Review #89: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #6- Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers

There is so much about this movie that confused me.

Rather than fill our head with needless details like "who are these characters" and "why should I care about them" and "what happened to the protagonist from the last film" this movie just throws a whole bunch of new characters at us in the same locations and same plotlines. Michael Myers is still going back to Haddonfield, for... some reason. Because that's what he does I guess. Haddonfield is still woefully unprepared for the regularly scheduled serial killer that only ever attacks there for... some reason. (In fact, between this film and the last, they both banned Halloween altogether, and then un-banned it. As if we should care.) All of the action is taking place in the Myers house and the Smith's Grove sanitarium, for... some reason. (Actually, I know the reason- because the writers seem to think there are only two towns in the entire world, and only three locations between them, and only three or four characters of note in those locations.)

Like, seriously. How did Jamie, the protagonist of the previous film, get to where she is at the beginning of this film? She's suddenly pregnant and in the custody of a weird cult? And even though Michael Myers has some kind of connection to them, he doesn't try to kill her until AFTER she escapes, and even though she has a truck and can go literally anywhere in the world, she goes back to Haddonfield- the ONE PLACE that Michael Myers is going to follow her to?

But then she gets killed off, and I spent the first twenty minutes of this film trying to figure out who the new protagonists were and why the heck I should care about them. Seriously, why are they even in this film? It's some girl in the Strode family (no idea whether she's actually a Strode or if she's adopted, because the family certainly doesn't treat her like she's their own flesh and blood) and her son who clearly has some sort of history we're not privy to. He's apparently starting to have visions or something (?) and that makes him of interest to this new cult that Totally Existed All Along And Wasn't Made Up Just For This Film, which... I guess makes him of interest to Myers? But the cult seems like they want to capture him, and Myers just seems to want to kill him. So which is it? And why should I even care at this point?

Then we have Paul Rudd's character. Oh, boy. On one hand I like that he's a returning character from the first film- on the other hand, I feel like the director said to the actor, "Alright, each time you say one of your lines, I want you to pretend that you're a serial killer. But, a different serial killer each time." His acting choices, particularly in the first half of the film, were completely bonkers. No other way to describe it.

Donald Pleasance is also in this film, for reasons I can't understand. He doesn't do anything of note. He gets taken prisoner by the cult (whose leader was an old friend of his I think?) but unless I missed something, that gets resolved offscreen because Loomis shows up to save the day and nothing else is said about the cult again. (Also, Myers just kind of went around killing the cult members, right? Why? WTF was even going on in this movie? I considered researching an in-depth synopsis before writing this review, but I feel that would kind of defeat the purpose.)

So much of this movie makes no sense to me, and I don't know if it was poorly written, poorly edited, poorly directed, or all three. Maybe there's a Director's Cut somewhere out there that inserts like thirty minutes of footage and makes everything make sense; but as it is it feels like there's a ton of missing scenes and the movie is just a complete mess. I cannot imagine being a person who went to the theaters excited to see this movie, and I especially cannot imagine such a person then leaving the theater satisfied with their experience. The filmmakers seem to have left behind everything that made the first couple movies good, and I am almost certain the next movie is going to be a complete reboot, so it especially made this one feel pointless from beginning to end.

All in all this mess of a film was incredibly bad and incredibly stupid. My gut tells me this movie could have been worse but I'm not sure how.

Overall Rating: 1/10 Mysterious Syringes Laying Around

Favorite Paul Rudd Scene: When he shows up at the hospital with a baby he found, screams for a doctor, talks to some old guy and then runs away