Best of 2023: In 2022's Surreally Misconceived Halloween Ends Michael Myers Makes a New Halloween Friend in Corey, the Worst Character in the History of Film — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Welcome to the first entry in The Great Catch-Up, a new feature where I go back and write about the many fascinating, important, great and wonderfully terrible films that have come out since this site was launched back in 2017 that I somehow never got around to writing about. YOU can help determine what I write about for this column by voting in polls at this site’s Patreon page at or by becoming a paid Subscriber for my Substack newsletter Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas here.

In the early 1980s producer John Carpenter and writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace made one of the great gambles in horror movie history. Instead of giving the public more of the Michael Myers mayhem they craved and angrily demanded, they made a Halloween movie that had nothing to do with the masked machete-wielding maniac but was instead a weird outlier about an evil toy company out to wreak havoc on Halloween night.

Halloween III: Season of Witch was supposed to be the first in a series of anthology films that would take place on October 31st and follow new characters in new settings every year.

Audiences were, perhaps unsurprisingly, surprised, and not in a good way, to discover that the horror franchise about terrifying mass murderer Michael Myers had somehow became a series in which the horror icon played no role.

The box-office for 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch (which, for good measure, was not witch-themed in any real way) was underwhelming and disappointing. The filmmakers abandoned their ambitious plans for a yearly horror anthology.

To make extra sure that audiences knew exactly what they were in for, 1988’s Halloween 4 was subtitled The Return of Michael Myers.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch may have been seen as a regrettable, if audacious mistake at the time of its release but in the ensuing forty-one years it has gone on to attract a sizable, devoted cult.

Wallace’s weird digression is now perhaps the third most beloved Halloween movie, after the acclaimed original and David Gordon Green’s critically acclaimed 2018 hit of the same name.

Green’s Halloween ignored every Halloween movie after the 1978 original (yes, even the one with Busta Rhymes). It was a direct sequel to Carpenter’s classic but Halloween Ends nevertheless feels like a weird spiritual sequel to Halloween III: Season of the Witch all the same.

Like Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Halloween Ends was an ambitious, audacious attempt to make a Halloween movie where the focus is not on Michael Myers.

Michael Myers, or “The Shape” as he is alternately known, is a spooky, malevolent presence but he inexplicably is no longer the primary villain or focus of the film. That unfortunate distinction belongs instead to Corey Cunningham, a brand spanking new character played by Rohan Campbell, who you might know from his role as "Male Student” in 2015’s The Unauthorized Full House Story.

You better love Corey because Halloween Ends belongs to Corey. It’s Corey’s time to shine! It’s Corey’s world. We’re just living in it.

There are many, many problems with that, beginning with the unfortunate name of its main character. Corey Haim may be dead and Corey Feldman might not be as popular as he once was but for multiple generations the name Corey is synonymous with cute teen actors from the 1980s that teenyboppers swooned over. Corey Cunningham, the film’s primary villain, is like Corey Haim and Corey Feldman but less messed up. Sure, he kills a lot of people but he’s smart enough to stay away from drugs and the decadent Hollywood party scene.

Making a Halloween movie about a killer named Corey is like making a Friday the 13th movie where Jason Voorhees teams up with his even more terrifying mass murdering friend Chad or a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel where Freddy Krueger faces a deadly threat in the form of the notorious serial killer Goober McGee.

When a serial killer is caught his neighbors often say that they seemed perfectly normal and that no one could possibly have guessed their dark secret. Corey, on the other hand, gives off a major serial killer vibe even before he starts straight up slaughtering the cursed residents of Haddonfield.

We open with a prologue where wealthy parents make the deadly mistake of having Corey baby-sit their brat Jeremy Allen. Corey has the poor judgment to let the boy watch The Thing (which Halloween director Carpenter also helmed) and when the little bastard locks him in the attic of their massive home Corey bursts out and accidentally knocks him off the top floor of their massive home.

Now THESE are some Coreys. Iconic, even.

Jeremy dies and though Corey is acquitted of manslaughter three years later seemingly every person in Haddonfield knows every aspect of Jeremy’s death and, for good measure, also has an encyclopedic knowledge of Michael Myers’ crimes and his relationship with Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode.

In elementary school Haddonfield kids learn the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic, blaming Michael Myers’ crime spree on Laurie Strode and holding Corey accountable for Jeremy Allen’s violent demise.

Everybody knows Corey and Laurie and hates them. Yet they stay in a small town with nothing but traumatic memories and residents who would happily beat them to death with their fists if given a chance.

Sure enough, when a gaggle of belligerent high school bullies try to get Corey to buy them beer and he politely declines they begin taunting him about Jeremy’s death.

Corey ends up bloody and wounded from the altercation. Laurie sees the whole brouhaha and becomes convinced that the deeply depressed, clearly unwell killer is the perfect man for her cute nurse granddaughter Allyson Nelson (Andi Matichak).

What are the odds that Laurie would befriend AND act as a Yenta to her old nemesis’ best friend? What a crazy coincidence!

In an even crazier coincidence Allyson conveniently happens to work at a hospital where Corey’s wound is stitched up. Allyson hurls herself at the crazy-eyed psychopath but he is too committed to dreaming of murder to have the sex with the gorgeous, understanding woman who instantly and inexplicably falls in love with him.

Allyson and Corey attend a Halloween party at a local bar where everyone is rocking out to Sebadoh and Corey is confronted by the mother of the child he killed, who is hanging out at what appears to be a college soiree despite being a good two decades older than everyone else.

Outside the party Corey encounters the young ruffians from before. They toss him off a bridge, seemingly to his death. Instead Michael Myers brings him to his rat-infested home.

If you want my body and you think I’m Corey, come on. baby let me know!

The crazed killer starts to choke Corey to death but stops when he senses a kindred spirit in the broken and despondent young man.

They should call Halloween Ends Halloween Friends because our new pal Corey is saved when his buddy Michael Myers drags him into his sewer lair and decides not to murder him even though killing people is his whole deal.

The masked maniac doesn’t talk but if he did his initial conversation with Corey would probably go something like this:

Michael Myers: Let’s play a game. On the count of three, name your favorite activity. Don’t even think about it. Just name it. Ready.

Michael Myers and Corey simultaneously: Murdering the people of Haddonfield with a giant knife.

Corey: Favorite motivation?

Michael Myers and Corey simultaneously: Blind rage and a deep, unthinking hatred of humanity.

Michael Myers: What?

Corey: Did we just become best friends?

Michael Myers is not the kind of friend who will help you move for the cost of a pizza and a six pack of beer or the kind of friend you can talk to after the death of a parent. He is, however, the kind of hulking brute who will help you murder your enemies. That is not the kind of friend you need. Unfortunately it’s the sort of bad influence Corey wants in his life.

Michael is the demon on Corey’s shoulder imploring him to kill as many as people as possible. On his other shoulder resides a smaller version of Michael Myers also telling him to kill, but in a more selective fashion.

Next Corey kills a homeless man, possibly in self-defense. Corey’s first two kills were accidental but he discovers that he has a taste for murder, not unlike his BFF Michael Myers.

Rumor has it that there’s even a deleted scene where Michael Myers and the one Corey make each other friendship bracelets. How adorable!

Corey then lures Officer Doug Mulaney (Jesse C. Boyd), an obnoxious ex-boyfriend of Allyson’s, to a sewer where he and Michael Myers join forces to murder the unfortunate lawman.

Michael Myers is okay, but he’s no Corey.

Then the bloodshed really starts. Corey decides to slaughter everyone he has a grudge against or has done him wrong, including a nurse that got a promotion over Allyson by sleeping with a doctor who is also murdered, the high school bullies who threw him off the bridge, his mother and even a disc jockey who spoke unkind words to him.

Laurie eventually wises up and realizes that there’s something a little off about her granddaughter’s new boyfriend and it involves killing a fuck-ton of people and befriending evil incarnate.

The mass murderer/superhuman killing machine team-up reminded me of William Lustig’s pulp masterpiece Maniac Cop 2, only terrible.

Laurie offers to help him if he’ll only leave her granddaughter alone but he's all, “Nah, I’m good.”

In a deeply anti-climactic climax Laurie fakes her own death so she can kill both Corey and Michael Myers. Of course Michael Myers has a kooky way of returning from the dead so the whole town watches as his corpse is fed into an industrial shredder.

But don’’t worry. He’ll be back. This particular series may have ended up poorly but another reboot is undoubtedly on the way with a whole new continuity.

Halloween Ends does just about everything wrong. Laurie Strode, one of the most badass heroines in horror history, is reduced to a cheesy supporting role in the Corey Show where she sets her granddaughter up with a man who is clearly a violent psychopath, writes painful purple prose in a memoir that, honestly, seems like it’s going to suck despite her having such a compelling life story and plays righteous avenger at the end once again.

David Gordon Green has made a movie roughly a fiftieth as cinematic as the average episode of The Righteous Gemstones, which Green works on as a director alongside Halloween Ends co-screenwriter Danny McBride.

Thanks to the Great Catch-Up I watched Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Halloween Ends back to back. They’re both godawful, wildly misconceived final entries in prominent cinematic trilogies that fail spectacularly short but in much different ways. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker errs in giving audiences what they think they want but ineptly and with a palpable sense of desperation. Halloween Ends at least tries to do something new and unexpected. It fails but at least it made the effort.

Will Halloween Ends pick up a Halloween III: Season of the Witch-like cult following over time? Probably not, on account of it being terrible.

Have we seen the last of Corey? I hope so but it’s possible that the filmmakers are so in love with the character that there will be a sequel with multiple iterations of the mass murderer. You could call it The Two Coreys and cast Corey Feldman in one of the roles. I’m sure he’d appreciate the work and he has extensive experience acting in slasher sequels thanks to his performance in 1984’s misleadingly titled Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco

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