Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers review
It’s like the opposite of John Carpenter’s Halloween. But still kind of fun?
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
Directed by Joe Chappelle
Written by Daniel Farrands
Starring Donald Pleasence, Paul Rudd, Marianne Hagan, Mitch Ryan, Devin Gardner, J.C. Brandy, Keith Bogart and Kim Darby
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers Review
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is not a good movie. I wanted to get that out of the way immediately. Actually, I needed to get that out of the way immediately because I unabashedly love Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. It breaks every rule that made the peaks of the franchise work. It goes farther than any entry into trying to explain what Michael Myers is…which is something that should never happen. And yet I love it. I love it for marking the end of the classic slasher era…and I love it for being so batshit insane that two different versions of the movie exist to battle for which one goes more off the rails.
1995 was the dead zone of the slasher genre. Scream would arrive in 1996 to ignite a new, self-aware era of slashers. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers would do its best to kill the Halloween franchise before that happened. Freddy had bowed out with the excellent meta-horror film Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in 1994…but it went out with an interest level best described as a whimper. Jason hit his career low with 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell…a movie that seemed to have zero understanding of what a Friday movie was.
Leave it to the OG Michael Myers to go out lighting himself on fire and pissing on his own ashes. The slasher era that defined horror from the release of John Carpenter’s masterpiece through the pop-culture rise of the masked (or burned) killer was dead with the release of Halloween’s sixth installment. They’d all come back, of course. They always do. But The Curse of Michael Myers marks an end to their era.
And what a mess it all ends with. Jamie Lee Curtis had left the franchise behind way back in Halloween II. The third installment wasn’t about Michael Myers. When that character (and his insane doctor) returned in 1988 with Halloween 4…the series found itself trying to exist in a landscape that had changed since it ushered it into existence. Halloween 4 is the sequel that feels most like the original…the one that feels like it would exist a decade after Michael’s original rampage. Halloween 5 sends things into crazy town almost immediately. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers does not attempt a course correction.
One of the most enduring things about the original Halloween is how little about Michael is ever explained. The film’s final image seems to confirm a supernatural attachment to the character…but the genius of the movie is that it never has to explain that. It’s simply an unexplainable boogeyman driven by nothing and killing indiscriminately. If Laurie Strode doesn’t drop that key off at the Myers house…she (and her friends) would have never been in danger. There’s no other motivation. He’s unstoppable and he’s everywhere. A perfect presentation with a perfect ending.
Flash forward a few years and Halloween II has no choice but to ruin that perfect story. Simply returning to Haddonfield and the story of Michael Myers forces the series to start explaining itself. At the very least…it has to tell us what happened after Halloween ended. Carpenter’s script goes further and makes Michael Myers the unknown brother of Laurie Strode. Time has proven this to be a mistake so there’s no sense going over it here. 2018’s Halloween retconned that out of existence. While it couldn’t put the toothpaste back in the tube…it could at least ignore that the toothpaste ever existed.
Halloween 4 faced a new problem. Jamie Lee Curtis wasn’t interested in returning to the slasher series. At least not until Scream made it cool again and H20 arrived ten years later. The solution came in the form of Laurie’s young daughter Jamie. Jamie became a beloved character in the franchise thanks to the incredible performances by Danielle Harris in parts 4 and 5. Then came Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. A sequel not just intent on explaining everything that it could about Michael…but also disgracing the legacy of the character that saw the franchise through its late-80s return.
The Curse of Michael Myers is the last movie starring Donald Pleasence. He died before they could do reshoots…leaving the theatrical cut of the film scrambling to rewrite an ending. His work is presented in the producer’s cut…the superior version of the mess of a story. It’s also the first movie to star Paul Rudd. Clueless came out first…but this was the first thing he shot. For most people, those will be the only two interesting bits of trivia about this movie.
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers takes everything that worked about the character of Michael Myers in the original and turns it upside down. No longer did we wonder what his deal was…this movie was going to explain it all. Stupidly. Halloween 4 and 5 teased out bits of lore that neither had the nerve to go all the way with. The Curse of Michael Myers can’t stop itself. There’s a conspiracy surrounding the Cult of Thorn and the town of Haddonfield…and I guess Dr. Loomis’s hospital which wasn’t in Haddonfield. It’s a mess. Essentially they create this pure evil and want to pass it on from Michael to a younger vessel. Imagine being told this in 1978 when you were watching Halloween in theaters.
The producer’s cut does a much better job connecting all these dots. They’re dots that shouldn’t be on the page to begin with…but if you’re going to watch one go with the one that finishes the nonsense story. The baby that the cult is hoping to transfer the evil into is the child of Michael Myers and his niece Jamie. Yep. You read that right. Literally raping the character people loved from the last two films. She’s dispatched quickly in the story…a totally unfitting ending to a great character. At least they recast the role, and we didn’t have to watch Danielle Harris treated that way.
The rest of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is a standard Halloween sequel. Michael walks around town killing people related to the characters we are following. This includes a grownup Tommy Doyle (Rudd) and another family member of the Strode bloodline. It’s all fairly standard stuff…except for it being utterly insane. The series has so fully lost the plot by the time part 6 rolled around that it’s impossible to take anything it’s doing seriously. Which is why it kind of works. When I want to turn my brain off and watch a Halloween movie…I’m going to throw on the producer’s cut of this movie before most of the franchise.
There are plenty of bad movies in this series. Halloween 5, Resurrection and Kills are all bad. Both Rob Zombie movies are too. Sorry. They are. So is The Curse of Michael Myers. But it’s the only one of that group that is legitimately so bad it’s good. It’s bad on so many levels…that you can’t help but enjoy it. It’s crapping on everything that came before and destroying any of the aura and mystery that it used to hold. And it’s so unapologetically earnest about doing so…you end up having a good time watching it. The series got a full reboot after this. Thanks to the success of Scream…everything old got a fresh coat of paint and sold as new again.
Halloween: H20 is a far better movie than The Curse of Michael Myers. It’s the new start that the series desperately needed. Then they ran it off the rails immediately in Resurrection and it wandered a filthy Rob Zombie fueled wasteland until the fortieth anniversary of the original brought Jamie Lee Curtis back once again. While there are many timelines in the Halloween franchise…only The Curse of Michael Myers has the distinction of ending the original one. This is the full Loomis run…ended in the most absurd way imaginable. A watchable disaster. A fun tragedy. One of the best bad movies in horror history.
Scare Value
There’s no way to properly express how far off course the Halloween franchise had gone by the time the credits rolled on The Curse of Michael Myers. Whether you’re watching the theatrical cut of the superior producer’s cut…the movie breaks every rule of what makes a Halloween movie good. It’s a betrayal of everything the original was…and even what the last two movies were for their new protagonist. But it’s also kind of…fun? I’ve always had a soft spot for Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Going fully off the rails is just a better look than several of the times they tried to stay on them. Or, at least, a more entertaining kind of bad.
2/5
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers Links
Rent/Buy the theatrical cut on Fandango at Home and Amazon
Rent/Buy the producer’s cut on Fandango at Home and Amazon
