Films That Witness Madness

review

HALLOWEEN 6: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS

The first HALLOWEEN film released by Dimension Films, HALLOWEEN 6 was doomed to failure from the start. Having to mop up the mess that was HALLOWEEN 5 would not be easy, but first-time screenwriter Daniel Farrands was more than eager to try. A massive HALLOWEEN fanboy, Farrands took on the challenge of tying up the myriad loose ends of the previous film while still remaining faithful to the original film. That he managed to come up with something that kinda makes sense is a small miracle. I can't imagine it was an easy task. Having heard interviews with Farrands, I know that he was truly excited to be writing the next installment of his favorite franchise. But I can't help but wonder if he ever stopped to ask himself a simple question: "How did it come to this?".

As a lifelong fan of the original HALLOWEEN, watching HALLOWEEN 6 is incredibly painful. What started as a simple slasher film has suddenly become anything but. Trying to trace a line from the humble beginnings of the franchise to this film, with its Druidic cults and flimsy hocus-pocus, is difficult but not altogether impossible. We learn in this film that Michael Myers was inflicted with the curse of Thorn, in which an individual is forced to kill his entire family for the karmatic good of the rest of the society. Returning figure Tommy Doyle uses a computer program to explain that every once and awhile - and only on Halloween - an alignment of stars form the now familiar shape of Thorn, triggering Myers' murder sprees. This doesn't do a damned thing to explain why Myers can take more knocks than Wile E. Coyote and keep on ticking but it does provide the killer with something he never really needed in the first place: a motive. Now this motive is most certainly ridiculous - and doesn't even make sense within the boundaries of this particular film - but, in some ways, subtle hints exist in earlier films that might lead us to believe something more substantial than mental illness is lying behind Myers' madness.

In the first film, during the scene in the graveyard, Loomis is having a conversation with the cemetery caretaker. The caretaker tells him about a man from a few towns over who calmly murdered his whole family fifteen years ago - the same year in which Myers committed his first murder. The word "Samhain" scrawled on the chalkboard in the school in HALLOWEEN 2 is another. With HALLOWEEN 6 still in memory, you might detect something much more sinister in the way the doctor peers through the window of the ambulance, nodding his head, just before it drives off at the start of HALLOWEEN 4. Add in the seemingly unrelated events of HALLOWEEN 3 and you might be able to justify the new mythos Farrands adds to the proceedings. The key word being might.

The version of HALLOWEEN 6 that ended up in theaters is pretty different from the original, intended cut of the film - copies of this version are widely available on the internet, usually under the label "The Producer's Cut". In order to fully understand the film you really do have to view this Producer's Cut. Having been chopped up, with key dialogue passages removed and new gore scenes added, the theatrical version jettisons most of the cohesion of Farrand's vision. What we end up with are dialogue sequences that go nowhere or allude to events that never take place because of editing choices made after completion of the film. In the theatrical release, Myers is defeated by tranquilizers and a beating with a pipe. In the Producer's Cut, Tommy, now a student of arcane magicks, paralyzes Myers by using runestones, negating the curse of Thorn. The latter, while less exciting, works within the existing context of the film. The former, though much bloodier, feels tacked on and out of place. This is the problem with HALLOWEEN 6. The film, in its theatrical version, makes little sense but is more exciting while the film, in its original cut, makes more sense but is more boring. It's a lose-lose situation.

The identity of the Man in Black is obvious from the get-go. If I've learned anything from a decade spent watching giallo films is that the most obvious character is always the culprit and, from the second he shows up on screen, its clear that Doctor Wynn is behind the whole thing. As the leader of the Thorn Cult, it is his duty to watch over Myers, to protect him, so he can complete his mission. As he explains it - much more cleary in the Producer's Cut - the sacrifice of one family means saving an entire tribe. That's nice and fine and dandy, but it does little to explain why they impregnated Jamie while she was in captivity. If they were really concerned with allowing Myers to complete his task, why not just let him do away with Jamie in the confines of their secret location? The Producer's Cut also explains that the father of Jamie's baby was Myers himself! It simply doesn't make sense.

A note: you know what kind of movie you're in for when the voice-over running over the credits gets the backstory wrong. Myers did not, as the voice-over tells us, kill off every member of his family one-by-one. Not a good sign when you have fanboys scratching their heads within the first five minutes.

Depending on the version you watch, the fate of Jamie - who is supposed to be 15 but looks about 25 and has seemingly inherited Myers' abiltity to drive without ever learning how - is completely different. Danielle Harris bowed out of the project because of monetary disputes, probably a good idea anyway, and her replacement is so absolutely jarring that when she finally dies - torn apart in the theatrical, shot in the head after surviving a stabbing in the Producer's Cut - we feel nothing. It's like watching some random character bite the bullet.

There is no real ending to HALLOWEEN 6. In the Producer's Cut, Wynn finds Myers frozen by Tommy's runic spell while Loomis ushers Tommy, Kara, and her son Danny away. When Loomis returns he finds Myers lying on the floor. Pulling off his mask, Loomis finds himself looking at a mortally wounded Wynn, who grabs his wrist before passing on. Loomis watches as the mark of Thorn appears on his own wrist, marking him as Myers' new caretaker. Loomis throws out a scream as we watch Myers, now dressed in Wynn's Man in Black outfit, calmly walk away. Cut to black. In the theatrical version, Loomis goes back into the hospital to find Myers - in this version, Wynn and the other cult members had been butchered by Myers during a never-explained surgical procedure - missing. We hear Loomis scream, this time off-screen, leading us to believe he is being murdered by Myers. Cut to black. After all the loose ends of the last hour and a half, this is a total cop-out.

What HALLOWEEN 6 shows is that franchises do indeed run out of steam at some point. Jason Voorhees should have been left buried years ago. Freddy should have been forgotten. And Michael Myers should have stayed at the bottom of that mine shaft. But on they go, retreading familiar ground over and over, milking their fanbase's loyalty for all it's worth. The best thing you can say about HALLOWEEN 6 is that it provided no easy road forward and, ultimately, prompted a return to the only storyline that really mattered. It'd be a few more years before Michael Myers reappeared on-screen. But this time, it'd be for a very long overdue family reunion.

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