It Was A Night Of Great Power Part 1: Halloween 6(66) And My Addiction To The Loathed Films Of This Damned Franchise

"It was the start of the year in our old Celtic lands, and we'd be waiting in our houses of wattles and clay. The barriers would be down, you see, between the real and the unreal, and the dead might be looking in to sit by our fires of turf..."

So intones practical joke mogul and evil warlock Conal Cochran in his parlor scene with alcoholic doctor Dan Challis. Dan O'Herlihy really sells the speech, infusing it with a foreboding reverence for the night of Samhain. Admittedly, it's a bit of a contrast to the apeshit plot concerning Halloween masks that contain Stonehenge-infused microchips meant for the annihilation of America's children. However I'm not here to talk about the masterpiece that is Halloween III. No friends, tonight we're due for a darker harvest. A similar scene occurs in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, only this one concerns boarding house owner Mrs. Blankenship (Who is by the way a black magic cult member) rambling to dead-eyed shit boy and nepo-baby of tragedy Danny Strode. The speech has considerably less impact, which comes from the fact that by this point in the movie you have no fucking clue what is going on.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (AKA Halloween 6 or Halloween 666 if yer' nasty) is not the red-headed stepchild of the franchise. No, this fella is more like the Castle Freak of the series. The production and evolution of the movie was an unmitigated nightmare, something that is extensively documented at this point (See the Wiki for the full serving of citation-heavy nerd bullshit). Everyone from Michele Soavi (Cemetery Man) to Tarantino (The bartender in Deathproof) were considered to direct, and the script went through countless iterations. Several plot elements were relatively consistent throughout all script versions:

1) Revealing the purpose of the Thorn rune symbol seen in Halloween 5 and its connection to Michael's (At this point) supernatural abilities.
2) A cult orchestrating Michael's annual bloodbath for black magic purposes.
3) Revealing the identity of the Man In Black who broke Mikey out of jail at the stupid climax of Halloween 5.
4) The traumatic relationship that the town of Haddonfield has with the holiday of Halloween.

That's a lot of convoluted nonsense (Outside of the town's relationship with Halloween which is interesting and feels like an afterthought in the final product) to cover in making a complete film and the final product definitely accomplishes the "convoluted" part more so than the "complete film" part. So why do I keep returning to this fucking mess?

Well I technically keep returning to TWO messes, for you see there are two versions of this movie. The theatrical cut has the editing of a music video, features a fantastic head explosion, and a score that absolutely abuses the whammy bar. The plot in this iteration is impenetrably confusing because contextually important footage has been cut to ribbons. In the opposite corner is the now legendary producer's cut, one which omits the gratuitous violence in favor of a coherent plot akin to a bloated horror paperback. This one has a soundtrack by frequent Carpenter collaborator Alan Howarth. It should be noted that the analog sounding Howarth soundtrack is superior, but feels very weird when paired with the nineties time period.

I am fascinated by this movie. It's a cinematic disaster on so many levels and one that I cannot look away from. There's also flashes of interesting ideas and
moments of camp that my brain has seized upon, extrapolating them to create alternate and probably superior versions of the film. But it isn't the movie you made up in your head! You shout at me as I sit there with my shit-eating grin. I know baby, but I just can't quit this madness. I adore the audacious stupidity of going from "Faceless evil" to "An evil cult that uses Celtic runes and maybe evil science to make invincible monster men." It feels like an Al Adamson-penned psychotronic disaster that would have melted my retinas if it had come out in the seventies. I love the idiocy of Dr. Wynn leading the Cult of Thorn. Dr. Wynn, a throwaway character that tells Loomis Michael can't drive in the original Halloween. The implication that he not only taught Michael how to drive but used magic and pseudoscience to make him a killing machine is farce made celluloid flesh. I'm compelled by the fact that the Strode family dynamic is one of bleak abusive history (Completely inappropriate for the tone of the movie) and that Paul Rudd (Playing Tommy Doyle) has a bizarre Norman Bates-esque vocal affectation throughout the film. Did I mention there's a bootleg Howard Stern character and a proto-Powerpoint presentation that Tommy showcases to explain the Thorn cult? Most importantly, I always cackle at the abrupt cut to this chef's kiss of an exchange after Dr. Loomis and Tommy are ambushed by the cultists:

Tommy Doyle: Where are they? Where's Kara? I feel like I've been drugged
Dr. Sam Loomis: We have been drugged.
Tommy Doyle: I don't understand, why didn't they kill us when they had the chance?
Doctor Loomis: It's his game, and I know where he wants to play it.

This is right before they head off on a mission to save our final girl from Smith's Grove Sanitarium, reimagined here as part-occult dungeon, part-surgical center, and part-airline terminal. In the producer's cut our heroes use actual rune stones to paralyze Michael. They put rocks around a man that crushes peoples heads, and he goes into power-saving mode. In the theatrical cut Paul Rudd beats him to death with a lead pipe. I thought putting my thoughts to paper would exorcise the demons of my fixation on Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers but I failed. There's something more to it, something darker and more primordial. It goes back to the tilled soil on the eve of Samhain, pregnant with eldritch promise. To quote Ricky Bobby's son, "I don't even know what that means but I love it!"

-Dr. Benny Graves