Halloween Ends (2022)

If you loved Halloween Ends then you should probably just skip this review entirely. I really disliked it, although my hopes weren’t that high after also disliking Halloween Kills, and I will specify my reasons here. But before I do that, as divisive as this film has proven to be, let me say that a) I don’t dislike a film for doing something different, and b) I don’t judge any Halloween film based on the screentime for Michael Myers. A lot of people have already labelled detractors of this movie as typical genre fanboys who cannot accept change (there have been a lot of tiresome exclamations of “5cream was so right”). I am sure some viewers have their mindset stuck in that rut, but others may have valid criticisms of a film that seems to undo whatever this trilogy, and it is hard to even call it a trilogy at this point, was aiming for.

Things start well. The shadow of Michael Myers still looms large, and young Corey (Rohan Campbell) is a babysitter who finds his evening ending in the worst possible way. Skip forward by a few years, Corey is trying to get on with his life. His reputation precedes him though, sadly. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, as if you need reminding) had meanwhile somehow found a state of peace, helped by the fact that she is now writing down her story. Her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), lives with her, and hangs about until she starts to become interested in Corey. Resentment burns through the young couple, a fire so strong that they wouldn’t mind seeing Haddonfield turned to ash, and Corey may be unable to contain his rage. And then there’s Michael Myers, coming perilously close to living the last of his days out as a Chris Farley character, ready to regain his energy enough for another showdown with Laurie. Because we were all shown it in the trailer, and those involved in these films pretend to be daring only until they revert to the fan-pleasing scenes they inevitably squeeze into each instalment.

The biggest problem here is a script that seems to want viewers to forget everything that we saw in the last movie. Remember the mob mentality that was immensely damaging to a town unable to heal its wounds? That’s gone. The grit and awareness of Laurie, someone who lived their life ever-ready for a battle they knew was always upcoming? Gone. Individuals defined by their encounters with the boogeyman? Yes, the leads still have that aspect, but everyone else seems to have moved on in a way that totally dismisses the past few years. Paul Brad Logan and Chris Bernier both join Danny McBride and director David Gordon Green in the writing department for this finale, but it’s difficult to pin any blame on them. This franchise “reinvigoration” has been in the hands of McBride and Green since it first started to take shape (no pun intended), and this fumbled ending shows that they never really considered how to make something consistent and cohesive.

There are some interesting choices made here, not least of which is the focus on Corey, but Green and co. are unable to commit to those choices. They don’t do right by the interesting idea at the heart of this, which should have been a study of a community making a whole new boogeyman, and subsequently waste the opportunity to also give Curtis more to do, while her character could have been the only one to see, and perhaps try to heal, the potential damage that she could see happening to someone not already beyond saving. This may have also helped to maintain a sense of the menacing presence of Myers, a character who can cause almost as much terror and tension by being offscreen as he can when on the rampage, instead of sidelining him and having his infrequent appearances feel ever so slightly patronizing.

The things that work are the things that work in every Halloween movie. Curtis, the music, and the quiet streets of Haddonfield. And I have to say that Campbell was a great choice to play Corey. Oh, and the opening title sequence is superb, and would have been even better if certain elements had been used more effectively (see last paragraph), which I do think was their initial aim. Sadly, nothing else feels good enough. There are only one or two impressive “bodycount” moments, the wild plot tangents aren’t taken far enough, and the predictable and inevitable ending is, by this point, just sadly laughable and pathetic. Poor Andi Matichak is also a negative, her flat performance not helped in the slightest by a script that asks her to do nothing more than fall very quickly for a boy who never really gives her a good enough reason to stick around and put faith in him. Which can happen in real life, I know, but it doesn’t help this movie.

Being divisive isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and many artists would prefer that you love or hate something they have done, as opposed to just sitting right in the middle, so I am still pleased to see that this has created so much discussion and passion. I have heard, and understood, people who really liked the decisions made here. I just strongly disagree, and I think this review clearly explains why I feel the way I do.

I will never bring myself to absolutely hate any Halloween movie, it is my favourite horror movie franchise (despite so few of the films being great), but this sits alongside Halloween Kills, for me, as the worst of the lot. I am glad this “era” is over, and I hope whoever has the next crack at it will take a bit more care, or at least be willing to move much further away from the comfort zone collage of nods, winks, and fan-service that we had here.

4/10

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Prime Time: Assimilate (2019)

Zach Henderson and Randy Foster are two young men who decide to film life in and around their small town, trying to get a piece of that YouTube fame (or whatever generic video uploading site is standing in for it). Nothing happens in their town, or so they think. Some new bugs have arrived, bugs that bite people. And once someone is bitten, it’s only a matter of time until they change. With everyone radically changing around them, Zach and Randy end up teaming up with Kayla, desperately trying to avoid assimilation while they figure out the best way to fight back against what looks very much like an invasion of creatures that snatch/swap bodies. Because, yes, this is a teen-friendly reworking of Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers.

Director John Murlowski is an odd figure. His filmography covers a wide range of movies, from one of the many Amityville series entries to the infamous Santa With Muscles, and he has helmed a couple of movies that have pleasantly surprised me (including that Amityville movie). This premise seems like an easy one to get right, and Murlowski does a good job with the material, working from a script that he co-wrote with Steven Palmer Peterson. It’s far from perfect, and may be the least of the films based on this material, but it’s tense and entertaining throughout.

The life cycle of the invader is pieced together well, with characters figuring things out as they face increasingly immediate threats, and the way the town is overtaken is impressively quick and plausible. People are changed, that’s obvious, but the aim is to get the new creations outnumbering the original humans as quickly as possible, and a lot of the changes happening so brazenly make things seem more ridiculous when our leads try to convince others of odd happenings.

Joel Courtney and Calum Worth do well in their roles, playing Zach and Randy, and they come across as likeable enough throughout, even when doing the whole “let’s film everything around us and comment on it” spiel that could have easily been built up to turn this into a painful found footage take on the material, and I am very glad that route wasn’t taken. Andi Matichak is equally good in the role of Kayla, a character also given a little brother to try and protect, just to up the stakes, and all three leads are served well by the script. Some of the supporting players have to overdo the change from normal to blank slate, but Cam Gigandet stands out as a local Sheriff who may or may not end up being a dangerous enemy.

Although I didn’t love this, I liked it well enough. And I like it more when I think of the choices made for what NOT to do. No doing the whole found footage thing is a big plus. Not cramming the film with songs to help sell any accompanying soundtrack album. Having the special effects used pretty sparingly, and therefore making them more effective. There are other films in which these things - format, FX work, banging tunes - can, and have, been used to great effect, but this feels like everything was done to make the film teen-friendly without moving too far away from the simplistic brilliance of the central concept. It features youths at the heart of it all, but never dumbs things down or tries to be “too cool for school”. And the third act adds one or two pleasant surprises.

6/10

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Halloween Kills (2021)

Here's a bit of a shocker. I wasn't a big fan of Halloween (2018). Despite my problems with it, however, it was impossible for me to deny that it was an attempt to set right a franchise that had so often gone off into choppy waters, to put it mildly. Halloween Kills is worse than the film that preceded it. The big surprise is that I think it is arguably worse than every film that preceded it. 

Following on immediately from the end of the previous film, Halloween Kills is the tale of Michael Myers getting out of a burning house and killing a whole load of people on his way to wherever he may want to be heading. Is that wherever Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is? Is it his childhood home? Is it somewhere he can face off against an angry mob who rally around the chant that "evil dies tonight"? Wherever it is, events are interrupted by numerous flashbacks to scenes that show the aftermath of that fateful night all those years ago. The night he came home.

David Gordon Green is back in the director's chair again, and he co-wrote the script with Danny McBride and Scott Teems (the former also returning to the same role he had on the last film). So let me start by saying what this film gets right. Entertaining scenes of mayhem and death. This feels like the Halloween movie with the biggest bodycount yet, and the kills have a decent mix of variety and brutality. Michael Myers is as unstoppable as ever when he's all revved up for a major killing spree. 

The other thing the film gets right is the score, making plenty use of classic music cues in the right places.

That's it. That's all this movie gets right, and that's why it manages to do what I thought was impossible, become a new low point for the series.

Now let's go through the many things that the film gets wrong. 

The cast. They're either not that good (Andi Matichak still fails to make much of an impression as young Allyson, granddaughter of the legend that is Laurie Strode), unceremoniously sidelined because they need to be held back for the next - final - instalment (Jamie Lee Curtis), or forced to make one bad decision after another on the way to an ending that treats them as badly as any minor supporting character. This applies to Judy Greer, Robert Longstreet, and Anthony Michael Hall, among others. The fact that Hall is playing Tommy Doyle, joined here by Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards reprising her role), makes the misuse of his character arguably more egregious than the misuse of any other characters.

The many nods to other movies that everyone wants to pretend doesn't exist in this timeline. This has been a pet peeve of mine before, but it's even worse this time when so many details seem to have been included for fans to point out as nods to previous visits to Haddonfield.

Leading on from the previous point, there is almost no scene in Halloween Kills that doesn't highlight either some dialogue, character, or scene from the 1978 movie. It makes up what feels like the majority of the runtime, and it's bloody infuriating. This is a film that shows a flashback of Michael Myers clambering over a car just to allow the film-makers to feel smug when they show a near-identical shot of Michael Myers clambering over a car. There is a big difference between dropping in references to please fans and making your film little more than a collage of those references.

The many scenes that are supposed to show the events of Haddonfield in the 1970s generally look well, but they are a) totally unnecessary, and b) full of choices made by people who wanted to recreate certain moments and characters without considering whether or not they should. This leads to intrusive camerawork and some terrible audio that can take viewers out of the movie.

Any commentary on trauma and mob mentality is undermined by the weak script. Why bring so many characters back if you’re only going to use them to make the same mistakes that everyone makes in these movies? They even mistake someone else for Michael Myers, which I think it the third or fourth time that idea has been used in these movies. There are individual moments that have characters showing how affected they have been by the night that terrified the entire town, but they are disappointingly brief. And none of the mob mentality stuff works, with no real feeling of “angry villagers with torches” ever coming close to actually causing a problem for the monster they want to drive away.

Halloween Kills has worked for a hell of a lot of people, and it seems to have been a big hit at the box office already, so you may end up at the opposite end of the spectrum from me. Some people have heard the film criticised and wondered what viewers were expecting. I’ll tell you. All this had to do was be true to the characters, true to the idea of making it a worthwhile story branching directly from the events of the original movie, and full of good kills. At least the kills are good. 

Sadly, any other film in the series manages to do what it sets out to do better than this, which even keeps our favourite scream queen so far away from most main scenes that it’s akin to watching a cut of Aliens re-edited to keep Ripley in stasis for most of the runtime.

Worst. Halloween. Ever. (so far)

4/10

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Shudder Saturday: Son (2021)

I've only seen one other film from writer-director Ivan Kavanagh, but that film is one I still praise to this day, the superb psychological horror The Canal. Seeing his name pop up at the start of Son immediately piqued my interest. I had no idea what the film was actually about, although knowing what you're getting into isn't necessarily a bad thing, certainly not in this instance anyway.

Andi Matichak plays Laura, mother to a young boy named David (Luke David Blumm). When she is disturbed one evening by a number of people seemingly standing around David while he sleeps, Laura calls the police, which is how she comes to meet an officer named Paul (Emile Hirsch). As nerves start to abate slightly, David then falls into a disturbing physical state, becoming ill in a way that mystifies the nearby hospital and staff. Laura will do anything to make her son better and keep him safe, but that may mean confronting her troubled past, including David's father.

Although it starts off with more than a little sense of mystery, Son is a film that very quickly puts its cards on the table. It actually sits comfortably within one particular subgenre, although fair play to Kavanagh for dressing it up in a way that allows it to feel a bit removed from the norm for a number of scenes. Once the end credits roll, it's not hard to think back over what you've just watched and evaluate it entirely as another psychological horror, especially when you consider the delicate mental state of the main character through most of it.

Matichak is a very solid lead, and gets to show off even more of her talent than she did in Halloween (2018). It helps that she also works well with young Blumm, who has to spend a number of scenes ensuring he looks ill and in the midst of numerous throes of pain. Hirsch is required to do the least of the three leads, and he works better when alongside the other two than when separated from them, but he's perfectly fine in his role. It is, however, the only recent role of his that I could easily imagine being better with someone else in his place. Hirsch is someone I enjoy seeing onscreen, but he does better portraying characters who can still have a bit of naivete about them.

Sadly, Kavanagh makes things a bit too unambiguous and obvious early on, something that he then continues to do right through to the very end of the film. That's a shame, and it's a misjudgement on his part that stops the film from ever being as good as it could be. Despite his best efforts, everything feels predictable and slightly disappointing when you realise that there aren't going to be any major surprises. Mind you, it's definitely not a bad film, and I still look forward to seeing Kavanagh's name appear on anything that I check out.

6/10

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Halloween (2018)

Horror fans. At heart, we're easily pleased, according to some anyway. And we're an optimistic lot, at least when it comes to films that aren't cynical remakes. Time and time again, we have been given assurances about remakes and reboots. This time they're going to get things right. It's going back to the spirit of the original. This will be a film for the fans. And that's what we were told with Halloween. Indeed, early word on the film was fantastic, and a lot of fans are very happy with it. I am just not too sure what they have seen in it that I have missed.

Here's the plot. When a couple of true-crime podcasters get to visit Michael Myers in the sanitarium that has been his home for forty years they do their best to get a reaction from him, seemingly to no avail. The podcasters then go to visit Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis returning to her iconic role), now living a sheltered existence, staying locked inside her own home, to the detriment of her relationship with her daughter (Karen, played by Judy Greer) and her granddaughter (Allyson, played by Andi Matichak). And it's only a short while from then until Michael *gasp* escapes and *shock* heads to find Laurie once again.

Okay, there's something off about Halloween that I can't put my finger on. Something to do with the way that those involved insisted it would work as a sequel to the original film, while ignoring all of the other movies that came along after it, yet not quite nailing a consistent tone throughout, not seeming to handle the manners of Michael correctly, and not managing to give fans a finale worthy of the wait. What should have been a potential last hurrah ends up instead being a bit of an eye-roll and a shrug.

Director David Gordon Green doesn't do a bad job when he allows himself time away from the main characters and plotting. That one tracking shot, shown in preview clips that were used to advertise the movie, is pretty great, allowing us to watch Michael mingle with unwitting trick or treaters as he wanders around and commits a couple of impressively short 'n' sharp kills. And there's a decent sequence that features a scared child and a babysitter who assumes that it's all down to imaginary terrors. Unfortunately, Green does worse with a number of scenes that seem to warp the characters for the sake of a fresh start in the series. The script, co-written by the director with Jeff Fradley and Danny McBride, has just as many silly moments as many of the other sequels it is so desperate to erase from the canon, and, worst of all, it doesn't do justice to the characters that deserve better treatment. Those characters would fare a lot worse if they weren't played by such good actors. And did I mention that everything is kicked off this time by true-crime podcasters? Yes, it may lack Busta Rhymes and webcams, but let's not pretend that this isn't as gimmicky and mistakingly attempting to be trendy in the same way as, oh, Halloween: Resurrection was. Things lift up when scenes don't feel like they're either reacting to trends or dishing up fan-service but, sadly, most of the film seems to be stuck in those two camps.

The cast help immensely, and it goes without saying that Curtis gives another great performance. Greer is good, although playing the overly-tense character that she's been stuck with many times before, and Matichak is a likeable younger potential final girl who could easily carry on the Strode legacy, as far as I'm concerned. The wonderful Will Patton is . . . wonderful, if sorely underused, in the role of Officer Hawkins, and Haluk Bilginer tries to fill a Loomis-shaped gap, but is let down by the writing in the second half. Virginia Gardner, Dylan Arnold, Miles Robbins, and Drew Scheid all do well as teens who may find themselves in peril, and Jefferson Hall and Rhian Rees are those pesky podcasters.

Is this a bad horror movie? No. There are some good kills, and an attempt to craft some iconic Myers moments. It just isn't a masterpiece, not in comparison to many other horror movies and not even in comparison to the preceding films that those involved view as lesser instalments in the series. A lot of the characters here do typically dumb stuff to get themselves in a position to be picked off, a number of moments feel like they bring the luggage of the other movies that have been ignored/discarded, and the ending doesn't feel true to the characters.

But that doesn't matter whenever Michael grasps hat knife handle and starts walking towards his next victim while that classic music plays. Because us horror fans, well, we're easily pleased sometimes. I know I am.

6/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can get it here.