Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) Dimension/Horror RT: 88 minutes Rated R (strong horror violence, language, brief nudity and sexuality) Director: Joe Chappelle Screenplay: Daniel Farrands Music: Alan Howarth Cinematography: Billy Dickson Release date: September 29, 1995 (US) Cast: Donald Pleasence, Paul Rudd, Marianne Hagan, Mitchell Ryan, Kim Darby, Bradford English, Keith Bogart, Mariah O’Brien, Leo Geter, J.C. Brandy, Devin Gardner, Susan Swift, George P. Wilbur, Janice Knickrehm, Alan Echeverria. Box Office: $15.1M (US)
Rating: NO STARS!!!
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is hands down the absolute worst entry in the Halloween series. It’s a confusing and incoherent mess more likely to piss off fans than scare the piss out of them. I felt pretty pissed off myself as I left the theater after the advance screening held the night before its release date. It was shown at 9pm instead of the usual 7:30pm. That’s the studio’s way of preventing critics from meeting the deadline for Friday’s editions. They’ll have one good day before bad reviews ward off potential audiences.
Directed by Joe Chappelle (Phantoms), the sixth installment picks up six years after the fifth left off. As you recall, Halloween 5 ended with a mysterious man in black breaking Michael Myers out of the Haddonfield police station and taking traumatized niece Jamie Lloyd with him. It turns out the mystery man is the leader of a Druid-like cult looking to continue the cycle of evil inherent in Michael Myers. After giving birth to her uncle’s son, a midwife (Swift, Audrey Rose) helps 15YO Jamie (Brandy, Devil in the Flesh) and her newborn escape from Smith’s Grove where she’s been held captive since that fateful Halloween night in ’89.
No surprise here, Michael kills Jamie before she reaches Haddonfield. HOWEVER, she manages to do two things before meeting her demise. First, she hides the baby at a bus station. Second, she calls a radio talk show only to have the shock jock DJ (Geter, Silent Night, Deadly Night) dismiss her cries for help as a prank. Fortunately, somebody in the listening audience believes her. Remember little Tommy Doyle? Sure you do. He’s the kid Laurie Strode babysat in the original Halloween. He’s grown into a dysfunctional young adult (Rudd, Ant-Man) obsessed with learning the truth about Michael Myers. He finds the baby and takes him into his care.
So how messed up is Tommy? He rents a room in the boarding house across the street from the old Myers house to watch the family that now lives there. Their name is Strode as in the family that adopted Laurie after her own family fell apart in the wake of her older sister’s murder. Let me tell you, these people are candidates for The Jerry Springer Show. The father (English, The Fabulous Baker Boys) is a drunken, abusive jerk who moves his family into the Myers house without informing them of what took place there in the past. Let me ask you this. How can they NOT know what happened there? It’s Haddonfield, people talk. You’d think that somebody might have mentioned it to them. For example, the girlfriend (O’Brien, Gas Food Lodging) of teen son Tim (Bogart, The Secret Life of Girls) is a Haddonfield native. Are we to believe the subject never once came up? It’s just one of many plot holes in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.
Pardon the digression. Let’s move on, shall we? John’s daughter Kara (Hagan, I Think I Do) has recently moved back home with her 6YO son Danny (Gardner). For whatever reason, he blames his unmarried daughter for their miserable existence. Has it ever occurred to him it could be his alcoholism that’s destroying his family? Based on the scene that takes place at the breakfast table, it looks like little Danny has issues similar to Uncle Michael. He holds a knife to his grandfather’s gut after he slaps his mother across the face. At this point, somebody in the audience shouted, “Go on, do it!” Okay, it was me. What can I say? I was growing impatient waiting for something interesting to happen.
Meanwhile, Dr. Sam Loomis (Pleasence in his final role) is approached by colleague Dr. Terence Wynn (Ryan, Lethal Weapon) to return to Smith’s Grove and resume his duties. Loomis is still haunted by memories of Michael. He’s convinced his former patient has returned to Haddonfield after bumping into Tommy. Furthermore, he’s convinced terrible things will happen this year with Haddonfield lifting its ban on Halloween. There’s a big party on the campus of the local community college. What are the chances a certain uninvited guest will crash the party?
I could sit here and discuss the details of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. I could explain the meaning of the tattoo on the wrists of Michael and the man in black. I could explain what the cult has planned for Michael’s progeny. I could even reveal the identity of the man in black. Sorry, I won’t be doing that. There’s no point in trying to explain that which can’t be easily explained. To me, it appears as though the makers had no idea where to go with the series, so they took ideas from several screenplays and tried to mold them into a coherent story, an endeavor at which they fail egregiously. To say Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is a confused mess is a gross understatement. All this meshugas about Druids, star constellations, rune symbols, some ancient curse and a baby makes no sense at all. Furthermore, why introduce these things at all? They negate the whole idea of Michael Myers as a boogeyman, a killer with no purpose. It’s a lot scarier than a killer with clear motives, don’t you think?
One thing I found truly heinous in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is the visibly ailing Donald Pleasence. He was deathly ill during filming and it shows. He looks gaunt and his voice is raspy. I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to watch a movie featuring an actor on the verge of death. It’s depressing watching him try to squeeze in one more performance before his death. How did the studio even get insurance on an actor who was clearly terminally ill?
As for the rest of the performances, it doesn’t really matter whether they’re any good or not since most of them aren’t. It was pretty cool seeing Swift again. She rarely appears in movies anymore, but why did she choose to appear in this dud? Rudd is positively bland as Tommy Doyle. I never got the sense his character was truly disturbed. He underplays the role to the extent that we only see an attractive actor getting started in the business by appearing in a low-budget piece of dreck. And I have to ask, what is Kim Darby doing here? She was great in the classic 1969 western True Grit. Movie geeks who grew up in the 80s will remember her as the ditzy mother in the 1985 cult comedy Better Off Dead. What demonic force possessed her to sign on for this piece of crap?
The last half hour of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers seems to be an entirely different movie, a boring and idiotic one at that. All I’ll say is it involves the sacrifice of the infant. Or is it the passing of the curse to Danny? It’s unclear what the cult’s intent is if you want to know the truth. It’s really more of an excuse to have the hero and heroine, Tommy and Kara, run around the empty corridors of Smith’s Grove trying to elude the masked killer.
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is one of those frustrating movies with a non-ending that will surely anger fans. Sitting through 88 minutes of complete BS with no payoff at the end would (and did) make me mad too. It fails on every conceivable level. The editing looks like it was done by Michael Myers and his trusty butcher knife. The kill scenes suck. The only memorable one is Jamie Lloyd being impaled on a corn thresher. There’s practically no gore. It doesn’t even work as a splatter flick. I cannot, in all good conscience, recommend it. I HATED IT! Fans of the franchise will hate it too. So will genre fans. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers holds the dubious distinction of being the worst horror movie sequel EVER. It’s moronic, incomprehensible, contemptible and completely worthless. Even horror and splatter fans have standards. This wretched sequel falls far, FAR beneath those standards into an abyss where no being should tread, neither fool nor angel.
