HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE
OF MICHAEL MYERS
A towering monument of awe-inspiring badness
Stand back! You have to take a step back to take it all in, the towering, magnificent awfulness that is Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers. Like the much-loathed Batman & Robin, this is not a movie for anybody looking for actual quality - this is more like a celebration of the horrible, a work of twisted genius that aims only to confound, frustrate, anger and madden its supposed target audience. It's like the filmmakers did everything they could to make this as far removed from what made the original work as they possibly could. And, well, it's different, I'll give ya that.
WAY overcomplicating the matter in its attempt to address the questions left by Halloween 5, Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers mixes in just about everything the filmmakers can think of, no matter how silly it all is, and comes across as a sort of largely unpalatable music-video-style gumbo. This was a fairly novel idea in 1995, actually. This was before Armageddon, after all. So, points for riding on this bad bandwagon before it even got out of the starting gate.
If you'll recall, Halloween 5 ended with little Jamie Lloyd, then nine years old, walking in to the recently-massacred Haddonfield Sheriff's department to see strewn bodies and flaming crap everywhere. The mysterious Man In Black - no, he's not Johnny Cash, but I'm not the first person to make that joke either - has mowed down everybody in sight and stolen off into the night with Michael Myers. So who is this mysterious man? What does he want with Michael? What's with the rune on both of their wrists? And if he rode into town on a Greyhound bus, how does he intend to leave with his new companion?
Fast-forward six years. Haddonfield has actually banned Halloween, I guess in hopes of Michael not stopping by, since nobody else in this series ever did anything really bad on Halloween, except for all those rednecks in part 4. I think they should have done what Crystal Lake did in the sixth Friday The 13th movie and changed the name of the town in hopes of him getting lost while trying to find it. But outside of Haddonfield, there's a cult compound somewhere, and a teenaged girl is giving birth in it. It's Jamie Lloyd (looking like she's aged about twenty years, and not played this time by Danielle Harris), and she manages to snatch her baby from the jaws of the evil Thorn cult and run away. But Michael - who the Thorn cult has apparently kept very, very well-fed for six years - will have none of that, and follows her.
Meanwhile, in Haddonfield, the old Myers house has reverted back to the modest two-story we saw in the first two parts of this series, and it has new owners: cousins of Laurie Strode's. This means what when Myers catches up to Jamie and kills her (in a particularly cruel way; was impaling her not enough, but he had to turn the machine on too?), he hasn't REALLY killed the last member of his family. (this would have been useful information in the last two parts) But, too bad, Michael, Jamie's hidden the baby, and who finds it other than a now-grown Tommy Doyle (Paul Stephen Rudd), who is devoting all of his spare time to tracking Myers down? Oh yeah, a now-retired Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance, of course) is back too, although his inclusion in the script seems like an afterthought, and had Pleasance's death immediately after filming happened about six months earlier, it would have made no noticeable difference to the movie.
Let's see, what else can we add to the stew. There's a Howard Stern-wannabe shock-jock ("I'll bet she wears crotchless panties and barks like a dog!") (this guy beats out Bucky the electrician from part 4 to become the series' most annoying character). There's a single mother (Marianne Hagan), and her abusive father, and her boy (Devin Gardner), who the Thorn cult has an eye on. Let's not even get into the cult's methods and motivations; they're edited into incomprehensibility anyway.
The editing mess may well have been the result of Pleasance's death; the original ending for the film suggested that Loomis was, voluntarily or not, involved in the Thorn cult somehow. This - and much of the movie - was altered after his death, maybe because it seemed tacky, I don't know. This "producer's cut" (that's a new one) has made the rounds of traders; I have never seen it. I've seen only the widely-available version, which is loaded (especially in the last third) with narrative gaps. Remember how the character of Poochie was removed from the Itchy n' Scratchy cartoon? There's a scene here which reminds me of that, which just ends suddenly and later Loomis and Doyle wake up and say "We were drugged!"
Now. Quick runoff of some of the hilariously silly things in this movie. One guy makes a point of chopping down his "FOR SALE/SOLD!" sign with an axe, when he could have just pulled it out of the ground. The washing machine continues to run despite the power having gone out. Dr. Loomis recognizes the Thorn rune (burned into a big stack of hay by Michael, for whatever reason) as Michael's "mark", despite never having mentioned it before. The abusive father is so hilariously abusive that he slaps his daughter in front of her kid and makes a point of calling the kid a bastard to his face. (I know, stuff like this happens all the time in real life where it's not funny, but in the context of this movie, the guy's such a cartoon that he becomes pretty amusing) The killing of the shock-jock is possibly the most extraneous in the entire series, Michael going way out of his way to dispose of this guy, not that we're not grateful. Who is the baby's father? No idea. The exploding head makes for a singularly hilarious scene in a largely humorless movie. Michael does...The Fade (TM), but he does it for so long that one wonders just when he WASN'T visible. The identity of the Man In Black should be fairly clear from early on, considering that he's probably the only actor who'd ever been in anything before, other than Pleasance. Michael is revealed to have been brainwashed by the Thorn cult from a young age into "sacrificing" his family to "protect the tribe" (read: cult) from, well, just bad ol' Celtic things in general, like the Irish Rovers. This particular cult does this only on Halloween night, or Samain, or whatever. And only (get this) when a remarkably Thorn-looking constellation appears in the sky, which only happens on Halloween, on certain years. Uh-huh. Director Joe Chappelle's style actually makes that of part 5's seem like a light touch in comparison. The words "He's right behind you!" are actually spoken in this movie. The cult apparently wants to harness the power of "Evil! Pure, uncorrupted (!), ancient." For what, electricity, to power their blenders so they can mix margaritas in celebration? And yes, there's a suggestion at the end that the cult is actually trying to isolate "the Evil gene" (remember Dr. Hibbert? "Adolf Hitler had it. Walt Disney had it. And Freddy Quimby has it.").
Like I said, Pleasance's presence here makes no detectable difference; he hasn't been given this little to do in a movie since Halloween II. Hagan makes no impression at all, and Gardner is just an annoying kid. Rudd, however, shows a little bit of the charm he'd later demonstrate in Clueless and Object Of My Affection - I always kind of figured he'd have become a bigger star by now than he has. Oh well, he's got a long career ahead of him anyway.
Now, there are a number of things I really like about this movie. The Man In Black has always been cool, and I dig the cult! The cult is cool! The cult using Michael as an attack dog is cool! But the cult being behind Michael in the first place, not cool. The attempt to take the series somewhere different is a well-intentioned one, I guess, but explaining Michael's origin this way is an attempt to re-write all that came before it, including (gasp!) the original, and that just ain't a good idea. But we do get to see Michael actually walking really fast! This is a first. And judging from the size of his gut, it really IS a first. There's a nice bit of homage to the little-seen early Carpenter TV-movie Someone's Watching Me. Nice to see some toplessness too, which hasn't been present in this series since the first three entries. There's a very cool, brief scene where Michael goes bugshit in a strobe-lit operating room. (seems to me that of all the kinds of rooms that could be strobe-lit, an operating room would be one of the more unlikely ones) It took six movies (well, five), but finally, ol' Mike found himself an axe to swing. And at the end of this movie, Michael gets da lead-pipe beats like we've rarely seen da beats administered before.
But make no mistake, this is one bad movie. But it's so aggressively bad that it becomes pretty entertaining anyway; it's hard to mistake what is to be expected from this movie when one guy is killed by having his head explode when he's impaled on a knife that sticks into a fuse box. So yes, on that train-wreck kind of level, I find Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers rather engrossing.
This was marketed as the last of the series, not that anybody believed it. Still, it pulled in a fair amount of cash, considerably more than people were expecting, probably thanks to a) a fanbase of the series which was finally gonna be told what was with that Man In Black, and b) that pickin's were REALLY slim for horror flicks at the time. Yet another sequel followed in 1998, which just pretended that this and the two previous to it didn't happen.
Producer's Cut addendum
For about three years I've been hearing about this alternate, pre-test-screening cut of this film, and only now do I actually get to see it firsthand. A tip o' this Man-In-Black's hat goes to Dr. Kent, without whom I'd still be in the dark about this.
Things are different from the first frame, believe it or not - the type used for the film's title is different, the "A" formed out of a Thorn rune turned on its side. The opening monologue is Loomis's, not Tommy's, and worded differently though generally giving us the same information.
A flashback scene gives us a brief glimpse at the police-station massacre aftermath from Halloween 5, when the Man In Black spirited off with Michael and (then-) little Jamie. I'd wondered before as to how he'd get away with them when he came into town on a charter bus - well, he leaves in a van. Where he got it, I don't know.
Now, many of the things which were unclear about the theatrical cut - and there were a lot of them - are either cleared up or absent entirely. The motivation of the Man In Black is cleared up - no nonsense about The Evil Gene. Here, it's tied in with Wynn's visit to Loomis at the beginning of the film - Wynn wants Loomis to take over Smith's Grove both on the surface and in its shady underworld. (I dig the red-lined, Dracula-like cape Wynn wears in the scene where he speaks to Loomis about this, too)
The whole Druidic aspect is followed through with more. Yeah, there's still that silly constellation (and as if we didn't figure this out on our own, we're told that this constellation showed in the sky in 1963, 1978, 1988, and 1989, the years the other Halloween movies took place). I don't really understand why they would want to intentionally impregnate Jamie, since Michael (or the kid) was just gonna kill the little bastard anyway, but at least it's nice and ritualized here, like a real sacrifice instead of them just sending Michael out and saying "Go sic 'em, boy!" But still, the relationship between Michael and the cult is more clear and believable here than in the theatrical cut - we're not really being asked to believe that the cult alone put him up to this from day one. And like the best movies about cults, this makes you want to sign right up even when you know intellectually that they're all nuts (the sex cult in Eyes Wide Shut being the finest example of this that I can think of - I'd join that even without the sex).
Now, not all of this Druidic stuff impresses all that much. It gives rise to what's got to be the worst line in this series' history: "I think Michael is under the influence of an evil rune!" Yes, Michael is under the influence of the evil Thorn rune, and one weapon against him is: good runes! (our hero lays some runes across the floor and Michael stops at them, unwilling or unable to pass)
Regarding poor, oft-harassed Jamie Lloyd, things are a little different for her in this cut. Instead of the extremely mean farm-machinery impalement, she just gets stabbed here, and hangs around in the hospital on life support for half of the film. (not that this goes anywhere - as soon as she regains consciousness, the Man In Black shoots her) But at least we find out who the father of that baby is - uh-huh, it's exactly who you think it is. Sounds pretty lame to me - one of the things that makes Michael Michael is the absence of any sexuality of his own.
The gore is not as absurd - like I said, Jamie's death is much less gruesome. There's no exploding head here, and (alas!) no way-cool strobe-lit massacre scene. Likewise, since just about everything is different after everybody's run-in with the cult, there's no lead-pipe-beating scene. Yes, if WSP's article in Rue Morgue is accurate, then you have the ol' Test Audience Syndrome to mostly thank for the over-the-top gore of the theatrical cut.
I'm not sure if I noticed this before, but when shock-jock radio-guy (man, is that guy annoying) gets killed, things are very slightly different in this cut. (I'd once heard that the Man In Black was his killer in this cut, but that's not the case) He roots around the parking look, searching for his van - yup, same as before - and eventually finds it and gets in, and is killed by Michael, for no apparent reason. This cut briefly shows that the van he gets into is from the Smith's Grove Sanitarium where Michael was kept for all those years - so why would this guy get into the wrong van? Idiot. Anyway, when his body is found, the little girl is actually SINGING the words "It's raining red" to some familiar tune, while in the theatrical cut, she was just speaking it again and again. I like this better - it's more childlike.
There is a bit more accent on character here; just more expanded conversations between people, the best being when Kara half-successfully tries to convince her little boy that her father wasn't trying to hurt her when he belted her one. Not quite as successful is further villainy from her evil father, in the same scene where he looks on from inside the house and disowns her. (just what is at the root of this animosity between the two is not hinted at in either cut)
Of course, most of the changes take place after the run-in with the cult. Loomis and Tommy still wake up from out of nowhere, and conclude that they'd been drugged - that's lame and slackly done in either cut. In the Producer's Cut, Tommy somehow manages to get his hands on a cultist's robe, though I couldn't quite spot where he got it from. Loomis is confronted by Wynn, who further makes the point that the job of running the sanitarium (and the cult) is his whether he wants it or not. Then they go save Kara from being sacrificed, stopping Michael dead in his tracks with that trick with the runes.
Remember in the theatrical cut where Loomis mysteriously says that he "has some business to attend to" inside, goes in, and screams? And that's pretty much it? Well, here, it's a little more clear - he goes in, and where Michael was stopped by the runes, he finds that body on the floor in the overalls and mask. Thinking Michael to be stopped at last, he reaches down and removes the mask - but it's not Michael, it's Wynn! Wynn's as shocked as Loomis is that Michael is gone, but Loomis is in for a bigger shock yet: Michael walks off into the night in the Man In Black's gear (minus the cowboy boots), and Loomis is told one last time of the path that's been chosen for him. Then he looks to his wrist, and there's the Thorn rune, just like Michael, just like Wynn. (the off-screen scream in the theatrical cut is the on-screen reaction to the sight of this rune here)
Good ideas there, and it's executed about as well as it could have been. I don't think I'd go so far as WSPig's article in Rue Morgue (great magazine, by the way) and say that this cut is the best of the sequels; my vote's still for part four, which while not idea-driven like this one, better fulfills its modest aspirations.