'Halloween Ends' Is the Michael Myers Buddy Cop Comedy We Deserve

This article obviously contains some spoilers

I didn’t want to know. I wanted to go into Halloween Ends, the latest and hopefully last installment of the beloved horror movie franchise, completely oblivious to anyone else’s takes or opinions on the movie.

But then I blew it. I found myself wondering what year the first of this trilogy of films helmed by the guy from Righteous Gemstones came out and, in the course of Googling that, spotted these headlines in the “Top Stories” section of the search results.

Neither of those headlines constitute major spoilers, so it’s fine. But still, reading them did have me geared up for an emotional rollercoaster of a finale that might even leave me with a tear in my eye over the sad but also long overdue loss of one of the best horror movie characters ever.

So imagine my surprise when what I got instead was the best buddy cop comedy of 2022.

Sorry, that might be hyperbole. It’s probably not the best buddy cop comedy of the year. I’m sure there were better. I stand by the rest of the statement, though.

Also, I shouldn’t be surprised. I love Danny McBride, mostly. You know, HBO’s Kenny Powers.

It’s just that I’ve hated all of his Halloween movies with the intensity of a million burning suns.

I’m also apparently among the minority of moviegoers who sincerely enjoyed the 2007 Rob Zombie remake, but that’s neither here nor there.

It was only a matter of time before we got here. Danny McBride is a funny guy. It was inevitable that he’d eventually make a genuinely funny Halloween movie. I just don’t think he meant to.

The only reason I was looking into when Danny McBride’s first Halloween movie came out was because I was wondering in what time proximity it was released to Jordan Peele’s Get Out.

That came out in early-2017, Halloween came out in late-2018. Plenty of time between the two to blame the debacle that is Danny McBride’s trilogy squarely on Jordan Peele, but that’s only if you’re going for the jokey-joke take on things.

There’s no doubt that the success of Get Out had some bearing on Thadeous from Your Highness being handed the keys to the Halloween franchise, but that obviously doesn’t make it Jordan Peele’s fault. It’s just classically terrible Hollywood decision making.

Jordan Peele doesn’t make good horror movies because he’s good at comedy. He just happens to be good at both of those things independently of each other.

Danny McBride is good at comedy. Very good! But there was zero indication he’d be good at making horror movies before all of this.

Did we have that with Jordan Peele? You bet! For starters, have you ever seen the Make-A-Wish skit from Key and Peele?

Genuinely creepy!

But also, the most obvious difference here is that Get Out was an original script that Jordan Peele wrote. The movie in and of itself was proof he’d at least be alright at making horror movies.

Same with Rob Zombie. He’d made House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects before he took over the Halloween franchise, so that choice made sense.

Danny McBride just liked the Halloween franchise a bunch and also happened to be funny, so the brilliant minds that make decisions in Hollywood figured they’d see if they could make lightning strike twice. The scariest thing he’d made up to that point was Vice Principals.

His first Halloween movie did well at the box office and got decent reviews, but I feel like that had to do more with curiosity and nostalgia than anything else. But sure, agree to disagree. Call that one good if you want.

Either way, I don’t think too many viewers would dispute that the returns diminished greatly with the second installment, last year’s Halloween Kills.

And that brings us to right now’s Halloween Ends.

I didn’t read the articles attached to those two headlines mentioned earlier, so I’m still mostly unaware what the public’s average temperature is when it comes to this movie. All I can tell you is that, again, I found it to be oddly hilarious.

Which is exactly what we deserve. Handing this franchise to a comedian solely because another comedian made a good horror movie shortly before that was dumb. If this really is where the Halloween franchise ends, it’s fitting that it dies with the most unintentionally hilarious entry in the series.

The fact that there have been five attempts to remake the same two Halloween movies since 2007 is funny in and of itself. We’re talking about a franchise whose creator didn’t even want to make a second movie. Now here we are, 40-plus years later and 13 movies deep. Bringing in a comedy guy to reboot the franchise was a blatant and cynical cash grab that deserved to end in unintentional comedy.

And again, that’s exactly what this movie is. It centers around a guy who’s fresh off of accidentally manslaughtering a child he was babysitting. His notoriety around town results in him getting bullied by a group of…high school band nerds.

Despite his quasi-criminal background and “I recently killed a child” demeanor, the women in town are absolutely lusting over this guy. Except by “women in town” I just mean two women, and one of them is his mom.

Still, the interest he’s getting from either of them is inexplicable.

Meanwhile, everyone in town is mad at Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) because she taunted Michael Myers a bunch and made him come out of the woodworks to kill a bunch of people in the last movie.

Honestly, that’s fair criticism. Michael Myers deserves to be left alone, by Laurie Strode and Hollywood both.

In one of the most rolling on the floor laughing my fucking ass off (ROTFLMFAO) moments early on, said child killer is tossed off a bridge by said high school band bullies. It doesn’t sound funny in writing, but just watch the movie. You’ll get it.

He awakens to find that he’s been inexplicably dragged into a sewer tunnel and, uh-oh, turns out it was Michael Myers who did it. Not only that, but he lives in that sewer tunnel! We know that because, as kid killer tries to leave, a hand reaches out from the darkness and chokes the ever-loving shit out of him.

Except there’s a moment where we’re led to believe that Michael Myers looks into this halfwit’s eyes and sees some of himself and decides to let him live. You can see almost all of that in the early seconds of this trailer.

Okay, so what was keeping him alive up to that point? Michael Myers didn’t get to gaze into his soul prior to dragging him into that tunnel. Why didn’t he just kill him when he got him in there? It makes zero sense, but watching Michael Myers choke that guy for a bit is definitely good for some guffaws.

I’m not joking when I say this is a buddy cop movie. For reasons that are never explained, in this dipshit who accidentally kicked a child over a railing to his death, Michael Myers sees murder talent worth developing. Or something like that.

Whatever the motivation, Michael Myers and this loser who keeps getting his ass handed to him by a teen who plays the flute at football games decide to become a team. After four long decades of “The Shape” indiscriminately killing anyone who crosses his path, even people who are nice to him like Danny Trejo’s character in the first Rob Zombie reboot…

…he’s finally found a soft spot for this hack who’s in his feelings because the community hates that he kicked a kid to death.

There’s a scene where the two of them commit their first murder together and, in a Halloween movie done right, Michael Myers would’ve annihilated everyone in the room, including his newfound apprentice. But nope! This isn’t your parents’ Michael Myers. This one sucks.

At one point, the young upstart shows up at Michael Myers’ sewer home and demands answers to questions (from someone who doesn’t speak) and starts a fight when he doesn’t get them. Instead of this ending in him getting stabbed in the thorax with a pair of kitchen scissors, the two of them just wrestle a little bit like teammates who got a little too worked up during practice. I don’t know how you could watch that and not laugh, even if this is the first horror movie you’ve ever watched. It’s like something out of the Scary Movie franchise.

When I say this movie is funny, I should clarify that I don’t mean the kills are funny. That’s a staple of this and several other horror movie franchises. Kills are supposed to make you laugh and/or howl with approval, and that happens a bunch here too. But that just adds to the problem. The kills are funny, but so is the idea that Michael Myers would team up with this hapless babysitter for any reason at all.

Now let’s flashback to those two headlines I mentioned at the beginning of this article. One of them mentions that “you could hear a pin drop” when they were filming the scenes that constitute Michael Myers’ final moments.

Again, I found all of that legitimately funny in a slapstick comedy way. Part of his death involves dropping a refrigerator on his leg so he can’t move it. An unstoppable force of evil is ultimately taken down by a kitchen appliance to the knee, and I’m supposed to believe everyone in the room was too overcome with awe and emotion to speak.

Or does the “you could hear a pin drop” line refer to when Michael Myers’ body is unceremoniously run through a trash compactor? Because that was absolutely hilarious to watch also.

Aside from it being laugh out loud funny in several moments when I know it didn’t mean to be, I guess my biggest problem with this movie is that, at the very last possible moment, it gives an emotionless killing machine emotions for absolutely no reason.

People were mad at the Rob Zombie reboot because he gave Michael Myers a backstory. That was considered highly antithetical to what a character so lacking in details he was originally just gonna be called The Shape was supposed to be.

So what does Michael Myers having a man-crush on this Haddonfield rando do for the legacy? I’d argue not a whole lot. If anything, it just sets up more questions that will probably be answered in a terrible reboot trilogy directed by Peyton Manning or some shit.