The Halloween Films Ranked: #12 Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

#12 in my ranking of the Halloween franchise.

I often advocate for franchises stuck in a rut to go weird, and then when one actually does, I tend to reject it. Why? Well, I’m a bad person, but aside from that, the weirdness tends to be kind of terribly done. Think Jason Goes to Hell where all of the previous rules were tossed out in favor of disconnected weirdness that didn’t make sense. Well, this is that for the Halloween franchise, a film so disconnected from how it had begun, so consumed with creating lore to explain what should never have been explained, and so unsure of how to fill all the bits of screentime in between lore with anything interesting that it just never works. I wonder if they’ll reset everything after this.

I’m going to be honest, the opening ten minutes or so of this just outright confused me. I wasn’t sure if things were jumping backwards and forwards in time. Having Michael continue to wear the Shatner mask is honestly not a help. It doesn’t make sense. Anyway, Jamie (J.C. Brandy) has been captured by a cult who also captured Michael at the end of The Revenge of Michael Myers. Six years later, she gives birth to a baby and escapes with the help of a nurse. At the same time, Kara Strode (Marianne Hagan), a relative of Laurie’s, lives in the Myers home (oh, lord) with her parents and son Danny (Devin Gardner). Across the street lives Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd), who had been babysat by Laurie in the first film. He’s obsessed with finding Michael again, and he watches the Myers house all the time. Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) has retired, but his old colleague Dr. Wynn (Mitch Ryan), stops by to offer him a job at the hospital he used to work at and where Michael had been kept. Also, Tommy finds Jamie’s baby at a bus stop. Also, Haddonfield is trying to make is legal to celebrate Halloween again, an effort headed by Kara’s friend Beth (Mariah O’Brien).

This is an overstuffed film.

And at its core, well, there’s no core. What is supposed to be the point is this mystery around the Man in Black, a mysterious figure who first appeared in the fifth entry, and what he’s doing with this cult focused on Jamie’s baby and Michael Myers. The problem is that it’s a mystery without much of an answer, no real sense of tension, and it all feels so disconnected from generally everything. What we get instead is Michael lumbering around (seriously…it made sense that he could get away with it in the first, even the second, entry, but anyone walking around with a Shatner mask in Haddonfield would be drawing attention) to kill people.

But, because we can’t just have Michael killing people randomly, he needs purpose, so we get Loomis and Tommy explaining how Michael sees anyone who lives in his house as his family in need of killing. Which…whatever. It’s an excuse, at least. And then the kills are kind of dull and unmemorable.

And it’s all buoyed by details of the lore that are just kind of stupid, like Myers suddenly having a symbol that he burns into hay bails when he kills someone, something he’s never done before. Is this…learned behavior over the past few years? I dunno. The movie doesn’t know. The movie doesn’t care.

So, it’s all meant to build up to a big confrontation at the cult’s center of operations with the surprise reveal of who The Man in Black is, a reveal that’s honestly halfway decent not because of execution but because they did actually put in some effort for it to make sense. However, it’s all lore-based nonsense that doesn’t gel with much that came before and is kind of stupid. Tommy, at one point, says that the stars align on some Halloween nights to make a specific constellation, which isn’t how stars work over a short period of time of a few years. Planets could do that, but not stars.

Anyway, this is a tired franchise reaching for anything to justify its continuation. Actors are committed, especially Pleasance in his final take as Loomis before his death, but it’s all commitment to nonsense. The tension doesn’t work. The kills aren’t great. The stuff around them is nonsensical.

Take a break, Michael. You need a rest.

Originally published here