Halloween Ends (2022) (1 Viewer)

[TravisR]

Spoiler: spoiler

Then, I laughed out loud because I kidded earlier in the thread here, they could run him through a woodchipper and they actually do, ha! I thought that was the most hilarious finale they could have used.

I laughed when I saw your very accurate guess.

Two things in the movie strike me as deliberately and darkly funny.

Spoiler

One is Michael being ground up at the end because it makes sense if someone is looking to be really sure that he's not going to come back. The other is the asshole kid falling in the background at the beginning of the movie.

Those two things remind me that the people who worked on the movie do f-ed up comedies.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

I laughed when I saw your very accurate guess.

Two things in the movie strike me as deliberately and darkly funny.

Spoiler

One is Michael being ground up at the end because it makes sense if someone is looking to be really sure that he's not going to come back. The other is the asshole kid falling in the background at the beginning of the movie.

Those two things remind me that the people who worked on the movie do f-ed up comedies.

Yes, that ending, which was foreshadowed, had me thinking this had to be meant to be funny. I did think for most of the film that the big joke they were going to play was the idea they would give the audience a pat ending. I thought they were building toward leaving things open to a new beginning. That seemed to be the game they were playing and having the story be about Laurie, her granddaughter, and her boyfriend. I mean you could say that like two thirds of the movie is not even a horror movie. It is sort of an angsty drama about people that are outsiders and how that had molded them into what they are.

I am also old enough to have gone to see Halloween III Season of the Witch at the cinema and recall the reaction to it. The catch phrase after the movie being people saying "That was like making a Jaws movie with no shark!" and here I was watching this thinking we are an hour in and there is no Michael Meyers yet.

That felt intentional to me as they started the picture with the Halloween III titles font and then here they are doing the same thing and making a movie without Michael Meyers. Of course Michael shows up but this is not at all his film. This film is really about Cory, Allyson, Laurie and Frank. Their lives and romances. Oddly, I thought they did that side of this pretty well but I did wonder "Are they intentionally trying to screw with Michael Myers fans?"

I thought this was a better written film than both of the first two parts of this trilogy as I was actually pulled in and involved with the characters and story. However, I also felt that this film was probably rewritten and I do wonder if they ever had an ending or they just ran out of time and threw that ending on this.

If this was just a separate film unrelated to the Halloween franchise I would have thought "Where did that ending come from?" because it seemed to have nothing to do with what they were doing with story and characters for 2/3's of the film.

However, since this was a Halloween film, I was thinking "How are they going to bring Michael into this?" and the truth is they really don't. The way they bring him in was as if they suddenly realized "OMG we forgot all about Michael and we were supposed to put him in this picture!"

Then they threw out the last 20 minutes of their script and wrote a fight between Laurie and Michael and the bizarre ending and just said "We'll just go with this!"

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

Here's how I think this trilogy should be viewed:

Halloween - This is basically a fun reintroduction to the universe of the films. It is not a sequel to the first film because in the first film Laurie and Michael are not brother and sister. So, this is really a sequel to and based upon Halloween II. It is mostly a film to establish how badly Laurie remains traumatized by her encounter with Michael Myers as a high school kid.

Halloween Kills - OK, this is really the ultimate Michael Meyers film for fans, maybe in the entire franchise, because it just features Michael killing his way through Haddonfield. This to me seems like the picture Meyers fans would dream of.

Halloween Ends - This is not a Michael Meyers film and is about a group of other characters. Michael is really the fifth most important character in this film. He is brought into the story just to provide an ending for him. It's not the best ending, it does not make a lot of sense, and it is sort of funny.

The problem with Michael as a character and keeping him interesting for however many films he was in is that he is like the alien in the Alien films. He does not speak and basically just does the same thing over and over. So, I think there is always an urge by people making the films to bring in other characters that do speak to juice up the story. In the Alien franchise we end up with David and in this we get Cory. You can do other things with those characters but when you do that it does diminish your monster.

 

[TravisR]

That felt intentional to me as they started the picture with the Halloween III titles font and then here they are doing the same thing and making a movie without Michael Meyers. Of course Michael shows up but this is not at all his film. This film is really about Cory, Allyson, Laurie and Frank. Their lives and romances. Oddly, I thought they did that side of this pretty well but I did wonder "Are they intentionally trying to screw with Michael Myers fans?"

I wish the movie had more with Laurie and Frank because that stuff was interesting. Frank was killed in the 2018 movie, they 'revived' him for Kills and made him more interesting by giving him a friendship with Laurie and also involving him in Michael's 1978 rampage and then basically wasted his character in Ends by only using him in a couple of scenes. Laurie and Allyson lost a loved one in Kills and it's barely a blip in the new movie. Lindsay Wallace was almost killed and a bunch of her friends died in Kills and she has two scenes. They had potential stories for the existing characters and they still tossed nearly all of it in favor of bringing in and heavily focusing on a new major character in the third movie of a trilogy. I appreciate the creative team's desire to have higher ambitions than the usual stalk and slash, to do something different and even to move slightly away from Michael but shoehorning Corey in when there were ways to do that without that character was the wrong move in my mind.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

**SOME SPOILERS**

So I rewatched it with the wife last night and I think I liked it less. The whole Cory storyline distracts from the main Laurie/Michael saga and it hurts the film imo. His character is just not that interesting. Definitely the weakest of the new trilogy.

Yeah, introducing and spending so much time on a new main character in the last movie of a trilogy was a major mistake in my opinion. Especially when the Laurie and Allyson characters were interesting enough to not require shoehorning a new character in there to begin with. MAYBE the Corey storyline could have worked if they hadn't killed off Cameron (Allyson's boyfriend) in the last movie and basically used him in that story but even that seems a stretch.

That negativity aside, I have to say that I loved

Spoiler

how they disposed of Michael's body. There's no coming back from that... until the inevitable reboot anyway.

So, at first I wondered if this Cory character was introduced in one of the other pictures but I guess based upon what everyone is saying he is a new character invented for Halloween Ends and oddly, he is the main character in Halloween Ends.

So, I guess the big question is why did they do that? Why when you are doing a big finale that essentially was going to be about ending the Michael and Laurie story bring a brand new character in and make that character the feature character in the film. It seemed like what happened was they wrote a couple different scripts and somehow maybe combined things from them. The weird part is:

Spoiler: Spoiler

The way they build up the Cory character I thought he was going to be important, and he is not. The prologue is about Cory, most of the story is about Cory, and then at the end they go "Oh, yeah we need Laurie and Michael to fight." and so Cory is quickly killed and the fight happens. Strange too that the Laurie and Michael fight at the end of the first film was more epic than the one in this final film.

To some extent I almost feel these three films are about universe building to create the possibility of making a TV show or something about the evil that haunts the town of Haddonfield. They kind of play that up in Kills and Ends like Haddonfield is a cursed town and there is more to it than Michael. However, it does not really go anywhere.

The truth is I liked this final entry the best out of the trilogy because it seemed much more compelling...well...until the end where they remembered they had to have Michael and Laurie face off.

I also thought that each picture was tonally very different. The first was kind of a revenge tale crossed with Halloween II, the second was an over the top, kind of comic, slasher film, and the last was a drama about oddball characters and what kind of draws them to each other.

I also feel these films do take a lot from the Alien pictures. In the first films Ripley and Laurie are victims fighting for their survival. In later films they are transformed into bad asses that are as dangerous as killers as the monsters that are after them.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

I wish the movie had more with Laurie and Frank because that stuff was interesting. Frank was killed in the 2018 movie, they 'revived' him for Kills and made him more interesting by giving him a friendship with Laurie and also involving him in Michael's 1978 rampage and then basically wasted his character in Ends by only using him in a couple of scenes. Laurie and Allyson lost a loved one in Kills and it's barely a blip in the new movie. Lindsay Wallace was almost killed and a bunch of her friends died in Kills and she has two scenes. They had potential stories for the existing characters and they still tossed nearly all of it in favor of bringing in and heavily focusing on a new major character in the third movie of a trilogy. I appreciate the creative team's desire to have higher ambitions than the usual stalk and slash, to do something different and even to move slightly away from Michael but shoehorning Corey in when there were ways to do that without that character was the wrong move in my mind.

I liked Frank and Laurie too and I like Will Patton as an actor and so that would have been cool if they did more with that. I have been reading and looking at reviews of the picture since watching it and it seems a lot of people did not like the Cory character, I thought it was a good character but definitely wondered why they made the last film his story when he had nothing to do with anything that came before. That almost seemed like someone had a script about a guy that has an accident while babysitting and they could not think of any way to continue the Laurie/Michael thing so they just used the Cory story so they had something to shoot and tacked a Laurie vs Michael fight on at the end.

I really liked the scene of Frank and Laurie in the grocery story and the way Frank throws his meat into the shopping cart. That cracked me up. I would have loved more Frank in the picture.

To me the best character in the Halloween universe was Loomis and I miss him being a part of it. If they reboot the whole thing I think the primary character should be Loomis, not Laurie.

 

[Malcolm R]

The director tries to explain the motivation for a new character, but I'm not sure it satisfies anyone:

https://ew.com/movies/halloween-ends-corey-jamie-lee-curtis/

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

The director tries to explain the motivation for a new character, but I'm not sure it satisfies anyone:

https://ew.com/movies/halloween-ends-corey-jamie-lee-curtis/

Interesting but yes, I don't think that makes sense as an explanation. Basically, I don't see the whole Michael/Laurie thing through the eyes of the Corey character. So, I do not think the story shows us that with "fresh eyes" because he is in it. Plus the Laurie/Michael thing just really remains the same. It is not new or different because Corey is dating Allyson.

It does seem to expand the take on the town of Haddonfield, I agree with that. We do see more of how the town itself is pretty F-ed up. In some ways Haddonfield seems to need a killer like Michael to put some of these people out of their misery.

I saw the addition of Corey as being done because the two main characters are geriatric. So, they want characters in the film that a younger audience can relate to. Hence, we get the romance between Corey and Allyson. For us older folks we have the romance between Frank and Laurie who eat a lot of vegetables to maintain a decent fiber intake...or at least that is what Laurie wants to encourage Frank to do.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

In looking at reviews and stuff last night I saw a video about the supposed original ending they wrote for this. It went like this:

Spoiler: spoiler sort of

Laurie kills Michael at the end but then to make sure he is dead they take the body to a funeral home and cremate it. However, before they slide Michael's body into the oven, Laurie looks into his eyes and when she does Michael's evil is passed into her. Then they cremate Michael. Once that is done Laurie and Allyson go home but Laurie, realizing she is turning evil and wants to kill Allyson, throws her out and tells her never to return to Haddonfield. Allyson fights this idea but Laurie slams the door on her and tells her to go before she can't stop herself.

Now, one of the big reasons I would not use that ending is. come on, Laurie is an elderly woman are we really supposed to think she is going to start killing people right and left? So, I can understand why they scrapped that ending.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

Another way to look at this trilogy is:

Halloween: The Laurie Movie

Halloween Kills: The Michael Movie

Halloween Ends: The Corey Movie

 

[Alex...]

https://collider.com/halloween-ends-heaviest-film-of-the-franchise/

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

https://collider.com/halloween-ends-heaviest-film-of-the-franchise/

I did not really find it depressing or heavy but it did portray the characters more in a down to earth way which maybe gave it more of a somber feel for some people.

 

[Michael Elliott]

I'm not sure if anyone here listens to the Danielle Harris / Taylor Scout-Compton podcast but this latest episode talks about them going to the premier and living out their dream of meeting Jamie Lee Curtis. I won't spoil what happened but you might want to give it a listen.

 

[Alex...]

In celebration of Halloween, Myers is revealing his face to the world...

Spoiler

 

[Colin Jacobson]

Sorry if someone already mentioned it, but does anyone else suspect the name "Corey Cunningham" was a nod to the way that the Corey character echoes - to me, at least - the path taken with the "Friday the 13th" movies?

Those movies kinda tried to have another character take over Jason's mantle like Corey sorta does with MM.

Corey Feldman played the character who went nuts, and Sean Cunningham was the Big Boss behind the series.

Agree? Or am I reading too much into this?

 

[TravisR]

Sorry if someone already mentioned it, but does anyone else suspect the name "Corey Cunningham" was a nod to the way that the Corey character echoes - to me, at least - the path taken with the "Friday the 13th" movies?

Those movies kinda tried to have another character take over Jason's mantle like Corey sorta does with MM.

Corey Feldman played the character who went nuts, and Sean Cunningham was the Big Boss behind the series.

Agree? Or am I reading too much into this?

The creative team clearly knows the Halloween movies so it wouldn't be hard to imagine that they would also know the Friday movies and give a nod to them too. Personally, I just assumed that Cunningham was a nod to Sean S. Cunningham but the Corey might just be a coincidence.

 

[Tommy R]

Sorry if someone already mentioned it, but does anyone else suspect the name "Corey Cunningham" was a nod to the way that the Corey character echoes - to me, at least - the path taken with the "Friday the 13th" movies?

Those movies kinda tried to have another character take over Jason's mantle like Corey sorta does with MM.

Corey Feldman played the character who went nuts, and Sean Cunningham was the Big Boss behind the series.

Agree? Or am I reading too much into this?

I didn’t think about this on my own, but I totally believe it! Nice catch!

 

[TravisR]

Sorry if someone already mentioned it, but does anyone else suspect the name "Corey Cunningham" was a nod to the way that the Corey character echoes - to me, at least - the path taken with the "Friday the 13th" movies?

Those movies kinda tried to have another character take over Jason's mantle like Corey sorta does with MM.

Corey Feldman played the character who went nuts, and Sean Cunningham was the Big Boss behind the series.

Agree? Or am I reading too much into this?

Coincidentally, I saw an article last night talking about the parallels between Christine and Halloween Ends and I realized that the Cunningham name is a nod to Christine's owner, Arnie Cunningham. So scratch what I said earlier about it being a Sean Cunningham reference.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

Coincidentally, I saw an article last night talking about the parallels between Christine and Halloween Ends and I realized that the Cunningham name is a nod to Christine's owner, Arnie Cunningham. So scratch what I said earlier about it being a Sean Cunningham reference.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

The creative team clearly knows the Halloween movies so it wouldn't be hard to imagine that they would also know the Friday movies and give a nod to them too. Personally, I just assumed that Cunningham was a nod to Sean S. Cunningham but the Corey might just be a coincidence.

It all could be coincidence, but that was just my guess.