It has undoubtedly affected my impression of the movies, at least a little bit, whereas spacing them out naturally across the course of my viewing life would have been a better way for me to take them on their own terms, and not be entirely sick of the whole experience. (But, I'd argue, I probably wouldn't have bothered to get to many of them, if those were the conditions under which I'd do it.)
But the question remains, how much has it affected my impression? Did it make me that much more likely to nitpick, or did it put me in the unique position of being able to submit these movies to their best possible analysis? The analysis they deserve?
"You are too close to it," a friend of mine said as a response to one of my observations about the catastrophically poor continuity of the series. "This would only bother me if I were watching them all in close succession."
That may be true. But just because a typical viewer is likely to have only a hazy memory of the previous film in the series they watched, it doesn't mean the movies are relieved of their responsibility of tying into one another in a way that doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence or take his/her loyalty for granted. Because there are, indeed, some people who would watch them all in close succession, like I have done.
As I reached the final installment of the franchise last night, Halloween Ends, I'll say that I have to hand it to David Gordon Green. I expected one thing from his final film and I got quite another -- though the other thing I got is almost as much of a failure as his first two movies, in the end.
Now is the time for my final Halloween SPOILER ALERT.
The way Green left off the previous film, Halloween Kills, was to have a rage-filled Laurie Strode stride out of the hospital carrying a bloody knife, ready to hunt down and kill her brother, who had just killed her daughter.
So I thought this movie would pick up straight at that point -- yes, a third straight Halloween movie taking place within a single 24-hour period -- with a protracted final showdown between Laurie and Michael Myers that somehow ran to feature length.
Instead, this movie picks up four years later, though only after picking up one year later. I should probably explain them in order.
Our cold open takes place in the home of a family we've never met before, involving a non-family member we've never met before, one year later. The non-family member is Corey Cunningham, a frizzy-haired 21-year-old overplayed by Rohan Campbell, who is a bit reminiscent of Patrick Dempsey in his Can't Buy Me Love days. He's babysitting a young brat who seems to be delightfully precocious, jumping out at his mom to scare her on Halloween, but might actually just be a little dickhead. After the kid locks his babysitter in a room upstairs right as his parents are about to get home, which means the babysitter will get in trouble for not having put his charge to bed earlier, Corey kicks down the door after repeated requests to the kid to let him out. The kid is on the other side of the door, and is knocked over the railing of a three-story spiral staircase, where he falls to his death. This is when John Carpenter's score kicks in and we are treated to the credits.
I didn't at first have any idea where this story was going to go, and I thought it was a promising attempt to break out of the formula that has plagued both the lesser (many) and greater (few) entries in the series. (There are only two movies in the series that actually feel fully fresh, which is the original and Halloween III: Season of the Witch.)
But then maybe the bigger surprise is that the movie jumps forward four years to the time of its release, 2022. Instead of Laurie having angrily tracked Michael down that night -- she tried but he disappeared -- she's started over in a calmer, apparently happier, more typically grandmotherly manner than she'd been displaying for the 20 years of her granddaughter's life. That granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichuk) now lives with her after the death of both of her parents over the course of the previous two movies, again apparently happier, in the quite large and traditional house Laurie bought in the wake of burning down her previous one in her attempt to kill Michael.
Okay let's stop here for a moment. It occurs to me we have no idea what Laurie does, or did, for a living. The series tried to give her a job in one of my "favorite" previous entries, Halloween H20, where she was serving as headmistress at a private school in California. But when those events were stricken from the record by Green's movies, that left us with no idea how Laurie managed to amass any income over the course of her shell-shocked life.
Especially not enough income to purchase a quite beautiful, quite large for two people, home in the suburbs. (Still in Haddonfield. Some people never learn.) Not after she was guilty of burning down her own home in Green's first Halloween, thereby voiding any provisions in her insurance policy that would pay her for that loss. Maybe this movie teaches us that Laurie is someone who commits insurance fraud? Okay that's probably too nitpicky.
So it's almost like Green -- and more to the point, his collection of writers, who include actor Danny McBride -- is trying course correct on his own movies. If you have set up Laurie as a hair-trigger survivalist type, it seems weird to abandon that. It's almost like Laurie is more calm in the four years since Michael reappeared for the first time since 1978 -- and then disappeared without a trace, meaning he's still out there -- than she was in the previous 40 years, when she had no reason to believe Michael would ever return to bother them again. (There's a humorous line here as part of her occasional voiceover, where he says "And just like I predicted, Michael escaped 40 years later." Um, you don't get credit for predicting something as a real danger when it takes four decades to finally happen.)
So back to this Corey character. He starts out as mildly sympathetic, maybe not an awesome guy but clearly not liable in the accidental death of this child who had locked him in a room upstairs. He's tormented by the locals, particularly a trio of stereotypical movie bullies (who at least have the benefit of appearing on screen in 2022, so they are diverse by gender and race). It's clear this guy should just get out of Haddonfield, but like Laurie, he does not either. (That's because he has a creepy (s)mother at home, who at one point in this movie tries to kiss him.)
Inexplicably, Laurie's granddaughter, Allyson, falls for him, despite no evidence whatsoever that this guy would be any fun to be with or that even has many of his marbles left. I think we're supposed to think that Allyson is attracted to him because she's also damaged, but Matichuk depicts her damage only very inconsistently. In fact, this script requires her to regularly change attitudes with no notice or antecedent in the action, which feels more like bad writing than true character beats.
Anyway, Corey has some sort of interaction with Michael in the cave where Michael has been hiding -- again I wonder how he has been feeding himself all this time -- and the experience causes some sort of transfer of Michael's evil to Corey. So now Corey is effectively an unstable Michael Myers clone, eventually doing his own killing and using Michael's mask. Of course, Michael is also still around and also uses his own mask. It would be really useful if they could get another mask, then they could each have one.
When this movie is clearly framed as the final chapter -- like maybe for the whole franchise, though someone will obviously make another one, probably before 2030 -- it seems unusual to spend so much effort on introducing this new character. It's not the first time in this series that someone has introduced the notion that Michael's evil is contagious, but it seems more to be setting up the idea of Michael's evil being eternal, when this movie ends definitively enough in that regard (he's ground up in the gears of some kind of junk yard compactor at the end).
Again Green is trying to say something profound here, about the persistence and immortality of evil, and he has Laurie deliver these thoughts a number of times in some pretty bad dialogue. (Laurie is writing a book, which I guess excuses the voiceover.) But again he fails, and the ending of this movie feels very flat. Along the way there has been a bunch more random killing -- don't get me started on the mildly racist portrayal of a Black DJ who seems to be right out of the 1970s, who has no purpose in the narrative than to get his tongue cut off so it can ride around on the vinyl and interrupt the song every time the tongue passes the needle -- and really not a lot else in terms of anything that makes us think.
So while I am slightly more positive on this final entry than I was on the previous two, the movie still falls a full star-and-a-half short of a recommendation.
I think I thought I was going to talk about more ridiculous things from this movie -- best not even to get into the Laurie Strode suicide fakeout -- but after a month worth of outrage, I'm all outraged out.
And super relieved to not be watching any more Halloween movies, though I must say, I actually kind of enjoyed the experience in a weird way. Only one of the ten new movies I saw this month actually earned the minimum star rating for a recommendation, and it was from a movie -- Rob Zombie's Halloween II -- that I would have given a pretty low chance of attaining that distinction before the series started. But the experience definitely stimulated me, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of words I've written (not doing an actual word count here) over the course of ten different posts. That's right, I originally thought I would write combined posts in which I discussed more than one movie, but the one time I tried that, I found I had way too much to say, and was already forgetting things I wanted to say about the first of those two movies. I suppose for a blogger, it is better when you want to write more rather than less.
And so I have two more nights to watching a scary movie that is not a Halloween movie. (Not that any of the Halloween movies actually scared me, which might be their biggest sin.) I'm hoping to get to the point of beingt scared with whatever I watch on Halloween night with my wife, but tonight I'll probably fall short as we watch the kid-appropriate movie Nightbooks with my ten-year-old.
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