Sixteen Further Screams For Halloween: Day 16 (Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers)

Boo.

Happy Halloween! I hope the ghosts and/or goblins are good to you and that many a child came to your door searching for the treats, which you will have provided of course. 'Cause you're good like that. I had a good few at the door, and possibly more now that the sun is down. Of course, the kids knocking were a welcome distraction, because it gave me a reprieve from engaging with GODDAMN FUCKING HALLOWEEN SIX THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS. Perhaps I gave the game away a little early in this review, but oh my God. Oh my good God this is dire. It's been a long time coming, after going through this series in a strange order (and detouring for the David Gordon Green trilogy), but here we are. The end of the Jamie Lloyd trilogy. That which Halloween 5 was building up to with its strange glimpses of the man in a coat and hat. And it's shit. It's a complete and muddled clusterfuck fired on screen in 90 minutes, it killed whatever the hell these folks were planning, and only by the good graces of Wes Craven making Scream a year later and causing people to go "hey these slasher things sure are popular" did we get Halloween H20 from that. Let's go wild into this thing and what it does wrong.

Firstly, I shall note: I viewed the theatrical cut. I know there is a big to-do about the Producer's Cut, and the differences it has from the theatrical, but this is what I got my hands on so this is what we're engaging with. Frankly, I don't think it makes too much of a difference. You get more bullshit involving the mysterious Thorn cult, but that's all you get. A bunch of bullshit. I want to get this out of the way: Halloween 6 here has a handful of what we might call "idea seeds". The theory of a good idea that, if cultivated properly, you could make a movie about. For instance, the Thorn cult. Yes, really. The idea of some dark part of society using modern-day science to bring about a revival of the pagan origins of Samhain, blood sacrifice and casting the runes and the constellation of the Thorn in the sky on Halloween night? You really could make something out of that. In fact, there's a nifty little movie that kind of did that very thing. IT WAS CALLED HALLOWEEN 3 SEASON OF THE WITCH! You already made this movie a decade ago and rejected it because it didn't have a dude in a William Shatner mask stabbing babysitters! Now that you've merged the two, what do you have? You have a dude in a William Shatner mask stabbing people and a messy half-cooked plotline about evil cultists that goes goddamn nowhere because they all get stabbed by I'm not repeating that a third time.

This is just the consequence of Halloween lore collapsing in on itself like a black hole. Why did Michael kill people in Halloween 1? Because he was the boogeyman. That's all you needed. 2 adds in that first reason, the Laurie Strode sister reveal, and that just opens the floodgates. In 4 he has to kill all his remaining family for reasons, and the reasons are... because he bears some ancient Celtic rune curse. Which, not only is overexplaining this bullshit and giving a question nobody asked, but isn't even consistent because Michael Myers will kill anything that moves in this picture. You have solved Halloween, and in solving it you have made it nonsense. The entire movie is filled with these dangling threads of potential. Like the notion of young single mothers, paired between Jamie Lloyd and Kara Strode. In an entry of a slasher movie series, a genre which comes with that whole rule about killing anyone who has sex, having the slasher go after multiple young single mothers approaches saying something. Not only does the movie not do this, but it throws poor Jamie Lloyd under the bus by killing her off like 15 minutes in to the movie. To say nothing about what the Producer's Cut has to say about the father of her child, which I'M NOT TOUCHING.

I could go on and on. I could yell at the howling leaps in logic, the plot holes you can drive a truck through. I don't usually do that thing, but they're so noticeable here and in the absence of any quality my brain latched on to them. I could talk about how Paul Rudd's Tommy Doyle is presented as an absolute crazy creepazoid in this movie, and how weird that is. I could go on and on, but it would be beating a dead horse. This is just bad. Boilerplate slasher nonsense that thought a random guy in a mask killing people needed this elaborate lore-based explanation. Thoughts and ideas that go nowhere. A dead end, literally and figuratively. Just go watch Halloween 1 and Halloween 3. You get the masked man killing people, and you get the modern-day revival of the occult rituals of Samhain. Combine the two together in the right hands, and you could have something. These were the wrong hands. Happy Halloween, and wish me luck on my Non-Specific November Writing Month journey. It's been fun doing these, even if we ended on one awful awful little film. 

Be seeing you.