"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers

tn_halloween6I’ve enjoyed rewatching this Jamie Lloyd trilogy of HALLOWEEN sequels. I never liked them, hadn’t watched them enough to remember them very well, but they look better on Blu-Ray and this is the most I’ve ever enjoyed parts RETURN and REVENGE.

CURSE, though, is a tough one. This is just not a good movie. But worth discussing anyway.

It starts unlike any HALLOWEEN movie. A young woman is about to give birth. There’s a medical staff pushing her on a bed down long hallways, beneath pipes, into some kind of boiler room type area, and eventually what doesn’t even look like a hospital. Now they’re in some place lit by candles and wall torches like the arena in BLOODSPORT, and she does not seem to be having her health care choices respected. This is actually supposed to be Michael’s niece Jamie Lloyd, but she’s now played by decent lookalike J.C. Brandy (WHAT LIES BENEATH).

mp_halloween6Check out the bonus features for an interview with Danielle Harris about why she wasn’t in it. She wanted it real bad, but they didn’t treat her respectfully. It sounds like a combination of needing to be ruthless about the budget and not thinking anything matters to the audience. This is hardly a new phenomenon in horror. I can think of a couple other young characters recast for their older versions – Tommy Jarvis in FRIDAY THE 13TH 5, Michael in PHANTASM II – but not any where it’s for the better. I did really like Priscella Barnes replacing Karen Black because they wouldn’t pay her more for THE DEVIL’S REJECTS. And ironically the star of HATCHET wanted a better deal for HATCHET II and was replaced by, yes, Danielle Harris.

Oh yeah, how’s this for recasting: “Starring and introducing Paul Stephen Rudd” as Tommy Doyle, the boogie-man-fearing weiner that Laurie was babysitting when the shit went down back in ’78. Apparently the producers did want original actor Brian Andrews, but didn’t know how to get ahold of him. This makes it funnier, though, because we get to see a very young Rudd (who had actually already been in RUNAWAY DAUGHTERS, CLUELESS and other stuff, but was five years away from his breakout role in GEN-X COPS 2: METAL MAYHEM) delivering doom-filled exposition, Loomis-style. Also it’s funny that his first movie appearance is as a dude standing with a camera watching the heroine undress through her bedroom window.

Somehow Tommy has stayed out of this for 15+ years, but now lives across the street from the Myers house and has the wall covered in newspaper clippings (plus a poster for Wim Wenders’ THE AMERICAN FRIEND?) and he knows Michael is coming back and he’s ready. By ready I mean he has a computer and knows how to look stuff up, for example that there’s a Celtic rune called Thorn and something something evil and the cult chooses one person (Michael Myers) to perform sacrifices and there’s a guy who protects him and I don’t think the guy necessarily has to wear metal tipped boots and a black trenchcoat as part of the ritual but he’s certainly allowed to. I hope the other cultists make fun of his spurs mercilessly though. Not once do we see him anywhere near a horse. What a fuckin poser.

Yes, you remember Part 5’s Man In Black, who came and shot all the police and blew off the side of the jail to bust Michael out. In this one we see that they dragged both him and Jamie into a van like that time when Brad Pitt was kidnapped on Jackass. And as soon as older-Jamie gives birth that asshole struts in still wearing the same corny outfit and snatches the baby from her. A sympathetic nurse helps her escape with the baby and she flees to a hospital, but it’s totally empty with a sign at the front desk saying “Back in 20 minutes”! Like a weird nightmare. Every member of the staff, every patient, every visitor – apparently they all went to Jack in the Box together or something. All of them back in 20 minutes.

Michael gets sent after her, and it’s a weird moment like in EMPIRE STRIKES BACK when you realize that this Darth Vader character is really only the henchman. Michael is like the doberman they sic on her, the pet of The Man In Black and this cult. On one hand, it’s hard to fight the natural instinct to think this Thorn Cult is a really stupid idea that completely undermines the previous movies and the scariness of one of the great horror icons.

still_halloween6

On the other hand, I sort of enjoy the reckless audacity of it. Seeing Michael Myers attending an occult ritual, just a dude standing there at the side, not even the focus of the camera, is kind of cool because it’s like through some crazy mistake The Shape got moved into the wrong movie, some satanic cult type deal. It makes you want to see the series continue on in even more ridiculous directions. Make him have to be the reluctant partner to a cop when disaster strikes during a prison transfer. Or he could be one of several colorful assassins in a spy movie. A supporting role.

I think the writer, Daniel Farrands (THE GIRL NEXT DOOR), deserves some credit, because apparently they filmed the end of 4 having no idea what that tattoo meant or who the Man In Black was. Farrands came in six years later and at least came up with something that seemed planned. (But since he went with this Celtic thing I wonder why he didn’t tie it into part III‘s Silver Shamrock? Maybe he’s not a fan.)

Now is as good a time as any to mention that there are two very different cuts of HALLOWEEN 6. The version known as “The Producer’s Cut” was a legendary bootleg until Scream Factory restored it in recent years. This is the preferred cut of producers Moustapha Akkad and Paul Freeman as well as Farrands. They thought it still needed work, but disagreed with the changes made by Dimension Films’ Bob and Harvey Weinstein in the final version released in theaters.

In the Producer’s Cut Jamie is sidelined kind of like Laurie in HALLOWEEN II, and eventually shot by Dr. Wynn. In the theatrical cut they just have Michael impale her on a corn thresher in the first 20 minutes. In both versions Tommy finds the baby hidden in a public restroom and hides her from Michael, who needs to sacrifice him as the last remnant of his bloodline. So Tommy’s babysitting his own babysitter’s grandson!

(Disgusting note: in the Producer’s Cut they say Michael is the father. In the theatrical cut it is possible that he was a test tube baby?)

Whoah! Wait... what?
Whoah! Wait… what?

The new characters are not likely to be anybody’s favorites. The Myers house is now occupied by relatives of Laurie’s adopted family. Single mother Kara Strode (Marianne Hagan, STAKE LAND) has come with her six year old son Danny (Devin Gardner) to live with her parents Debra (Kim Darby, the original Mattie Ross in TRUE GRIT) and John (Bradford English, WOLF). What a nice tribute to Debra Hill and John Carpenter to name the Strodes after them, except that John Strode is a mentally and physically abusive asshole who you’re supposed to enjoy seeing get killed by Michael. It does make for an interesting development when a domestic violence incident is thwarted by little Danny poking him with a big knife. But if they were trying to imply that Danny could go the way of Michael Myers they don’t really do much else with that idea.

Haddonfield is in the midst of controversy over whether or not to celebrate Halloween, and super famous and edgy shock jock Barry Sims (Leo Geter, SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT) is coming to town to broadcast live, much to the excitement of Kara’s brother Tim (Keith Bogart) and other Barry Bros. This is a weird subplot because it seems to only be there as an excuse for a cheesy radio broadcast that explains what’s going on in Haddonfield. He gets to town and is quickly murdered and we never hear anybody mention that the celebrity everyone was excited to see is missing.

Loomis was supposed to be dead at the end of part 5, but they just say he had a stroke. Also he’s gotten plastic surgery to get rid of the burns on his face. This was Pleasance’s last film. He’s obviously not doing great and his voice sounds weak, but I do like his first scene where he gets to giggle in delight about being retired. Then his old colleague Dr. Wynn (played by Robert Phalen in the original, now Mitchell Ryan from MAGNUM FORCE) comes to visit him. He’s retiring and wants Loomis to come back to Smith’s Grove (what? how is that fair?).

Farrands wanted Christopher Lee to play Wynn, which maybe would’ve given away that he’s a bad guy. In fact, he’s the Man In Black, having been secretly orchestrating shit with Michael since the ’70s, I guess. And I think the occult birthing chamber is actually supposed to be beneath Smith’s Grove. I wonder if he has a firepole to get down there?

I’m okay with there being some dude that wears that outfit who protects Michael, but having it be Dr. Wynn is a little befuddling. He has his regular Dr. Wynn outfits – wherre does he go to change into the boots and black whenever he meets with the cult or stands across the street spying on someone or blows up the jail? And if he’s this doctor who’s been around the whole time then why did he have to come into town on a Greyhound in part 5? Does he have along commute or something?

The Shape is played by part 4’s George P. Wilbur (A. Michael Lerner in reshoots), with a mask by FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII director John Carl Buechler. At times he doesn’t really seem like the same guy to me. He impales a nurse and then stands back and looks at her more like curious Leatherface than emotionless Michael.

The Weinsteins added a bunch of Avid farts and gore to the theatrical version. I’m okay with the latter. Originally, Michael slammed John Strode into a fuse box and stabbed into it to electrocute him. In the theatrical cut it’s the same except then his head explodes SCANNERS style.

The Producer’s Cut is trying to be more atmospheric and creepy, and it follows through with the cult movie thing. There’s a big ritual scene with hundreds of candles and cultists (plus Paul Rudd) in funny black sorcerer robes. Tommy does a spell using runes and blood from his palm to trap Michael in a circle. But by the time Loomis comes back and tries to kill Michael once and for all he discovers Dr. Wynn inside the costume – he switched clothes with Michael, who escaped in the Man In Black costume. Then Loomis discovers the thorn tattooed on his own wrist, cursed to replace Dr. Wynn as Michael’s protector and cult leader. (Or as the new Michael, with Michael as the Man In Black?)

The point is, Obama won’t even say the word “radical Thorn Cult murder sprees,” so of course he can’t stop it.

Test audiences didn’t like that weird ending, so the Weinsteins ditched the whole thing and made a new ending where Tommy injects Michael with glowing green toxic waste and then beats him seemingly to death with a pipe. Since Donald Pleasance had died before the reshoots he’s left out of the climax and then gets a PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE style death where he makes a funny scream from off camera to imply Michael is killing him, seconds before ending the movie with a dedication to Pleasance. Maybe the classiest thing ever done in a movie in my opinion and I know alot about classy movies believe me.

So, as is now tradition in this series, there is a kind of crazy ending that some other pour soul would have to figure out how to get out of in the next one. That ended up being H20 and the way they got out of it was following up part II and denying the existence of 4, 5 and 6. It turns out Laurie is still alive and faked her death, but there is no sign of her having had a daughter named Jamie. She has a son played by Josh Hartnett.

The director was Joe Chappelle, who had only done an unreleased indie called THIEVES QUARTET. The Weinsteins seemed to love him and used him for PHANTOMS and the reshoots on HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE. He eventually escaped into television where he made amends for his shameful past as a producer, director and second unit director for The Wire.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2016 at 11:05 am and is filed under Horror, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

23 Responses to “Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers”

  1. I re-watched the “Thorn/Jamie Lloyd trilogy” last night and I apologize in advance but I enjoy these more the shittier they got.

    -4 is okay. Gets the job done.
    -5 is shittier but I enjoyed it more and legitimately like how it shows what a terrible guy Dr. Loomis is
    -6 (I re-watched the Producer’s Cut for the first time since ye ol bootleg VHS days (only saw the theatrical-cut once in theaters when it came out) is technically terrible and a bad idea from get-go. I found myself strangely drawn in and fascinated by every bad/wrong-headed decision: Myers is basically Oddjob now, super secret stupid ’70s horror movie style cult bullshit where smeingly EVERYbody but the heroes are in on, Antman defeats Myers by putting rocks on the ground (I don’t have to tell you guys that that last one is a thing that totally happens in the movie), etc. From a legitimacy stand-point, the climax to the theatrical is much better (avid farts and all) but there is just something so stupid and anti-cinematic as defeating the big bad of your horror movie series by putting rocks on the ground that I can’t help but smile.

    Thanks for finally nudging me to re-watch these, like THE BEYOND and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD I have finally learned to enjoy these.

  2. Great review, horrible movie. The attempt to retcon a ridiculous back story is definitely an interesting departure and exercise in counter-factual what-if Halloween fan fiction. But narratively and within the series and the iconography and psychology of Michael Myers, its’s a total farce. Just ludicrously implausible and un-engaging conspiracy theory crap that adds nothing truly intriguing on any level beyond the MST3K level. I agree with Vern that it’s interesting to inject Michael Myers into random, out-of-character scenarios, but in this case, it undercuts and diminishes the shape as an inexplicable self-directed force of nature and just makes him a henchmen of this lame, bullshit cult.

    #radicalThornCultmurdersprees
    #notmytheshape

  3. I don’t think I can enjoy 6 the way you do Geoffrey. There’s something about Jason Vorhees that has almost always been campy, and so you can send him to space or make him battle Chucky or make him the family dog, and I’ll go along with it if it’s well-executed and engaging in its own right. Jason has this kind of pathetic geek homicidal, decaying golden retriever quality that makes me enjoy him doing his thing in weir scenarios. He’s a good straight man, is what I’m saying. Michael Myers is not a good straight man or a good henchman. He’s a loner and a self-directed man-thing. And he has no interest in being a straight man put in wacky situations. That’s another reason Resurrection sucks. Too much of this wacky Busta Rhymes mugging and joking shit. It’s not the Shape’s style to be the straight man for that kind of shtick.

  4. Other thoughts:
    -Dr. Loomis listens to late night shock jocks?
    -You’re telling me in a town that is obsessed with these murders and the families related to them, the people living in the Myers house now have NO IDEA it was the Myers house?

    Skani
    I’m very surprised by how much I enjoyed it last night. To your point though, I agree with everything you said but it is that complete wrong-headed move of making Myers a henchman/straight-man, and then side-lining him most of the movie (!), that just made me give up any hope of quality and decide to enjoy the ride as is. With part 6 we are two movies after they told us blowing yourself up will only give you an annoying burn mark, one movie after learning that Myers has a guardian Terminator or something who has his back (this time not the other times though), that I was expecting stupid and it delivered in spades.

    Not to be a complete meanie to this movie I will list two things I legitimately liked:
    -Donald Pleasance’s performance. Sure he’s always good but just something about his (final) performance here made me feel he was more into this one than the last two where I felt he was a big on auto-pilot. I guess it was seeing him retired and happy for once, not on edge. So I guess I’ll rephrase that I like his performance in the first act at least.
    -The scene with the girl singing her song and spinning-around with the “red rain” dripping on her (unaware that it is blood). Sure I have no clue how Myers got that body up there with no one seeing him but it lead to a good image so I’m willing to let it pass (besides not like he’s NEVER done anything like that before anyways).

  5. The main thing I remember was just how weird and depressing the Myers house family was, mom with her big-ol glasses, and that dad is just such an utter piece of shit. I guess they are trying to set him up as somebody you love to hate, and so presumably there is a bigger pay off when Michael dispatches him. But it doesn’t work. He just makes me pissed off, and just that whole situation in the Myers house is depressing as hell but not in a white trash nihilism Rob Zombie way, just a weird should-have-been-cancelled mid-90s NBC dramedy / afterschool special way. Who the hell are these people? The Myers family and Paul W.S. Rudd in this are just a total whiff of a cast, whereas 1-2 gave us Laurie and her innocuous-to-likable friends and 4-5 gives us Rachel and Jamie. This one gives us this friggin depressing public service announcement of a cast and this bonkers conspiracy theory and complete marginalizes the shape, it’s like a master class in how to screw up a Halloween film.

    I appreciate the way you and others can somehow re-orient and find away to appreciate the film in a kind of Ed Wood/MST3K way. For me, I can’t usually do that unless I’ve got the actual MST3K guys to help find the absurd humor in it.

  6. I saw this twice in the theater. The only reason for this was because it was so goddamn awful that I thought it was me and not the movie. I saw it for the second time when it played at the dollar theater and much to my shock it wasn’t me. It was the movie. There’s bad movies and there’s bad movies. Any movie so bad that it makes you doubt your own taste is some next level shit.

  7. Vern, that’s an empty bus station that Jamie ends up at with the baby. Listening to the background noise of her call to the radio station is how Paul Thomas Rudd tracks the baby down: the bus schedule is droning on and on. But it does cut from him and the baby in the bus station to him entering the hospital with the baby, so I see how it could be confusing.

    Then again, I’ve only seen the bootleg Producer’s Cut. You might have been watching the theatrical cut, which I’ve only once 22 years ago. The entire chain of events could be different, for all I know.

  8. I think this film is the main reason I won’t put down my hard earned cash for that super deluxe blu-ray set. The ratio of good to bad film is way off kilter. Part 6 is such a mess. There’s got to be someone out there who can write a book about Dimension Films’s influence on horror in the 90s and 00s.

    P.S. Small correction Vern
    “Now they’re in some place lit by candles and wall torches like the arena in BLOODSPORT”
    I think you mean KICKBOXER. Easy mistake to make.

  9. I got this as part of a bargain bin 3 pack along with H20 and the one with Tyra Banks. I only got it as it was the least expensive way to pick up H20 on Blu ray and never even thought about watching it until Vern reviewed parts 4 and 5.
    Having not seen Halloweens 4 and 5, part 6 just seems like everyone involved just threw a bunch of shit at the screen and saw what stuck. I saw the version in which Rudd (spoilers) beats up Myers in a fight at the end, and despite having watched it just days ago I cannot remember what happens after that.

  10. It was nice to see Dr. Loomis enjoying retirement, wearing a nice sweater, and sipping tea with an old friend and colleague, even if that colleague was one of those Shadow Company pussies a friend of mine ran into in Saigon in ’69.

  11. For me it is and always will be the theatrical cut. I saw the T-cut in 1996 when it came on cable tv here in the UK and I know its a confusing bag of nonsense but its been an annual viewing for me ever since on DVD. Recently I saw the producers cut on YouTube and I couldn’t get used to it even after my third viewing. So I’m loyal to the T-cut.

  12. Watching this one on AMC right now, like I usually do at this time of year, meaning I flip back and forth between it and other things and kind of lose track what the hell is going on. Not that it matters because the movie is so obviously a pile of garbage.

    What I’ll never understand, though, is why the Halloween movies get held to such a high standard because the first one is a masterpiece, but garbage like the Friday the 13th series gets the “meh, it’s pretty good for what it is” standard because the first one (not to mention every fucking sequel) is a pile of inartful shit.

    I know I’m speaking to an audience of none when I say that, but search your feelings. You know it’s true. We watch them to laugh….because they suck.

  13. These movies are almost all good which is why I hate smug attitudes towards them.

  14. Yeah some of the F13 movies may be lesser entries, but I’d be hard-pressed to call the first one “inartful shit”, that’s just hyperbole. I would say basically any movie with a Tom-Savini-provided beheading is at least a *little* artful.

  15. My apologies if I’m the one with the smug attitude in this scenario. I’m trying to defend the honor of the (admittedly disliked by me) Halloween sequels and instead spend more time bashing Friday and its fans.

    That’s weak sauce. I remind myself of those people who spent months or years after 1999 taking cheap shots at Phantom Menace. “I didn’t care for this new Disney cartoon I saw today, but at least it was no Phantom Menace.” “Finally caught up with Unforgiven today. Pretty darned good, but most importantly it wasn’t about space politics.” “Did you ever see The Evil Dead? It was great. And no Jar Jar.”

    “Inartful shit“ was just over the top. My bad.

  16. I’m not sure that stopped until 2017 when the prequel trilogy relayed with the sequel trilogy for that “honour”. Remember how everyone said “GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY is what the prequel trilogy should have been”. I remember one wag saying of WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES; “that’s how you make a prequel trilogy Lucas!” Any fool can just like a film, you need to use it to denigrate another film to show you’re smart!

  17. Hehe, PacMan, that’s a perfect example of that stuff! (Not unlike me denigrating Friday.).

    “My filet at Morton’s was transcendent. It just goes to show Mr. Lucas that a restaurant can excel at making great steak.”

    “The selection of videogames at GameStop left me wanting, like a viewer walking out of a prequel movie.”

    “This fungus on my high upper thigh is so irritating, but at least it’s not Jar Jar Binks.”

  18. Sorry Johnny Utah I got too emotional in response.

  19. No, you’re good, Sternshein. A jackass needs to be called one now and then to bring him back to earth!

  20. gregory scott garner

    May 10th, 2021 at 3:43 pm

    To Mr. Jar: You claim to regard Loomis as ‘terrible’…Why? Because he failed to take Jamie’s feelings fully into account when he was trying to get her to divulge any information that could enable him to stop Michael? Fans to this day whine about the death of Rachel, and her death could have been easily avoided(or at least postponed a bit) if the cops had just done their job…the same cops who were sent there BY LOOMIS, because of what he managed to glean from Jamie…Loomis was frantic to prevent what he foresaw…And if he DID suspect that Jamie’s loyalties were divided, who could blame him? Remember what he had just seen the year prior? When Jamie tore into someone with a large pair of scissors? At the end of the day, Loomis-for the umpteenth time-put his own life on the line to protect someone who didn’t really seem all that appreciative…in fact, he got between Michael and the kid TWICE…If Loomis were, indeed, a ‘terrible’ man, he’d have washed his hands of all this LONG before, and simply wished the Haddonfield police good luck…

  21. gregory scott garner

    May 10th, 2021 at 3:54 pm

    Johnny Utah: I love the Halloween series, but the Friday the 13th series is probably stronger, on a film-to-film basis. The original Friday the 13th is a masterpiece….as brilliant a piece of craftsmanship(or ‘art’, if you prefer) as the slasher realm has ever known. And the sequels are, for the most part, very good. It was only when they put Jason in Manhattan that they truly began to fall off in quality. But the first 7 films? They never committed the fraud that the Halloween producers perpetrated with Season of the Witch….they never placed the fate of an entire movie on the back of a buffoon like Busta Rhymes…They put together a franchise that, up until the 8th film, never cheated the audience. Even the weakest of the original Friday series I’d take ANY day over most of what’s been made over the last 15 years.

  22. gregory scott garner

    May 10th, 2021 at 4:04 pm

    Skani: Well said. You described Myers well..I cannot help but to wonder if Rosenthal made Busta the ‘star’ of that movie as a kind of petty revenge against John Carpenter…there’s just no way that the same guy who made Halloween 2 actually thought that featuring Busta Rhymes was a sound decision. It’s like Joe Bob Briggs said…devoting 20 years to your craft ought to bring about an improvement in your skillset…or at the very least, you shouldn’t get WORSE!!!

  23. gregory scott garner

    May 10th, 2021 at 6:18 pm

    Karl: The Producer’s Cut ends with Loomis being compelled to cooperate with the evil. That moment, alone, is enough to disqualify the film from the canon. The idea of Loomis being some kind of chaperone to the Bogeyman is just so offensive…after all he has sacrificed…it is positively OBSCENE to do this to such a magnificent character. Why not have Van Helsing Shanghai folks for Dracula while we’re at it?

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