For this year’s 31 Nights of Horror Challenge, the Day 27 prompt was Michael Myers. Of course there are a lot of Michael Myers movies to choose from and we wanted to keep with our theme of watching movies that are not in the normal rotation of our challenge so we choose, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995).
Storyline
Six years after Michael Myers’ last massacre in Haddonfield, Jamie Lloyd has a child, but is then killed by Michael. Michael is allied with the Cult of Thorn, who both protect him and gave him the Curse of Thorn, the reason he killed all of his family. The Strode Family also moved into the Myers’ house and are stalked by Michael. Sam Loomis and Tommy Doyle, a boy Laurie babysat during Michael’s first rampage, are now out to stop Michael and the cult. Michael heads to kill Jamie’s son and the rest of Laurie’s family, but Dr. Loomis and Tommy plan to stop the curse, defeat the cult, stop Michael, and put an end to his murderous rampages, once and for all.
Our Thoughts on Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
This 6th entry into the long running Halloween-series is certainly a bad one. You just never really get into the story because it isn’t a very well constructed and build-up movie.
It’s simply a poorly done film, that also suffers from its imagine-less writing and non-compelling characters that are in it. Dr. Loomis seems to be in it just for the sake of being in it. It’s a real shame that this had to be Donald Pleasence last film-role. It’s nice and also sort of suiting that his last role is in an Halloween movie but he definitely deserved to be in a better one.
There is never a sense of real danger in the movie and the character of Michael Myers just never comes across as threatening or scary. Perhaps it’s because he’s featured too prominently throughout the movie, from pretty early on already. He does his usual stuff again but without too much class or originality. Also the attempts to uncover Myer’s past don’t really work out, for the main reason that it just doesn’t get explained very well. It’s obvious that the script went through various re-writes before- and also very possibly during filming. Several scenes even got re-shot or added after the first cut turned out to be far from pleasing.
The movie more often looks and feels like a made for TV one. This is also due to the lack of some real good gore. As an horror movie it really is lacking in basically everything to make this a good or even original one to watch.
3 out of 10
Trivia
Most of the cast and crew disowned this movie. On the Halloween: 25 Years of Terror (2006) DVD, they stated that the studio, producers, and director interfered and argued to the point of ridiculousness which resulted in a very poorly directed and edited film.
The producers of the movie wanted Brian Andrews to reprise his role as Tommy Doyle from the original Halloween. However, Andrews did not have an agent, so they could not get in contact with him. He’s stated since that he regrets missing the opportunity.
Sadly, Donald Pleasence died as the film headed into re-shoots, and Farrands recalls the body double they had on set at the time. “It was this very strange moment where you kind of looked at him and wondered, is he back?”
