Episode Transcript
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0:00
I
0:00
wanna tell you my seat right now. My
0:03
seat. Shieland
0:06
prayed people. No.
0:11
I am the father. What's
0:18
in the barn? You
0:23
blew it up. Damn you
0:26
all the hell. Hello,
0:28
and welcome to Slate spoiler specials.
0:30
I'm Sam Adams, the senior editor at Slate. And
0:33
today, I am joined by SLAIT's features director,
0:35
Jeffrey Blummer. Welcome, Jeff. Hi, Sam. I believe
0:37
this is the first time we've been in the same room
0:39
since the pandemic began. And now it's very exciting.
0:41
You gonna hear some serious chemistry here.
0:43
Very exciting. So today we are spoiling the
0:45
movie Halloween ends, which is the,
0:47
I guess, the final part of David Gordon Greens.
0:50
Halloween reboot trilogy.
0:52
There are a lot of nouns to apply to that.
0:55
This finds us sort of back in the groove
0:58
with Lori Strowd played by Jamie
1:00
Lee Curtis and the shape as
1:02
Michael Myers is often known. I'm
1:04
gonna start off Jeff with what you thought
1:06
of the
1:07
end So you know that I am a
1:09
long suffering Halloween fan. I'm
1:12
not quite like
1:13
going to Michael Myers
1:15
festivals and, like, you know,
1:17
doing Reddit cosplay and stuff, but I have seen
1:20
all fourteen movies I believe there
1:22
are now. some of them more times than I care
1:24
to admit on the record. And
1:26
I kind of, like, even I at this point have some
1:28
franchise fatigue because, like, the last movie, literally,
1:30
they were introducing new characters every twenty minutes
1:32
in order for them to be killed off ten minutes
1:34
later, and it was just so listless.
1:37
And so going into this movie, I really did
1:39
not I didn't
1:40
know what to expect. Like, she's already killed
1:42
Michael Myers once in the past in movies that are
1:44
ignored by this one. And this movie
1:46
throws a bit of a curveball. It at least does something
1:48
different. and I'm grading on a curve,
1:50
but
1:50
I appreciated that. We will get into what
1:53
I mean in a minute. What did you think?
1:55
It stinks. I really feel like
1:57
this movie at all. This movie for me
1:59
was so bad that
1:59
it made me like the previous movie
2:02
in the trilogy, which I also did not like
2:04
more because I feel like that at least had
2:06
ideas, although they were bad ideas. And this
2:08
one really feels like it has none. It's trying to
2:11
do something different, which we will get into shortly,
2:13
but I just don't think it comes off. And then
2:15
it sort of forgets about
2:17
that thing like an hour into
2:19
it and I mean I just sort of feel no compelling
2:21
reason for this thing to exist other than
2:23
that the first one did well and somebody clearly
2:25
at some point did what if what if two more
2:28
until they did two more? I like that
2:30
we disagree somewhat. I I cannot
2:32
claim that it totally works. but I was delighted that
2:34
it was not the same movie again. So we should start
2:36
by saying because we're that's a spoiler special. We're gonna
2:38
spoil the whole thing and probably the biggest spoiler for
2:40
this movie is that Michael Myers
2:43
I don't think even shows up apart
2:46
from a sort of flashback to the previous movie
2:48
is for like forty five minutes into it and
2:50
does not kill somebody until an hour.
2:52
into a hour and fifty one minute
2:55
movie. So it's definitely throwing you for
2:57
a loop there. This is not a movie
2:58
that's just like what's
3:00
another excuse for Michael to go around and, like,
3:02
stab some more babysitters. The opening setup
3:04
kind of gives us that because it flashes
3:06
back to Halloween twenty
3:09
nineteen, which is the movie set in the present
3:11
day, but it goes back a few years. It's Halloween Night,
3:13
this middle aged couple are going out to
3:15
a party, and they've gotten a last minute babysitter
3:17
who's twenty one year olds, I guess, promising
3:20
engineering student. And he is
3:22
called Corey Cunningham, played by
3:24
Rowan Campbell. and he is just supposed to
3:26
look after their bratty little boy for an evening.
3:29
He makes it a mistake of of showing the kid the
3:31
thing for some reason which is a
3:33
little obviously tip of the hat.
3:35
in addition to the tip of the checkbook that
3:37
has allowed all these movies to happen
3:39
to John Carpenter who directed that movie in the
3:41
original Halloween. And basically, the kid decides
3:44
hey, let's play hide and seek. Which
3:47
which you know is going to end badly. We didn't
3:49
really know how it's going to end badly.
3:51
He ends up locking Corey
3:54
in the attic saying Michael
3:56
Myers is gonna come and get you. We think
3:58
clearly Michael Myers is probably gonna come
4:00
and get one of them, maybe the kids.
4:02
But Corey freaks out, starts
4:05
kicking at the door. This attic, by the
4:07
way, is up several flights
4:09
somehow the suburban house has like nine flights
4:11
of stairs in it and a big sort of
4:13
empty circular stairwell. Corey
4:16
freaks out is like kicking at the door,
4:18
finally gets it open, the door swings
4:20
open, knocks little Billy over
4:22
the railing. He plummets a hundred and
4:24
fifteen stories to his death,
4:26
just as his parents are coming back in the door.
4:28
He's dead. There's blood everywhere for
4:31
reasons. Corey is also holding a knife
4:33
at this point. And basically,
4:35
his parents like, you murderer. And
4:37
so that's that the opening
4:39
this this child has been killed not by
4:41
Michael Myers, but by the fear of
4:43
Michael Myers, essentially. Yes.
4:45
And, like, this little kid earlier in the
4:47
movie is, like, well, Michael Myers doesn't
4:49
kill little children. He kills babysitters. And you
4:51
know from that moment that kid's gonna eat it one way
4:53
or another. And I think that, like, I
4:55
actually liked this opening sequence. I thought it
4:57
was like Danny McBride and
4:59
David Gordon Green, the writer and director
5:01
respectively among others who wrote it. It seems
5:03
like there's five screenwriters on smoothie
5:05
or something. Need to stop relying on the trope
5:07
of a little kid who like is like suddenly extremely
5:09
profane out of nowhere, but like Otherwise,
5:11
I thought that the sequence was, like, pretty effective and,
5:14
like, surprising. And it should have been
5:16
the clue right there. I noticed that the opening
5:18
credits were blue, like,
5:20
a departure from the normal
5:22
Halloween credits, and that's the other movie
5:25
that had those was Halloween three.
5:27
which season of the Wish which is the movie and which famously
5:29
Michael Myers does not appear. Mhmm. And that
5:31
doesn't quite what happens in this movie, but it
5:33
probably is the first clue that things are not going
5:35
to proceed. as we expected.
5:37
Alright. So let's sort of talk about where we
5:40
go after that. That's our little twenty nineteen
5:42
prologue. Then we are sort
5:44
of up to the present day. Michael
5:46
Myers is sort of in theory still
5:48
quote unquote dead as he was at the
5:50
end of the last movie. We know, of course, that's not gonna
5:52
last, but let's where where we
5:54
finding everybody at this point. Judy Greer is still dead.
5:56
I guess we can reveal that. Yes.
5:58
So Judy Greer has played Jamie
5:59
Lee Curtis his daughter, Laurie Strode's
6:02
daughter, and she was killed at the end of the last movie
6:04
after this mob had sort of pummeled Michael
6:06
to death. And so now
6:08
we're, like, a few years ahead. And
6:10
Lori Stroh has, like, sort of
6:12
graduated from being this, like, post slash
6:14
or warrior woman into, like, kind of, like,
6:17
funny, zany grief, like, kind
6:19
of person
6:20
I don't know. She, like, is writing a memoir,
6:22
and we're hearing a voice over her describing
6:24
Michael and sort of, like, Cliched memoir
6:27
terms. And now she lives with her
6:29
granddaughter Alison and their relationship had
6:31
been sort of afraid in the other movies and now
6:33
It seems like they're doing pretty well. Allison's
6:36
working as a medical assistant. Louristro
6:38
just seems to be kind of like a wackadoodle
6:40
around town. And basically,
6:42
we kind of I initially thought that we were just
6:44
gonna have, like, a cold open and not really come
6:46
back to that character. But earlier in the
6:48
movie, we see Corey come back. and
6:51
he is being tormented by some,
6:53
like, local teenagers. All
6:55
of whom you know are gonna be absolutely filleted
6:57
based on how they are treating him. Lori
6:59
strobe sort of spots this, and she's like a defender
7:02
of the bullied. And she goes up and
7:04
she like kind of scares the kids away
7:06
after they like knock him down basically.
7:08
And then slashes their tires
7:10
with him and then brings him
7:12
to the granddaughter's medical
7:14
clinic because quite clearly
7:16
she's up to, like, kind of matchmaking.
7:18
Right. There's a moment where the twist
7:20
or the sort of development in this movie. In
7:22
the second one, as you mentioned, was sort of all about, like,
7:24
mob justice. It's like the fear of Michael
7:26
Miles turns the entire town into
7:28
killers. In this case, the town has
7:30
sort of weirdly turned on Laurie Strode
7:32
and, like, blames her for Michael
7:35
Myers existence. They one
7:37
of the the victims from the last movie
7:39
who the daughter of a woman who got, I
7:41
guess, not not killed, but paralyzed, sort of
7:43
blames her and it's like, you know, it's your buggy
7:45
man, you did this. Other people kind of blame
7:47
Lori for somehow, like, leading Michael
7:49
on until he snapped. Corey,
7:52
at one point says, like, well, you know, they couldn't your
7:54
boogeyman, so they made me the boogeyman, where the
7:56
boogeyman gets it a lot in here. And
7:58
in that scene where he's getting tormented by
8:00
the the teens outside the drugstore,
8:03
She comes to his rescue
8:05
and they, you know, they sort of like, oh,
8:07
look, you know, it's Laurie Strode. She's still sort of famous
8:09
local celebrity. Don't be the victim of a
8:11
serial killer in a small town because everybody
8:13
will will know who you are. You know, it's the
8:15
psycho and the freak show. And then there's
8:17
a sort of back and forth
8:19
ever, like, which one of them is the psycho and which
8:21
which one of the freak show. So I guess if the movie
8:23
has a thesis, it's that. The movie
8:25
comes back to that. And I think that you're right
8:27
that, like, it's trying to riff on
8:29
the last movie's idea about, like, a grief
8:31
contagion or, like, a trauma contagion
8:34
basically. like infecting these people and taking
8:36
it to, like, the next level, I
8:38
guess. Yeah. Laurie uses the word, like,
8:40
infection and sickness like in her memoir a
8:42
lot. There's at the beginning of
8:44
that seen when they're tormenting
8:46
Corey, he, like, has a glass bottle of choc
8:48
milk in his hand for some reason, and he, like,
8:50
squeezes eddie so upset that he squeezes it until
8:52
it breaks. and it, like, cuts his hand open and that
8:54
sort of, like, the, you know, something where you
8:56
get, like, a little scratch and then use
8:58
some you know, you it seems like nothing, but
9:00
then you you get, like, you know, full
9:02
body sepsis or something that's like that sort of that's
9:04
like the entry for the infection that
9:07
will take him over. Right. It's a little
9:09
perhaps on the nose. they go to the clinic and
9:11
he starts sorting with the granddaughter, and there's
9:13
instant chemistry there. And you can tell that
9:15
those two are gonna be sort of a driving force
9:17
in the movie. And the thing that's going
9:19
on with them is, like, pretty
9:21
quickly after they start
9:23
seeing each other, I think
9:25
that Lori Strode starts to
9:27
suspect something actually is off with Corey.
9:29
Does that happen right away or is it
9:31
shortly after the first meeting? first, she's
9:33
like, hey, you know, you should meet my granddaughter,
9:35
and she kind of sets them up and, like, pushes
9:37
them together. But then they
9:39
I guess, they eventually, like, go out to a Halloween
9:42
party a few still a few days before Halloween when they go
9:44
out to a costume party at a bar,
9:46
Corey runs into the mother of
9:48
the boy. He's accidentally killed everybody
9:50
recognizes him as the guy who killed the boy.
9:53
So he runs into the mother who's
9:55
just, like, out, you know, drinking by herself. I guess
9:57
we we sort of intuit that the the
9:59
couple has, you know, split up. they
10:01
get into a fight. He sort of runs off, and
10:03
that's when he's kinda really starts to go off
10:05
the rails. And I think that's when he ends up
10:07
knighting a homeless man to
10:09
death under a bridge. Yes.
10:12
Basically, what happens is that he's walking home. He
10:14
storms out of the party because the mother confronts him and
10:16
calls him a murderer and so on kind of
10:18
echoing the way that people have been confronting
10:20
Lawrie Stroud and then they
10:23
confront him at the edge of a bridge and through a
10:25
back and forth in which he finally tries to stand up
10:27
for himself. They end up throwing him over the bridge.
10:29
It's not a very steep fall, so he's just
10:31
knocked out on the ground. But nevertheless, it's
10:33
kind of an unpleasant scene. And
10:35
then all of a sudden, this like
10:38
unseen figure drags him into his storage. Yeah.
10:40
We've gotten this ominous shot of this like
10:42
culvert leading into a hill
10:44
before And I think there's even, like, a
10:46
PoV shot from inside it. So we know,
10:48
like, Michael's in it's been
10:50
four years, but somehow Michael's just been, like,
10:52
living in like, a drainage
10:54
pipe for four years? Yeah. It's
10:56
funny because, like, in
10:57
the last movie, they were sort of going toward this
10:59
direction where Michael was superhuman and it really did
11:01
not seem like kill him anymore. And
11:03
in this movie, even though he came
11:05
out of the mob justice in the last one enough
11:07
to kill Lori Stuart's daughter, he
11:10
seems to have been badly battered and
11:12
just like like living, you know, as like
11:14
a the literal shadow of the town.
11:16
And there's there's a bit, I mean, we're
11:18
jumping huddle. But eventually, Corey,
11:20
who, you know, again, seems like this kind of
11:22
unimportant character being sort of ends up, like,
11:24
taking on both
11:25
literally and figuratively sort
11:27
of taking on Michael Myers mantle.
11:29
And there's a point at which he sort of, you know,
11:31
kills somebody accidentally, then he, like, kills many
11:33
people. on purpose. And there's a point in which
11:35
he goes to Michael
11:38
Gregg's, I guess, his cop
11:40
ex boyfriend, like, tricks him back into the
11:42
calvert, sort of lures him down there, and then it holds
11:44
him up and says to Michael, like, I wanna see how you do
11:46
it. So you have many holds him down while Michael,
11:48
like, you know, stabs him with the iconic
11:50
knife, and then Corey really decides
11:52
to commit to the bit at that point. And there's
11:54
a point in what she says to Michael, like, I need you
11:56
know, I came back because I need something that
11:58
you have. And then there's like this sort
11:59
of pretty
12:01
funny in at at least in a different context
12:03
like a long shot through
12:06
the through the covert where you see
12:08
Michael and Corey sort of, like, staggering
12:10
back and forth, like, out of frame, like, wrestling
12:12
with each other. You know, they wrestle, they go out of
12:14
frame, they come back in. It's like this long sort slabstick
12:16
bit. And then eventually, you find
12:18
out that Corey has, like, taken
12:21
his mask, basically, to put it
12:23
on, and and obviously, like, one of and the movie is like you've
12:25
never seen Michael without the mask. It was never
12:27
the what like, the one thing that will deter him
12:29
from killing somebody is
12:31
adjusting his mask when it's almost pulled
12:33
off. like that's very important. So the fact that,
12:35
like, someone else can take it off and where
12:37
it is. There's this scene
12:39
at the beginning, which sort of made my blood run
12:41
cold where I think Allison or
12:43
maybe your friend is giving someone a taro reading
12:45
and just, like, oh, whatever this card is, it
12:47
means, like, an old chapter closes
12:49
and a new one begins and I'm are
12:52
they setting up like another trilogy of what's
12:54
going on, but they're really they're just, you know,
12:56
for the sake of this movie setting Corey up to be
12:58
sort of briefly the new shape.
13:00
Yeah. And so like you said, they go out of their
13:02
way to code this kid as like pretty innocent and
13:04
someone who's been corrupted by the town, the chocolate
13:06
milk stuff. And he just generally gets kind of
13:08
a timeless performance and seems
13:10
kind of broken up. And
13:12
he at first kills a homeless man who confronts
13:14
him sort of by accident. And
13:17
then it sort of escalates at the
13:19
same time as he is starting a
13:21
romance with Alison, which goes
13:23
very fast. It does, but they
13:25
really do I think the two have, like, decent
13:27
chemistry and it was not the least believable part
13:29
of the movie that the two of them
13:31
would connect the way
13:33
they do. but it's really strange. It has a
13:35
really weird, like, sort of, seventies vibe to it.
13:37
They're, like, riding around on this old
13:39
motorcycle. And then, like, so much of the movie, no
13:41
one's being killed, and it feels like a much different sort of
13:43
thing than a Halloween movie in a way that, again,
13:45
I found out altogether unpleasant, although
13:48
I imagine most fans and most people would taste
13:50
or disagree. And I
13:52
it goes on for a while like this, but you do
13:55
start to see flashes of him kind of
13:57
having some issues. He confronts the
13:59
police officer at one
13:59
point that was also dating Alison in
14:02
of frightening way. And he's
14:04
the one that he ends up killing with Michael
14:06
in the sewer. And he's got
14:07
his whole weird, like mother thing. too.
14:10
Oh, yeah. Almost can't even remember that. But he lives
14:12
with his parents. Corey lives with his parents,
14:14
including a much a very
14:16
overprotective shall we say mother. And if there
14:18
are tones of her loving her son a little
14:20
bit too much, of course later in the movie, they become
14:22
explicit. She says at one point, like, has
14:24
come home late or something, and she's like, well, if you're not
14:26
a good like, boys who aren't good, don't get any
14:28
customers. It's
14:30
really it's quite bizarre. But
14:33
I think that, like, It
14:36
all pretty much works to build him up
14:38
to become he's the main sort of
14:40
antagonist if also victim of the
14:42
movie. And at first, he's killing people,
14:44
including like Alison's boss. at the
14:46
doctor's office. He wears a scarecrow mask to the
14:48
Halloween party and at first that becomes his
14:50
mask. And so he's going around and killing
14:52
people. in typically brutal
14:54
fashion. Although this movie, I would
14:56
say, was just a touch less gory
14:58
than the last one. until the
15:00
end. I I mean, I'm not, like, a horror
15:02
fan of the sort that is, like, will,
15:04
you know, ask, like, what are the kills
15:06
in the movie or something, but I I will
15:08
say, just from that point of view, the kills in this
15:10
movie are a lot less. Gory, but also like
15:12
less inventive than the previous I think the previous
15:14
movie was the one where somebody gets like stabbed
15:16
to death with, like, a new old post from
15:18
a stair case or something like that. And this
15:20
is just he runs somebody over with a truck
15:22
at one point. mean, he blowed towards his people. He does
15:24
some things in this. I'm not a oh, what are the
15:26
kills? Are the kills gruesome enough person either?
15:28
And so I appreciated this movie was a
15:30
little bit less sadistic. So
15:32
we are getting very rapidly toward
15:34
the ending because like we say, oh, this movie is
15:36
fairly long, not a ton happens in it.
15:38
But I guess we should take a moment
15:40
and come back to get to that.
15:42
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spoiler. That's ditsi Stories
17:24
dot com slash boiler.
17:28
And we're
17:32
back. So we are approaching the
17:34
ends of Halloween ends. how do we
17:36
end up with sort of the final confrontation, which,
17:38
you know, does eventually involve
17:40
Michael Myers.
17:41
So, yeah, Michael Myers does show up in the movie
17:43
in which supposed to be the last movie in which he
17:45
appears, which it certainly won't be. And as we
17:47
mentioned earlier, Laurie strode at some point
17:50
sees the evil in court realizes
17:52
that something's going on with him and
17:54
starts warning Alison about him and saying she
17:56
needs to stay away from him. There's a really bizarre
17:59
scene in which Corey
18:01
falls asleep in the abandoned house where he
18:03
accidentally killed the kid. And Lori
18:05
started just there, like, with a chair against the
18:07
wallbang in the chair against the wall, I don't
18:09
even remember what she says, but it's something like, you know, I know
18:11
what you are. I know what you're doing. She does a lot
18:13
of talking about like the nature of evil and there's outside
18:15
evil and inside evil and yada
18:18
yada yada. What have you said that Jamie Lee
18:20
Curtis has a lot of fun with the last
18:22
her last horizon character. If
18:24
nothing else, she's a real joy to watch.
18:26
So anyway, she's confronting this kid
18:28
and and also Alison about being
18:30
with him because they they're basically planning
18:32
to run away together with this kid and
18:35
Alison and Cory. And
18:37
the issue is is that he also
18:39
just keeps absolutely
18:41
massacring people. And so it's obviously not going
18:43
to work out, including we should say, like, all the all
18:45
the tea in gas stations, you know, of course, he, you know or or, of
18:47
course, are all brutally eviscerated one
18:50
way or another. Yes. The sequence
18:52
eventually back to
18:54
we haven't really talked about it, but he works at this, like, sort
18:56
of car repair shop that's in a junkyard. They all
18:58
end up there with the teens and he does dispatch
19:00
them all in, like, classic horror movie.
19:03
like who's the real villain sort of situation.
19:06
So anyway, we're basically now
19:08
finally at this, like, ending
19:10
moment where he's
19:12
stolen Michael Myers' mask and sort of,
19:14
like, kinda knocked him on the ground and,
19:16
like, kinda taking up the mantle in a way
19:18
that, like, certainly disrespecting that
19:20
when we kind of get the sense that he's like
19:22
had enough of this kid and enough of
19:24
being pushed around. And
19:26
so We end up
19:28
back we know that a conversation is
19:30
going to happen between Lori, Frode,
19:32
and Cory to start out with. Do
19:34
you wanna take us into that?
19:36
Yeah. Sure. So we one
19:39
of the threads that's running through this
19:41
movie is Laurie sort of finishing
19:43
her memoir that she's been
19:45
working on So she finally finishes it, and then she's sitting
19:47
upstairs at her desk in her little writing nook,
19:49
picks up the phone and says, like, I wanna report
19:51
a suicide. hangs at the phone, pulls out
19:53
this gun, we think, 000
19:55
no. She's overcome by grief. I mean,
19:57
the movie has not really set us up to
19:59
believe this at all, but it's like, well,
20:01
a lot arbitrary things have happened and this maybe
20:03
they're just gonna have Lori kill herself. So
20:05
cuts away. We hear gunshot. We see
20:07
this splat. Come out of
20:09
the door. that incomes Corey
20:12
pan back to the mantle piece where Lori has
20:14
actually just shot pumpkin. Call back to
20:16
the the credits of the original
20:18
and you know, most of the movie since. And so
20:20
then they have, you know, she's just like, oh,
20:22
you ready? You didn't really think I would kill myself.
20:25
She shoot him, I think, twice.
20:27
And then puts the rest of the bullets the
20:29
wall for some reason, but he's he's, you
20:31
know, at this point, lying there
20:33
sort of bleeding out, we think
20:36
briefly dead at the bottom of
20:38
her stairs. And then, of course,
20:40
we see a shape move
20:42
in the background. So earlier in
20:44
the movie, when Lori had
20:46
confronted Corey. Corey said
20:48
something like, if I can't have
20:50
Alison know one well, there's a lot of
20:52
classic abuser language going on in the
20:54
movie and it's all about the cycle of
20:56
trauma, etcetera, etcetera, that this movie is sort
20:58
of trying to toy with it, not very
21:00
convincingly. And then in this
21:02
scene, after are on the ground. Does
21:04
Michael confront him while he's still alive? Yeah.
21:06
We think he's dead, but then the Lori
21:09
realizes that she sees like a curtain
21:11
bellowing and she's like, you know, she knows Michael's in the
21:13
house because she has, you know, like Michael
21:15
Dar. At this point so he goes
21:17
up to Corey. Michael
21:19
goes to pick up the knife, which
21:21
Corey's left on the floor, and Corey grabs his arm
21:23
when he does it. So he's not dead, like a little
21:25
sort of end of carey jumpscare
21:27
there. They struggle with it for a little bit, and then Michael just kind of grabs
21:29
his head and breaks his neck.
21:30
Oh, yes. That's right. because what I
21:33
was thinking of is that earlier in the scene,
21:35
he stabs himself in
21:37
the neck. and says he repeats the line about
21:39
if no one can have her and then stabs
21:41
himself somehow. That's supposed to make sense.
21:43
Okay. Right. And then Michael comes and Michael,
21:45
yes, dispatches him. takes
21:47
the mask back. And so it begins,
21:49
what the trailers for this movie sort of presented
21:51
it as being a confrontation between the two
21:53
of them once again. And it goes through a
21:55
lot of weird sort of, like, volying
21:58
around the house. Like, they like,
21:59
at one point, he, like, takes her hand and puts
22:02
in the garbage disposal and tries to turn
22:04
it on. which is itself a callback to the
22:06
previous Halloween anniversary
22:08
sequel in which she decapitates
22:11
Michael Myers. And you're going into this movie, and
22:13
this movie ignores the events of anything
22:15
after Halloween too, if you don't
22:17
recall. So that's why that kind of makes
22:19
sense that she's already killed him before. And in
22:21
fact, in the he's also killed
22:23
her. But I
22:25
think in in the scene,
22:27
you sort of like, what can she possibly do
22:29
to Michael that it'd be more final? than
22:32
decapitating him. And so he does come up with an
22:34
answer. But first, we're sort of in the
22:36
kitchen, and she's like kind of crucifying
22:38
him. She's like, she's puts, like,
22:40
knives through both of
22:42
his hands and, like, kind of, has them
22:44
open on the thing. She can really handle big
22:46
game. And Michael, you
22:48
know, she's She gets him down. She seems to
22:50
cut one of his arteries at first, and
22:52
then she slices his throat. And then
22:54
for good measure, she slits his
22:56
wrist the right way as the moves have
22:58
Tommy. It's a very long and bizarre sequence. That's, like,
23:00
almost a little bit tender in the weird way.
23:02
Yeah. And he comes back, you know, after you think he stood
23:04
at one point and grabbed her around the throat
23:06
and is choking her out, and then Allison comes
23:08
back in, sees Corey dead.
23:11
But, you know, comes around
23:13
to her mom's side. eventually. Yeah.
23:15
Grandma. Yeah. I'm so sorry. Yeah. At first, she's,
23:17
like, horribly mad that she that Laura started
23:19
us killed Corey, but later
23:22
on, she sort of seems to have come around to it
23:24
have been being the
23:25
right thing and realizing that Lori was
23:28
right. But in a very weird sequence
23:30
that was kind of fun almost,
23:33
they take Michael and, like, they decide that he's
23:35
not dead enough yet. So
23:38
they
23:38
strap his body to a on top of a car,
23:41
I believe. And, like, the entire townspeople form a
23:43
line as if they're, like, going to a mess, like, a
23:45
giant funeral in the middle of the
23:47
night, and they drive out
23:49
to the junkyard
23:51
where, you know, Corey killed
23:53
all the teens. They feed him into what I
23:55
believe if I remember right Steven King correctly
23:57
is called a Wrangler. They put his body in
23:59
there and, like, it is they really make pulp out of him.
24:01
And, you know, at the capitation, it's
24:03
very nineties compared to this. Like, it is, like, at
24:05
a very thorough evisceration. You
24:07
see his little head, like, get sort of
24:09
squished up and, like, you know, mashed
24:11
in the gears of this thing. Like, it is he's
24:13
really most sincerely dead at this point. Yeah. I
24:16
think that it's meant to be a
24:18
weirdly sort of sweet moment even
24:20
though it's incredibly gruesome. So
24:22
this movie is sort of assimilated
24:25
to earlier does something different that he thinks is bad and I think
24:27
is okay, but it it it, like, also
24:29
wants to have
24:31
this
24:31
final climatic moment with Michael
24:33
too in a way that, like, totally
24:35
feels a little bit off. Let's talk about how it brings
24:37
the whole trilogy in this reboot cycle to
24:39
a close, let's take break first.
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So we've been talking
27:01
about Halloween ends, how it does bring
27:04
this whole new trilogy to close.
27:06
I'm sure there will be, you know, more
27:08
Halloween movies in another ten
27:10
or five or three years whenever the
27:12
IP needs to be revived. But as a
27:14
fan of the series like this or a
27:16
devotee of the series up to this point, how did you feel
27:18
about this as a kind of at least
27:20
temporary close to the cycle? I
27:21
mean, I think it is a far less
27:24
satisfying movie than Hollywood H20 It's just
27:26
like from the late nineties and it's like an
27:28
eighty minute sort of throwaway Slasher
27:30
kind of, but it like is a taut
27:32
little movie in which she confronts Michael onto
27:34
Cabotades and like I said. And it's like so
27:36
I guess they just like realized they couldn't do
27:38
that movie again and wanna do something different, which as
27:40
I said, I appreciate shape. I can't imagine that fans of the
27:42
series and of this character are going to take very kindly
27:44
to how they just, like, really like,
27:48
let
27:48
this kidwalk all over him and make him into
27:50
this weak feeble little thing only for Lori
27:52
Strode to feed him to a Wrangler.
27:55
But I you know, I thought it was solid.
27:57
It it caught me by surprise. I
27:59
don't know
27:59
that the movie makes any sense or works at
28:02
all, but that is, like, fine. A lot of these
28:04
movies do not But that said, I thought it
28:06
was at least a shot at
28:08
something vaguely original. In that way, I thought it
28:10
was satisfying. Yeah. I've already made
28:12
my feelings about it clearer than I'd rather end on your up notes.
28:15
That is our
28:17
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spoilersslate dot com. Our producer today
28:35
is Christie Tywell McEnjula,
28:37
Alicia Montgomery is the Vice President of Audio Exchange.
28:39
For Jeffrey Bloomberg, I'm Sam Adams.
28:41
Thank you for
28:43
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