtis and Rohan Campbell especially nailing it; the writing of the characters and the humor are much improved from the two previous movies; it's, again, very well-made on a technical front; it has some good makeup effects, albeit not nearly as many memorable kills as in the previous two movies; and there are some thrilling setpieces, particularly the climax. However, as much as I admire the direction they chose for the story, I also think it might've been better to do this as its own thing, and even as it is, they don't entirely stick the landing with it. Also, Michael Myers himself isn't utilized nearly as much as or as well you'd want, especially given what we've already seen in this trilogy; Allyson becomes rather unlikable during the third act; the music score, while still well-done, isn't as memorable as what came before; and finally, as fun as I think it is, what you come to this movie to see is executed in such a way that it does feel like something of an afterthought. To sum up, I think the movie does have merit, but you have to know who you are and have some vague idea of what you're getting before going into it to appreciate it; otherwise, you will likely be pissed off.