I hate election season. I don't have cable, but because I work at a TV station and political ads have infected YouTube, I can't escape the insanity. Still, there is one thing I like about those ads. It tickles me every time they say something like, "Candidate X voted to set fire to every small business, lining his pockets with millions of dollars," and it has a still picture of the candidate smiling and having the time of their lives. I love the subtext of, "Look at this monster, laughing while they destroyed your life!" It's incredibly silly, but it makes me laugh anyway. So yeah, what was I talking about? Oh yeah! Let's discuss...
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1996)
Anytime I watch a movie I like to check out the Trivia section on IMDB to learn a little bit more of the backstory and I just learned something that I can't process right now. In the original Halloween, John Carpenter offered the role of Dr. Loomis to Christopher Lee but the producers refused. I don't know how I feel about this. I have no doubt that Christoper Lee would have knocked it out of the park, but Donald Pleasance is SO good in the role. As great as Lee is, and he's awesome, I don't know if he would have been able to pull off the emotion Pleasance had in part 4 where he begs Michael to walk away. Then again, I'm not sure Loomis would have been the same character as the movie went on with Lee. I can imagine the character would have taken a darker turn than the insane one we got in part five.
Let's talk about the movie... Six years after the previous movie we jump right into 15-year-old Jamie Lloyd, who is now being played by Danielle Harris, giving birth in front of a bunch of cultists. Thanks to a kind nurse, she manages to escape with her baby and Michael hot on her tail brutally murdering everyone in his path, even doing the head tilt after pinning a nurse to the wall. I get it, everyone loves that scene in the original, but it loses the effect when he does it all the time now. I'm going into a bit more detail than I normally would because it leads to one of my favorite images from the entire series. Jamie has escaped the compound and with the music blaring, she turns around to see Michael emerging from the building holding the big knife. It looks so cool! The scene has stuck with me ever since I first saw it as a child.
From there, Michael kills Jamie and then spends the rest of the movie trying to track down Jamie's baby boy. His quest brings back familiar faces Dr. Wynn from the first movie, Dr. Loomis and Tommy Doyle, played by Paul Rudd, credited as "Paul Stephen Rudd," continuing my favorite thing of huge movie stars getting their starts in horror movies.
This was the final chapter in the Thorn trilogy before the Halloween franchise decided to go nuts with its continuity. This installment is looked at as one of the worst of the series. On Reddit, the ardent defenders of David Gordon Green's swing-and-a-miss trilogy will say "It's better than Halloween VI!"
I disagree. Don't get me wrong, this movie isn't good. It's an actual mess. I don't have enough time to go over everything that happened behind the scenes, but my goodness, it sounds like a nightmare. There were two cuts of the movie, both of them very different. The Producer Cut as it's called strongly implies that Michael impregnated his 15-year-old niece. It also focuses more on Michael and he's ultimately defeated by Rudd setting three runes on the ground, freezing Michael in place. The theatrical version has more Dr. Loomis, has less of a focus on the cult and Michael's defeat is a fair bit better.
There are a few other things that I want to touch on. Michael is absolutely brutal in this one. The other movies offered small glimpses of the last shred of Michael's humanity, but not this one. Michael's business is murder and business is booming. I think there's only one quick death, everyone else has a really rough go of it when running into him. The other big takeaway was Rudd's character. He is such a charismatic and charming actor whose mere presence makes movies better. This one, not so much. I don't know if he needed to find himself or if it was terrible writing, but he's bad in this. Not just bad, but he's super awkward and creepy throughout the entire thing. It's certainly a choice to have your hero be just as creepy as your unknowable killing machine.
Still, despite the bad stuff and the ridiculous plot, it's better than many give it credit for. I like how all the chaos behind the scenes created a Frankenstein's Monster of a movie splicing together both cuts. Things just kind of happen to move the plot forward. I'm still trying to figure out why Michael just up and decided to murder all the doctors and nurses he'd been working for and the final shot in the movie is certainly a bit of a head-scratcher that only makes sense in the Producers Cut. Despite all the stuff going against it, it's entertaining. We get our final appearance from Donald Pleasance, the beginning of Paul Rudd's career and an extremely brutal Michael that doesn't venture into cartoon territory like later movies.
7 Dr. Chainsaws!
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