Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

 

Genre: Horror/ Slasher

Time: 1h 27mins

Director: Joe Chappelle

Quick Summary: Six years after Michael Myers last terrorized Haddonfield, he returns there in pursuit of his niece, Jamie Lloyd, who has escaped with her newborn child, for which Michael and a mysterious cult have sinister plans.

The opening in this is so cool and really tense. It's such a shame how boring this film was overall.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting the Halloween franchise to suddenly change from a stalker to a cult. Slowly these have been losing the atmosphere and tension that created the perfection of the original Halloween, and slowly that has been swapped for kills and wacky storylines. Admittedly, by now it does get a bit tiring to see the same pattern happen again and again with no good changes.

While it has an interesting plot and some good suspense to it, it fumbles big time. Not all of the acting wasn't particularly great. Marianne Hagan is the leading lady and she is very likable but admittedly forgettable. Paul Rudd plays a grown-up Tommy Doyle and is also very talented and plays his part nicely. It was a nice touch to bring back Tommy from the original and to show that he's a bit of a weirdo now because of the events in the first one, but he is also pretty forgettable.

I think where this one lost me is that they decided to explain why Micheal was killing people almost at random and tried to humanise him. Which I don't think they should have done because then, he loses all ambiguity and isn't as scary when you try to explain he is a mindless killing machine who is being controlled. It doesn't have anything to do with his whole thing of stalking and slashing. There are plenty of stalking sequences in this movie, but none of them are particularly engaging and most of them feel tired. He just stands there pretty much for most of it.

Loomis is back, too. He is, of course, not surprised in the least when Michael reappears in Haddonfield, and the usual shenanigans happen ( people don't believe the famed serial killer is still alive, make the mistake of writing him off, and end up getting axed in oh-so-creative ways). What a surprise. Even he feels pretty tired just from watching him on screen. 

This is a bit of a mess that didn't really need to happen. It feels tired and doesn't really know what it wants to be. It feels like they tried to tie in the events of the third film, and somehow make it actually connected to Micheal Myers, but it just doesn't work for me.

2/10