Review of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) by Jesse O — 30 Oct 2014

This film will only be remembered as a Paul Rudd trivia, as this was his film debut. While this film isn't any good, as rarely any Halloween sequel has been, it wasn't as bad as one would fear.

Maybe I've seen so many horror movies that one has to be offensively terrible for me to really even care, but this one had some pretty nasty kills, which somewhat saves the entire experience. While this was a plot point started in the previous film, I found the entire idea that Michael Myers gets his superhuman abilities of this curse, the curse of Thorn, inflicted to him in a Druid ritual really strains credulity.

Particularly when this means completely retconning what came in the previous films. I suppose expecting some sort of continuity from a series such as this is simply too much to expect. But I found this to be completely ridiculous and it really made the film a little hard to buy into.

Horror movies, in general, certainly depends a lot on the suspension of disbelief as so many of the people in these movies behave like idiots. They behave in many ways that, one would hope, real humans wouldn't.

They make it a habit to head TO the danger instead of away from it. Even with that, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for horror films. But this film, with this idea that it was a ritual that's given Michael Myers all this superhuman powers and immortality, that's a little difficult to buy into.

It's not as dumb as the whole telekinesis bringing Jason back from the dead, but the same person not being able to kill him with it, in Friday the 13th Part 7, but it's still kinda goofy. At the very least it kinda explains, and justifies, the guy not ever really dying.

Really stupid, but it at least explains his abilities. What I liked about this, unlike the Jason movie just I referenced, is that it didn't feel campy. Once you start bringing in telekinesis into the equation to bring someone back to life then it's clear that no fucks are given anymore.

WHY WOULD TELEKINESIS EVEN WORK TO BRING SOMEONE BACK TO LIFE??? So fucking stupid! But I digress, at least this film tried, even if it failed, to take its story a little more serious. I think the violence certainly reflects that "darkness".

It doesn't really do much, since the film is still fairly terrible, but I can appreciate the effort. I can imagine, if you were a fan of these series, or any of the other slasher series from the 80s, that by the third sequel things just start blending together.

It's gonna be hard to differentiate between each particular film, since each sequel, outside of the third film in this franchise, is rehashing the same villain and mostly the same stories. Paranormal Activity is a perfect example of this.

If you were to take one scene from each installment in PA and asked me to match it up correctly to the film it belongs to, I would not be able to. Those films are so stylistically similar that it's impossible to tell them apart.

I can imagine that same exhaustion for fans of this series. Then again, Paranormal Activity has seen a film released every year since the first one and that's gonna contribute to the fatigue. The Halloween franchise hasn't had that.

Halloween 3 was released a year after the second, but the third film was completely unrelated to the first two installments. Halloween 5 was released a year after the 4th one. So this didn't have that fatigue, at the very least.

The point is, this film is rehashing old characters and, by the time you reach a sixth installment, it's nigh impossible keeping an ever-expanding and changing audience interested in seeing the same thing over and over again.

Really not as terrible as I would've imagined, some of the deaths are good, but I can't really say too much positive about this. If you can get the original film, then watch that instead. You'll thank me for it.