Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
Early on in the sixth installment of John Carpenter and Debra Hill's holiday slasher franchise, on Halloween morning, a group of kids pull a prank on the new owner of the infamous Myers home, defacing a "Sold" sign in the front yard with a cardboard cut-out of Michael Myers. As the enraged homeowner chops it down with an axe, he growls, "Enough... of this Michael Myers... bullshit!" After sitting through an hour and a half of this joyless and unreasonably dark tripe, you'll be hard-pressed to disagree with such a seemingly self-reflexive sentiment.
Jumping ahead six years after the ending of Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, during which Michael Myers and his then-nine-year-old niece, Jamie Lloyd, were abducted from Haddonfield's police station by a mysterious man in black, a now 15-year-old Jamie (J.C. Brandy, taking over for two-time portrayer Danielle Harris) has been brought to an unknown facility by the man in black and his Druid-like cult and impregnated. Moments after giving birth to a son, Jamie's infant is removed from her care by the man in black, but a sympathetic nurse named Mary (Susan Swift) steals him back for Jamie and aids her in her escape from the facility. Shortly after placing a call to a popular radio station run by shock jock Barry Simms (Leo Geter) to alert Haddonfield about her uncle's return and hiding her newborn safely in a sink base cabinet in an airport, Jamie is finally captured and murdered by Michael for refusing to offer up the youngest member of his bloodline.
Meanwhile, a new family has moved into the previously abandoned Myers home in Haddonfield, Illinois where Michael grew up, relatives of the couple who adopted Laurie Strode, Michael's deceased baby sister: John Strode (Bradford English), a real estate agent, his wife, Debra (Kim Darby), their daughter, Kara (Marianne Hagan), younger son, Tim (Keith Bogart), and Kara's son, Danny (Devin Gardner). Living across the street in a boarding house run by the elderly Minnie Blankenship (Janice Knickrehm) is 25-year-old Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd), a survivor of Myers' Halloween night massacre from 1978, who overheard Jamie's cry for help the night of her murder and assumes responsibility for her baby. Teaming up with Myers' recently retired psychiatrist, Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), Tommy suspects that Michael is motivated by a supernatural curse that compels him to murder every last member of his family, and is determined to save the unsuspecting Strode family and put a stop to the man he was initially too young and terrified to confront head-on.
Making his first major contribution in screenwriting, Daniel Farrands attempts to unlock the mystery and motivation behind Michael Myers' seemingly unmotivated, implacable madness by supplying an overtly supernatural explanation rooted in the utmost convoluted folklore. What he clearly fails to understand about his own antagonist, created to straightforward perfection by John Carpenter and Debra Hill, is that his aura of mystery and very lack of motivation is what makes him so nightmarishly terrifying. Michael Myers doesn't have a reason for killing people. Killing is just who he is. When Carpenter and Hill first envisioned him in Halloween, he wasn't stalking Laurie Strode and killing off her friends and their boyfriends because Laurie was his baby sister and he needed to finish off every member of his bloodline to satisfy a cult determined to understand the essence of evil. In fact, Laurie wasn't even his sister at that time. She was just a stranger, a symbol of pure, uncorrupted innocence to contrast with his soullessness and nihilism. It wasn't until Halloween 2 when Carpenter decided to reveal Laurie as her assailant's sister to create a more personal relationship between them, undermining the randomness of Michael's selection of her. Michael was never fully human nor supernatural, but something in-between. He was born a human being to two human parents, then on Halloween night at the tender age of six, an unaccountable, all-consuming force of evil took control of his mind and body, imbuing him with an impersonal hatred and superhuman level of resilience that compelled him to murder anyone with whom he came into contact. The randomness was the point. It didn't matter who you were or how innocent you were. If you crossed paths with Michael, your life was as good as over.
Feeling an obligation at six installments deep to satisfy audiences' curiosity and desperation for insight into the psychology of Michael Myers, Farrands concocts a most elaborate, confusing, and ironically undercooked explanation that virtually sheds Michael of every last drop of the mystique and menace that gifted him his timeless appeal in the first place. As opposed to a force of nature adhering to his own innate instinct for mayhem, Michael is now reduced to a pathetic, mindless pawn under the control of an ill-defined cult hell-bent on understanding the nature of "pure, uncorrupted, ancient" evil. For a reason never clarified, they need Michael to eradicate every member of his bloodline. Now that Jamie, previously Michael's youngest relative, is dead, the spotlight has shifted to her newborn son, now the youngest descendant. But the cult of Thorn's intentions for Steven, named by his surrogate father, Tommy, are infuriatingly murky. Do they want Michael to murder him to complete the erasure of his family, or infect him with Michael's evil so that at the age of six, he too will begin his career as an equal opportunity serial killer? Who knows and who cares?
The story is so glum, stupid, and boring, stemming from a script chock-full of plot holes. For instance, why and how does Dr. Terence Wynn (Mitch Ryan), Dr. Loomis' former colleague at Smith's Grove Warren County Sanitarium revealed to be the mysterious man in black and leader of Thorn, appear in the nightmares of Danny, commanding him to kill on Michael's behalf? What does Danny have to do with Michael? He isn't related to him by blood in any way, merely the son of a woman related to the couple who adopted Laurie. He's not a brother, cousin, son, or nephew. So what would the cult want from this utterly unrelated little boy? Furthermore, nearly every character in Halloween 6's script appears to have been lobotomized to the point of being incapable of acting like a normal human being with even a partially functioning brain. Dr. Loomis, once the smartest and most intuitive character who understood the extent of his patient's evil while the rest of his colleagues dismissed his warnings as irrational, is now so decrepit that, in order to warn the Strode family of the danger they're in, he breaks into their home and sneaks up behind Debra instead of knocking on the door first. Then after putting a hand on her shoulder and giving her a jolt, he actually has the audacity and idiocy to calmly ask if she's alright. When Kara returns from school to an eerily empty house, she shouts upstairs for her mother and son, and neither Tommy nor Danny, both of whom are sitting silently in the latter's bedroom, has the decency or basic intelligence to offer the most bare minimum response of "Up here." While being pursued by Michael, Debra falls on her knees, but instead of standing up and hightailing it away from her home, she elects to crawl as though paralyzed below the waist, pulling back suspended bed sheets along the way. It's far-fetched to consider that no one noticed the trail of blood leading to the bathroom sink in the airport or heard the crying of Jamie's infant in the cabinet below before Tommy arrived.
Speaking of baby Steven, he must be the quietest newborn on the planet, managing to remain conveniently silent while held in the arms of Danny as he screams at the top of his lungs for his mother's help. Obviously, the only thing being cradled in the swaddle in that moment is air. In a clumsily lazy effort to catch viewers up to speed on the events of the original and previous installments, Farrands recaps the mythology through Tommy's opening narration, his subsequent phone call to Barry Simms' radio show, and Beth's (Mariah O'Brien) unprovoked exposition of the murder of Judith Myers.
Of the gallery of characters who populate Farrands' script, not one is worth caring about, sympathizing with, or rooting for. They're cardboard cutouts, and so each death, including those visited upon the most deserving individuals as well as the least, provokes nothing more than a shrug of indifference. The worst offender by far is John Strode, an abusive alcoholic who belittles his wife and daughter, dismisses his own grandson as a "little bastard" for being born out of wedlock, backhands Kara across the face for standing up to him, and knowingly moved his family into the home of an infamous serial killer because his brother couldn't sell it to anyone else. Debra is the meek, mousy shrinking violet of a wife, too gutless to stand up to John herself in defense of her daughter or grandson.
Kara is a single mother who has moved back home with her parents and is attending college to try to get her life back on track. Her field of study is psychology, which is both frightening and ironic considering she's negligent enough to dismiss the red flag of her son drawing violent pictures of her and the rest of their family with knives embedded in their stomachs, not to mention Danny holding a knife to his abusive grandfather's stomach in the flesh. Gingerly, Kara removes the knife from his hand, then seems to forget about the alarming incident. After catching Tommy spying on her from across the street in her bra and underwear, Kara doesn't think to report him to the police, merely closing her curtains in mild annoyance. The following afternoon, she complies with Tommy's request to follow him back to his room, along with Danny, whom she turns her back on twice, allowing him to slip out of her sight.
Tim is the zen younger brother who's unintimidated by his father's perpetual ire, evinced by his perfectly timed belch at John's rant against the country-ruining disrespect of children. Beth is the punk-chick girlfriend who wants to bring Halloween, which has been banned for the last six years, back to her town for no discernible reason other than to be a rebel. Somehow, she knows the secret behind Tim's family's home while Tim himself is utterly clueless, and derives a twisted excitement from its sordid history.
Minnie Blankenship initially appears senile and uncommunicative, until she suddenly comes to life to relay exposition on the meaning of Halloween and the night of Michael Myers' first murder, adding the preposterous detail that she was babysitting him that night and that he heard a voice commanding him to kill his family. As the obligatory "endangered child," Danny is devoid of a personality, slipping in and out of consciousness at the whims of the plot that dictates he be uncommunicative, fall into arbitrary trances, draw in a sketchbook, listen to a monstrous voice's command to leave his mother's side and walk into the Myers home, sit on Dr. Wynn's lap, and stare blankly out of a window in an operating room. Only during the climax does Danny develop a semblance of autonomy to defend his mother from the suffocating grip of Michael's hand, but once that consequently makes him a target, he pathetically resorts to screaming "Mommy!" repeatedly in helpless terror, contributing zilch to either his own or his mother's survival. As the second most unlikable character next to John, Barry Simms is a douchebag shock jock who condescends to his audience on-air and makes explicit passes at Beth in front of her boyfriend and a live crowd for asserting herself.
Director Joe Chappelle mistakes characters walking slowly through a deserted house in cautious apprehension for legitimate suspense building. Scenes of Kara ascending the stairs in her lightless home while extending a fireplace poker or stepping over the unconscious body of Michael to pick up Danny and carry him over to her side fall flat because the characters are made of cardboard. It's impossible to fear for them. At two points, Chappelle and Farrands rehash two iconic moments from Carpenter's original: a shot of Michael standing still across the street, viewed by Danny through a window, and Michael chasing Kara and Danny to the locked door of the boarding house. The filmmakers conjure neither the nightmarish dread of being chased by an unstoppable force of evil nor a child's fear of not being believed by an adult. However, during the climactic chase portion, once Tommy frees Kara from her maximum-security holding cell in Smith's Grove, Chappelle gathers at least a scintilla of steam. At no point is his direction more invigorating than when Michael grabs a screaming Kara by her throat through the gap of a gate, necessitating Tommy to grab a gun off the wall and shoot a bullet into Michael's shoulder, blowing him down onto the floor.
Cinematographer Billy Dickson tries way too hard to create a stylishly dark atmosphere by saturating every nighttime sequence in shadows and rainstorms. Thunder rumbles, lightning flickers, and a layer of blue fog envelops the characters, but the effect is too stylized and artificial to feel believable. Chappelle makes moderately effective use of shadows in only two ways: projecting Michael's shadow on a wall to precede his appearance and directing Kara to hide in a shadowed corner in her staircase to ambush Michael with her fireplace poker. More showy and pointless is a dialogue between Tim and Beth during which the bottom of Tim's face below his nose is submerged in shadow and Beth is silhouetted against a window. A low-angle shot of Michael walking down an upstairs hallway illuminated by flashes of lightning is memorable.
To his credit, Dickson does capture the atmosphere of fall with exterior shots of Haddonfield that recall Dean Cundey's beautiful cinematography from the original installment, from the horde of trick-or-treating children walking down the sidewalks to leaves strewn all over the street and large trees ablaze with green and orange. Unfortunately, Dickson lacks his predecessor's ability to exploit framing to enhance his antagonist's menace, whether by an over-the-shoulder shot of Michael stalking Debra outside her home or materializing in a corner behind her while she's voicing her concerns to a disbelieving John over the phone.
Composer Alan Howarth faithfully adapts the peaceful piano theme of John Carpenter for moments of tranquility, such as an exterior daytime shot of the Myers-turned-Strode house on Halloween morning, but as an accompaniment to the chase sequences, he alters the classic Halloween score with a shrill guitar riff and percussive drums that fail miserably to invest them with suspense, propulsion, energy, or urgency. It's as out of tune an "enhancement" as Chappelle's use of American rock band Brother Cane's song, "And Fools Shine On." The editing by Randolph K. Bricker is choppy. After Kara hurls herself through an upstairs window to evade capture from the cult of Thorn, Bricker hard cuts to a shot of Tommy and Dr. Loomis standing at the site of her fall, now empty save shards of glass. Within an undisclosed period, both Kara and the cult have vanished into thin air. As a defense, Tommy and Loomis reach the conclusion that they've been drugged, but at what point did the cultists find the time to drug them? One shot before, they were awake and sober, never handed a spiked beverage or injected with a tranquilizer by Wynn, Mrs. Blankenship, or any of the robed followers.
Bricker obscures Michael's climactic lead pipe beating with flash frames of his mask leaking green fluid from his eyeholes. He butchers the massacre of the cultists with an epilepsy-inducing flashing of blinding lights that requires the viewer to squint in physical discomfort, interspersing the stabbings and disembowelments with close-ups of hands contracting in agony. For the murder of Beth, Bricker overdramatizes it in slow motion, showing Michael thrusting his knife into Beth's back while Dickson limits the focus to her unconvincingly contorted face, intercut with horrified reaction shots of Kara as she watches powerlessly through a telescope from across the street.
Out of the abundance of victims carved up by Michael, four in particular receive deaths that are clever in both conception and execution: Nurse Mary, whose head is shoved into a spike conveniently protruding from a wall; Jamie, who's impaled through the back and out the stomach with tractor harrows, onto which she's pushed down further before they are activated to grind her innards; a cultist whose head is slammed against a locked metal gate and squashed through a gap until it collapses; and most deservingly of all, John, who's stabbed in the stomach, elevated impressively midair, and electrocuted against an exposed electrical panel, causing him to foam at the mouth until his head explodes. For other kills, Chappelle exerts a more curiously understated approach, keeping some off-camera -- as when Michael slams an axe downward, and Bricker cuts to a spatter of blood on a white bed sheet -- obscuring Tim's throat-slashing with a haze of shower steam on a mirror, and pinning the camera exclusively on Barry's face while Michael disembowels him.
In addition to bearing zero physical resemblance to Brian Andrews, the child actor who originated the role of Tommy Doyle in 1978, Paul Rudd kicks off his pre-comedy career with a comically wooden performance, delivering his expository lines in a flat, robotic voice that sounds like an impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator. At certain points, once to convey nervousness at his first face-to-face confrontation with Michael in 17 years, and once more to affect resignation, Rudd utters a creepy, borderline psychotic chuckle that indicates he may not have escaped Michael's original Halloween night massacre with all of his sanity intact. Staring blankly at a nearly nude Kara through his telescope from across the street, Rudd's rendition of Tommy comes across more like a sexually repressed pervert than the avenging angel and masculine hero that Farrands envisions him as. Rudd is fortunate to have achieved success in the comedy genre following this movie because if debut performances dictated the outcome of an actor's career, Halloween 6 would've been his first and last acting job for two reasons: (1) his performance is lifeless, and (2) it's in service of an altogether abysmal slasher film.
The ending of Halloween 6 is both incoherent and patently incomplete. Whereas in the original, Dr. Loomis arrived just in time to save Laurie Strode from being strangled via firing six bullets into Michael, here, he regains consciousness to little heroic effect, merely shooting a lock to open a gate for Kara and Danny to escape from. Rather than accept Tommy's invitation to join him, Kara, and Danny to safety, Loomis bizarrely decides to remain at Smith's Grove, insisting he has "a little business to attend to here." What "business" is he referring to? Every member of the cult has been butchered, and as far as they all know, Michael is dead. After the survivors drive off, Bricker cuts to an interior shot of Michael's mask lying abandoned on the floor, accompanied by Loomis' anguished scream in the distance, that leaves the fates of both characters up in the air. For that matter, was Dr. Wynn killed in Michael's rebellious mass execution of his manipulators, or did he somehow manage to escape as well?
Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers would feature the final performance of franchise stalwart Donald Pleasence before his death at the age of 75 from complications of heart failure following heart valve replacement surgery. To commemorate his indelible contributions, the filmmakers dedicated this sixth installment to his memory. You can almost hear the good doctor rolling over in his grave.
3/10
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