Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

Oh, they were trying to capitalize on the horror boom of the '90s.  This movie has some money thrown at it because we get a lot more on-camera deaths.  They are super gory.  Like, over the top.  There's nudity and sex.  We've now introduced demonic cults and just the grossest gloop that comes out of someone's head that is pulverized.  I'm sure people swear too, but don't hold me to that.

DIRECTOR: Joe Chappelle

Look at baby Paul Rudd!  He's Paul Steven Rudd in this one!  Aw, c'mon.  He's playing all moody and angsty.  He's straight up in a horror movie not as the comic relief.  Aw man, I just want to have an entire review discussing how young Paul Rudd is in this movie and how he isn't at all like Paul Rudd in any other movie he'll ever be in.  That's something.   If you get nothing else, you get to see Paul Rudd's start and that's something in itself.

Okay, this might be the most '90s horror sequel in the world.  I was complaining about Halloween 4 and Halloween 5 for being too '80s.  Then 1995 brings The Curse of Michael Myers and I can't even.  Guys, my nostalgia card got punched across the board.  Does that make this a good movie?  Nope, quite the opposite.  Aw man, The Curse of Michael Myers is everything that is wrong with '90s horror.  Listen, I loved horror in the '90s.  If anything, this is when I learned to love horror movies.  But it was an opportunistic time.  Things had to get more extreme.  If you don't think that this movie is opportunistic and entrenched in the '90s, there's a Beavis and Butthead imitation at one point.  The thing that horror movie sequels in the '90s did was try to enrich the mythology with absolutely absurd demonology.  It's so stark compared to the rest of the franchise because the other movies do so little to explain.  This movie spends the entire movie trying to explain Michael Myers.  LET'S CALL SPOILERS because this movie is absurd.  You don't have to watch it and I might just be saving you some time.  I also really want to discuss how insane this movie tried getting in such a short amount of time.  The previous films have Michael Myers, who happens to be pretty unkillable, going to kill people in Haddonfield as he tries killing family members.  It's never formally explained why Michael is unkillable.  Loomis loves using hyperbole, establishing that Hell won't accept Michael, but that's as close to mythology as we get.  Then comes this movie that tries explaining everything about Michael.  Hardcore fans, I apologize if I misinterpret a remarkably complex idea.  Michael is the evil that has to be unleashed on Halloween as a sacrifice.  He sacrifices his family to bring everyone else prosperity.  He has been imbued with the mark of the thorn, which has a constellation that is in the sky every Halloween.  There's an evil cult, that has been sending Michael out into the world to bring them prosperity.  They now want Michael's grand-niece, the daughter of Jamie, to either act as a sacrifice for Michael or to be the ultimate killer beyond Michael.  Tommy Doyle, the kid who was babysat by Laurie Strode, discovered all of this when he was traumatized as a child.  Boy, that got complex and I'm sure I didn't even get it all.   What happened?  Why were the '90s so obsessed with having demon cults and deep origin stories for characters that should ultimately have been pretty simple?

Like, I really could cut together a Dimension Films trailer out of this movie.  It hits all of the hallmarks of '90s horror.  The beginning of the movie has Jamie going into labor.  There are pipes all around and steam.  The film has been saturated with blue and it's shot with dutch angles. Instead of seemless transitions, many many cuts are shots of someone screaming with a knife wielding foley effect.  There's people with candles and robes.  The Halloween theme is done on electric guitar.  Much of the running is scored with electric guitar riffs.  Holey moley.  Like, I love the clothing and the slang, but the actual filmmaking techniques of the '90s were just too much.  This whole movie is too much.  Also, I'm really confused about the timeline for Halloween at this point.  It is so weird.  Jamie is killed horribly in this movie.  Like, she gets ripped apart by farming equipment.  Okay, but remember, she was just a kid in the last movie.  When you binge this movie, you see Jamie for two movies as this little kid who survives Michael Myers.  Then she's eviscerated in the first fifteen minutes of the next movie. That's a choice.  Also, we have that problem that this series has had about ignoring the setup from the last movie.  The last movie ended with Jason ripping apart a police station and implying that he will continue coming after now.  Now she's a young adult and what happened in that time?  Geez, there's stuff going on.  (Also, '90s Internet in movies is hilarious.) Then, the movie spends a lot of time focusing on a '90s shock jock.  Was the movie trying to be self-referential?  There's no way Joe Chappelle was that aware of his place in history.

WHY WOULD ANYONE LIVE IN HADDONFIELD?  I know, the excuse given in the movie is that real estate prices are insane.  But the STRODES moved into the MYERS house.  Soak that up.  Mr. Strode, a Tom Wilson type who is evil, says that he couldn't sell that house.  But c'mon.  C'mon.  There is this insane awareness of the Myers house in that town.  Every other movie points out that the Myers house is demonized.  The idea that the Strode family wouldn't know about the house that the Myers owned, but everyone else in town would know is absurd.  Like, everyone knew in grade school that Jamie was Michael Myers's niece.  How does the entire family who lives in the Myers house not know the history of the house?  This is part of the entire attitude that throws everything into the blender.  There are way too many elements to this movie and none of them are important.  The Strodes moving into the Myers house doesn't really contribute to the story.  The fact that they are the Strodes doesn't really play into it.  We have this adult daughter who moved back into her abusive father's house that doesn't really play into the narrative.  She has a kid.  This isn't important to the story, but it just places a kid in danger like Jurassic Park III.  Heck, Dr. Loomis doesn't really even need to be in this movie because Tommy Doyle acts as Dr. Loomis in this one.  It's like we have two Dr. Loomises.  Secretly (or not-so-secretly), I like the idea of Tommy Doyle being the new Dr. Loomis.  It's a clever tie to the original story.  But the actual information he contributes is so over-the-top dumb that I couldn't handle it.

There's a reason that no one really likes this movie.  I'm sure that there are fans out there, but this movie is rough.  Like, really rough.  I'm glad its over because I have H20 to look forward to.  But regardless, I wish I wasn't watching these for a podcast.  I'm so tired of this stuff.