HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS (1995)
Starring Donald Pleasence and Paul Rudd
It had been six years since the last "Halloween" movie and a new generation of high schoolers were hungry for it. Too bad it sucked as bad as Michael Myers' sex life.
Actually Myers' sex life didn't suck quite so bad in this film, since it's hinted he had sex with his niece to produce an evil baby. Two versions of the film were made. A "producer's cut" that is making the rounds as an underground video and the version that made it to theaters. In the producer's cut, it's pretty clear that Myers is a Dad, the result of an incestuous incident with his niece. Both versions of the film are a mess, neither are really worth seeing.
John Carpenter says he hasn't even seen any of the Halloween sequels following part 3—and after seeing this, I envy him. "Halloween 6" was a disaster. Part 5 was bad enough. "The Curse of Michael Myers" came along to tie up some of the loose ends from that travesty, like how Myers escaped from a jail cell at the very end of the film, and why a mysterious "man in black" was following him, and what the meaning of that tattoo on Myer's hand was. But by the time this film came out, no one could really remember Part 5.
The film opens with Myer's niece Jamie, who was just a little girl in the last film, now a grown woman who's just given birth to a baby, in a strange hospital that seems like a cross between Kaiser and a satanic church. A nurse helps her escape. The nurse is then killed by Myers, who is wandering the halls. Jamie eventually gets offed to, but her baby survives and winds its way into the hands of Tommy Doyle (Rudd), the little kid from Part 1 who's obviously now an adult too.
Pleasence returns as Dr. Loomis, still obsessed with finding the masked killer he never seems capable of destroying. (This would be Pleasence's last movie. Hopefully it won't be the one he's remembered for.) While Loomis is reminiscing about old times with a buddy of his, in Haddonfield members of the Strode family (not direct relatives of Laurie Strode who, remember, was adopted) have moved into Myers' old home. The town hasn't celebrated Halloween since the events of Part 5 six years earlier, but have decided to get in on the holiday this year. Myer's last surviving relative, the baby, is now in town after Doyle intercepts it. Take a wild guess what happens.
Obviously the series was stretching itself, trying to come up with new ideas for an ailing franchise. In the end, the film just doesn't make sense -- and it'll even make less sense if you're not thoroughly familiar with the events of the previous film, itself a deeply flawed, forgettable feature. There's talk of Druids, some kind of medical-occult secret society's obsessions with evil and something called the "thorn," and even hints demonic possession. None of it makes any sense.
This was the first in the series to be released by Dimension Films, a genre film arm of Miramax, which would go on to produce the "Scream" films and eventually the superior "Halloween: H20," which had a large budget and Jamie Lee Curtis back as Laurie Strode. Ultimately, the nuttiness of Part 6 would lead the producers to decide to shelve pretty much all the plot developments from Parts 4-6 when they got Curtis back into the franchise. This, the very worst entry in the franchise, is for the most hardcore of fans only. If you're a really hardcore fan, you can download scenes from the "producer's cut," which was never officially made available on video, by going here.