Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
We've had the 'Return', the 'Revenge' and now the 'Curse'. However, this time the title actually has some relevance to the content of the film. We start the movie in some kind of strange institution. Grown-up Jamie is having a baby which is then taken away and has some kind of occult ritual down on it. Then Jamie is given the opportunity to get out of there just before Myers steps in and starts murdering people. The whole thing is totally nuts.
Loomis appears at the beginning announcing in a tired but happy voice that he is now retired as his claim to fame as the man who stopped Michael Myers on previous Halloweens is announced on the radio. While this is clearly an indication that he's not going to be staying retired, Loomis really doesn't seem up to the job here and not without good reason. The dedication "in memory of Donald Pleasence" actually appears at the end. This was Pleasence's last movie and watching it I almost felt complicit in his death. It practically feels like Pleasence is slowly dying as the movie progresses.
While they may have become embarrassed enough by the number of instalments to leave out the number '6' in this sequel, the filmmakers clearly want us to think there's a clear continuity while they watch this. One of Loomis' co-workers is back and Paul Rudd is playing one of the boys Laurie Strode babysat back in the very first movie. To be quite frank, I'm not quite sure why Paul Rudd has been chosen for the role of Ant-Man. What else does he actually have in his career other than Halloween 6 and the Anchorman movies? Certainly neither of those films really suggests that he has much talent to offer.
This movie clears up the 'mystery' (if leaving a character entirely unexplained counts as a mystery) of the guy with boots from the last movie. Apparently he belongs to some cult connected with the mysterious mark which only appeared on Michael Myers for the first time in the last movie (and yet which we are supposed to pretend has been there all along).
Michael Myers is still going after members of his family because that's the corner this series has backed itself into. He's also still inclined to return to his childhood home. So helpfully all the people living in this house are part of the Strode family.... except that the Strodes were the family that adopted Laurie and took care of Jamie. None of them are actually related to Michael, who we all remember has the surname 'Myers'.
This movie tries to expand the mythology of Michael Myers in the most lazy way imaginable. It expects us to believe, out of the blue, that Michael Myers' entire murderous rampage has been orchestrated by some kind of druidic cult. The introduction of druids is presumably an attempt to tie in with the one-off Michael Myers-free "Halloween III: Season of the Witch" except that if any such ties were intended, they are not made explicit here. (Presumably the intention would be to wait until a further sequel to 'solve the mystery'. Like they did with the mysterious man from the fifth movie.)
The deaths are less interesting here, the characters don't have any, Loomis is tired and lacking the passionate warnings about Michael, Paul Rudd is a particularly lame central character to follow and the background story about the druidic cult is convoluted and unengaging. I'd rather be watching "Jason Takes Manhattan". The problem with Halloween 6 is that it just solidifies more than ever the sense that this is a joyless franchise. The franchise's own reputation seems to work against it since, after being praised so highly (whether warranted or not) in its first instalment, the failings of the sequels are all the more devastating as a result.
Halloween 4 had some promise because it suggested that there might be more interesting stories to tell about the relationship between Myers and Loomis. Halloween 6 makes clear that no more interesting stories about the relationship between those two characters are going to be told (at least not with Pleasence in the role). The writers simply do not know what to do with these characters and with the death of Loomis it feels very much like the death of the series as a whole.
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