Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers
Every year on Halloween weekend, I watch an entry in the Halloween film series. Things started off great, but last year's part 5 watch was an absolute stinker. I didn't think it could get any worse.
I was wrong.
HALLOWEEN 6: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS is one of the worst films I've ever sat through. Make that barely sat through.
If you gave any freshman film class the $5 million this trash cost, the keys to Carpenter's franchise and a typewriter, any of them could come up with something better than this poorly shot, shoddily constructed, stupid, illogical travesty.
Hell, even Michael Myers seems to have gotten fat since that last film. Is nobody even trying here?
This 1995 stinker has two attributes.
It's only 87 minutes long and it features the film debut of Paul Rudd.
For those of us that think that Rudd never ages, here's come film proof that he does, because he looks about 16 here.
I would bother trying to share some part of the storyline here, but it's so poorly formed and delivered that no one really cares.
It's more fun to talk about what it gets wrong.
And that gives us SO much more to talk about.
In Donald Pleasence's last film as Dr. Loomis, he seems to spend most of the film either talking about how he wished he'd retired, or muttering his signature Loomis line.."Good God...." so many times that it starts to feel like a punchline.
Rudd plays the grown up (kind of) Tommy Doyle, who still lives across the street from the Strodes house where Jamie Lee Curtis first battled the Boogeyman. Rudd is okay, but the character as written is such a twisted oddball that I spent most of the film laughing about how far he's come since his debut.
Poor Kim Darby is also a long way here from her film debut in "True Grit". We know she can do horror, her 1973 TV horror movie, "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" scared the hell out of me as a kid. Here, she's reduced to getting tangled in hanging laundry in her back yard, chopped up by a hatchet while wearing a really bad wig that looks like something from The Golden Girls.
It seemed like (again, the filmmaking is so bad, it's hard to be sure of anything) Michael is coming back to Haddonfield in pursuit of his niece Jamie Lloyd, who has just escaped from a bizarre cult who kidnapped her newborn baby.
I laughed out loud when in one scene, she escapes Michael, jumps into a truck with the baby, drives for twenty minutes and then Michael shows up two minutes later, even though he's walking.
Was anyone in charge of continuity on this mess?
We all loved the original Halloween flicks and Friday the 13th films for their inventive kills and crazy, wacko deaths. This plays like an episode of Dateline. Here comes Michael, he never walks and everybody can run. He catches them anyway and stabs them. Boom your dead. Next!
So boring, so stupid, so dull.
Director Joe Chappelle must have been shackled by tightwad producers or a horrible studio. He went on to direct 66 episodes of one of my favorite series of all time, "Fringe" for JJ Abrams. That was a terrific show with great structure, drama, suspense and thrills. So I'm not blaming him for this mess.
This film became legendary when initial test screenings were horrible, resulting in massive reshoots and bad editing. I watched the supposedly superior "Producer's Cut", which rendered me speechless wondering how the first version could have been any worse.
The film spends a quarter of it's running time dealing with a secret Druid cult that is responsible for Michael Myers power. Huh? I thought the Halloween mask storyline in Part III was dumb. At least that chapter didn't even pretend to have ANYTHING to do with the series.
There is one character in the film, a man in black, that keeps appearing, but he's never explained at any point. He appears to serve as a major plot point, but he's never called out in anyway before the end credits roll.
To be honest, I was so glad to see the last scene fade out after 87 minutes that felt like 3 hours, I didn't care.
What dreck. Unbelievably, this had the biggest opening weekend of the entire series up until that time, grossing $15 million before word of mouth killed it faster than Michael ever slayed anyone.
There's a curse all right, and it kept anyone with a brain from being anywhere near the creative team on this scare-free turd.
Just like part 5, HALLOWEEN 6 gets an F.
Next year, I'll watch it's follow up, 1988's 'HALLOWEEN H20: 20 Years Later" which ignores that parts 3, 4 5 and 6 ever happened.
Gee, I wonder why.....
Comments