a review of 月光光心慌慌：终结

HOOPTOBER NINE! NIGHT THIRTY-FOUR! + 2022 PODCAST MACABRE HORROR CHALLENGE CATEGORY 24: A BLUMHOUSE PRODUCTION Gotta say I appreciated what they were going for here, even if I'm unsure of how it all flows tonally from the first in this trilogy. Like HALLOWEEN '18 and KILLS, it's attempting to take on some big cultural and societal themes in the guise of a slasher; ENDS goes one further by making its villain a vulnerable young man, mistreated by a punitive justice system, who takes his rejection by society as an excuse to become further radicalized by antisocial forces, here represented by Michael Myers lurking in a drain pipe a la Pennywise. I'm not certain that it fully nails its metaphor here, and I think there's certainly some room to wonder if it isn't inadvertently justifying the POV of the anti-social justice crowd, e.g. "so much for the tolerant left," etc. The movie tries to set up Laurie as the good-babysitter to Corey's bad-babysitter, and there's some interesting imagery around wallowing in one's own personal tragedies and rejecting despair, but I'm not sure if it's differentiated enough from her Sarah Connor-ish portrayal in '18 to stick.