Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

Oh God, Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis are back again. Years have passed since the events of the previous film, and little Jamie has grown up and is now pregnant. In fact, we open the film with her giving birth in some basement in a hospital, begging the doctors not to take her baby. But they do. And then a kind nurse manages to get Jamie her baby. Jamie thanks her by running away and leaving the nurse to a horrible fate at the hands of Michael Myers, who is really angry now that he has a baby to worry about.

Later on we meet a bunch of awful people living in Michael's house, and living across from them is grown up and crazy Tommy Doyle, who was one of the little kids Laurie was babysitting during the first Halloween movie. Tommy has been obsessively researching the whole Michael Myers phenomenon, and has connected Michael with ancient druid lore and he starts explaining something about how the druids would curse one of their children with the mark of Thorn, and then that kid would grow up and kill his or her next of kin, saving the tribe from Dracula or something. Look, Tommy Doyle is obviously insane so it's up to you if you buy this druid nonsense.

The Man in Black from The Revenge of Michael Myers is back and you can look forward to his identity being revealed. And while all this is happening, Loomis is still around though sadly not nearly as out of control as he was in Halloween 5. He's just a little crazy in this one.

The whole druid/Thorn thing is pretty interesting but it really takes away from what made Michael Myers scary in the first place- he was just a kid that snapped for no reason and killed his sister and then came back ten years later or whatever and killed again. It's just not as scary when he's being controlled by draculas or druids or space leprechauns or whatever. Although one thing that is done well with Michael this time around is that he doesn't really do a lot of slow stalking. He's just really angry and you can see that in how brutal he is this time around. Michael has trouble with feelings, so he must express himself through the universal language of killing you with whatever tools he has within reach at the time, no matter how unlikely they might be as weapons.

There are a ton of stupid things going on in this movie, but apparently the movie had a rough production so it's understandable (but not forgivable!!). At one point the plot depends on Tommy tracking the location of a phone call he has recorded to a bus station, then following a trail of blood left from the phone booth in the station into the bathroom where he finds a loud crying baby hidden in a little cabinet, all in broad daylight at least a day after the incident occurred there. You mean no one but crack detective Tommy noticed the massive pool of blood on the floor of the public telephone booth in the bus station? And no one heard the loud baby in the bathroom?

So this is what we are dealing with, when we sit down to watch The Curse of Michael Myers, but it's okay. It's got the worst cast of any of the movies (though Paul Rudd as Tommy Doyle is pretty cool, especially his reaction when he first meets Michael face to face in a hallway), but it sure looks good with some excellent colored lighting straight out of 1970s horror Italy. This is also definitely the goriest of all the Halloween movies.

I thought about this really carefully and I am fine with that. Halloweens 2 and 4 tried so hard to do the same thing as the excellent first movie, but they just couldn't manage it and ended up being extremely boring. Halloween 5 threw its hands up in the air and just started cracking jokes. And The Curse of Michael Myers doesn't try any of that, instead it's just a really violent, weird, and pretty decent looking slasher movie with light occult elements. I'd rank it the third best Halloween.