Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

Runtime: 88 minutes

Directed by: Joe Chappelle

Starring: Donald Pleasence, “Paul Stephen Rudd”, Marianne Hagan, Mitchell Ryan, Bradford English

From: Dimension

Yes, I finally got back to watching Halloween movies, and as I had remembered long ago, this is pretty awful. In a few days I'll see the “Unrated Producer's Cut” of this for the first time and I understand it's not as bad. What they put out theatrically... it's pretty appalling. I explain it all in my Letterboxd review copied and pasted below:

NOTE: This is the theatrical cut I am reviewing; in a few days I will watch and review the Unrated Producer's Cut that I haven't seen before but has to be better than this, or at least not as rancid.

Last fall I rewatched the first five Halloween movies; talk about a mixed bag. As I had seen this bad movie once before (and believe it or not this is the newest Halloween film I have seen. The rest of the sequels I actually haven't watched yet, which I understand is probably a good thing if I wish to avoid seeing bad motion pictures) I knew that a second viewing probably wouldn't change my opinion, and I was right. This is pretty awful.

The general story seemed OK in theory. The screenwriter of the fifth film randomly included that man in black who busted him out of jail and never explained it so the filmmakers here decided to tie it in by going with the Celtic and Druid angle, which was at least mentioned before in the franchise. However, due to reasons not entirely known by me, there were many production issues during filming and there were plenty of reshoots and what ended up in the theatrical cut is an incoherent almost incomprehensible mess. A bunch of random things happen haphazardly that you couldn't possibly care about and rather than end, the movie pretty much stops and doesn't resolve much of anything. What a limp and flaccid finale it was, and even more of a mess than the rest of the film.

As for the performances, meh. Even Donald Pleasence did not deliver a great performance; then again he was hardly in this version of the film anyhow. What an insulting end to that character, by the way. “Paul Steven Rudd” makes him movie debut here and the lasting memory of his performance is that while his character appeared earlier in the series, it did not mean much anyway and he was a creepy voyeur who somehow became one of the heroes. They did not bring back Danielle Harris to reprise her role of Jamie Lloyd and the studio first acted like they did not want anything to do with her then gave her an insultingly low amount of money to do the role. The actress they cast instead was OK but the fans naturally were not happy with that.

To mention an aside, a few years ago I listened to a now defunct podcast where screenwriter Daniel Farrands (yes, the guy who later produced the Nightmare on Elm Street documentary Never Sleep Again and wrote Crystal Lake Memories) talked about the badness of this and the two tidbits I remember was that the role of the “shock jock” (which ended up being a pointless diversion) was going to be played by HOWARD STERN but he wisely turned it down and Farrands wished that Mike Myers would have appeared in the movie-for obvious reasons-even if it was just a cameo and yet the in-joke never happened.


Anyway, due to the troubled production I understand that most of the people involved have disowned this, and unless you want to see every movie in this franchise I suggest that you do the same and not bother wasting 1 ½ hours on this claptrap.