Noah Cassidy’s review published on Letterboxd:
Love Lives Today
Michael may have been onto something this whole time, Haddonfield fucking sucks. If there's one whole concept that I would think has been in these movies exclusively due to Danny McBride, who would find it really funny, it's that so many people in Haddonfield are total assholes. Everyone has something going on with them, not just trauma, but a feeling of outright hatred and instigation that can leap out. It's played well both for dramatic intent, as well as the occasional situational laughter that can come from seeing the lengths people go to as jerks. That all said, Halloween Ends rocks, I liked this a lot. The early review for this, both positive and negative, made it sound like something really special, and it sure was. The original Halloween means the world to me, it's one of my all-time favorite works of fiction at this point, and this is without question the first one in this new trilogy that not only tributes itself well to that original, but also feels like its own intimidating beast within the Halloween canon. Kills I find to be very fun, but this is its own creature. This splits the difference between the more exaggerated "trauma" bits of the 2018 film while meshing together more of the over the top genre elements that I enjoyed from Kills. In that mishmash, you get some really fantastic shots, an of course stellar musical score from John Carpenter, and yes, to me at least a rather great character in the form of Corey. I can almost already sense that saying "Corey" is gonna be to Halloween fans what it's like saying "Jar Jar" or "Rian Johnson" to certain Star Wars fans, but I am immediately and proudly coming out as a Pro-Corey audience member. I liked Rohan Campbell's performance a ton. Related to him and the film's exploration of the evolution of evil as a whole, there is admittedly an almost constant adherence to just telling the themes of the movie instead of showing them. That normally bugs the shit out of me, but it didn't here, I didn't only not mind it here, I found it charming. Laurie especially is out-loud working through well over forty years of horrendous things that have happened to her. She's then unfortunately not alone. You have people around her who have had to suffer too, and if Michael Myers really is just a human, then like humanity, evil itself has to evolve. As I've seen other folks whose writing I admire note, this somehow has to do with the likes of Twilight, Fallen Angels, Lost Highway, and pretty much the entire fucking filmography of John Carpenter, especially my adored Christine. We have an effect on people. How we talk to them, how we view them, we are never experiencing life in a vacuum. We can choose love, hate, or ambivalence. The last one is rare, the second one is too damn easy, and the first is the hardest but often possible. If evil doesn't die, it can rest, and just for the slightest moment of clarity, so can we. I think the mountain of discourse and complications that this trilogy has had is now worth it to me because this movie exists. The final shots and the end credits needle drop made my heart sing. (Don't) Fear.
8.5/10
