Michael Myers is Controlled by an Evil Druid Cult in the Marvelously Misguided Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers
Because I am obsessive and at least moderately insane, when I was choosing American documentaries about filmmaking to include in The Fractured Mirror, my mammoth upcoming tome about American movies about filmmaking, I made a special point of selecting 2010’s Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy, and 2013’s Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th despite the immersive, exhaustive documentaries boasting a six hour and forty minute and four hour runtimes respectively.
Daniel Farrands directed or co-directed both of the entertaining, informative documentaries. Despite their epic lengths, Never Sleep Again and Crystal Lake Memories are breezy delights that feel much shorter than they are.
That made me wonder why Farrands didn’t make a similarly lengthy documentary about the Halloween series as well. That seems like a logical next step for the horror hound, except that it might cut a little too close to home for the acclaimed documentarian and critically reviled writer and director of poorly received, uniquely sleazy, and opportunistic docudramas.
In addition to Never Sleep Again and Crystal Lake Memories, Farrands’s resume includes such nadirs as 2019’s The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, which boldly/incorrectly posits serial killer Glen Edward Rogers as the killer of Nicole Kidman and Ron Goldman rather than O.J. Simpson.
The same year, Farrands wrote and directed the equally deranged The Haunting of Sharon Tate, which presented a fictionalized version of the Manson murders where Tate, as played by Hilary Duff, is plagued by sinister premonitions of doom.
More to the point, Farrands made his screenwriting debut with 1995’s Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers. He's credited as the sole writer, but the movie underwent numerous drafts en route to filming, and then experienced extensive reshoots after audiences responded poorly to the original cut.
When I read that Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers involved the mute masked murderer being controlled by a Druid cult run by a mysterious “Man in Black” introduced in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, I got excited.
I love it when venerable horror franchises take unexpected turns, some of which involve space travel and/or venturing into the hood.
On paper, Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers seems ingratiatingly bonkers. In practice, it’s a confused muddle that makes a mess of the provocative ideas at its core.
The fifth sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 classic takes place six years after the events of the previous film. Haddonfield has outlawed Halloween in a doomed attempt to make the world forget that it’s the home of the world’s most prolific mass murderer.
Jamie Lloyd, the Final Girl from Halloween 4 and Halloween 5, returns, with J.C. Brandy replacing Danielle Harris in the role because the filmmakers stood to save a tiny amount of money by fucking over the best part of the third and fourth sequels.
After being abducted by the Man in Black in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, Jamie has spent six years in captivity, during which she was impregnated with a seed of pure evil.
Michael Myers is her uncle and the father of her child, although Farrands has clarified that Michael did not sexually assault his underage niece. That would, honestly, be gross. It would make me think less of Michael Myers as a person. It’s one thing to go on a crazed murder spree targeting your immediate family; it’s quite another to engage in incestuous rape.
With the help of a nurse, Jamie escapes with the baby. I watched the Producer’s Cut of Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, where Jamie disappears for much of the film, only to show up at the end to get murdered.
National treasure Paul Rudd made an inauspicious film debut as Tommy Jarvis, the grown-up version of the eight-year-old boy that Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode babysat in the instant classic that started it all.
The massacre he survived as a child had a profound effect on Tommy. He lives forever in the long, lingering shadow of a formative tragedy. Despite being played by the single most charming and likable actor in the history of American film, Tommy has a wild-eyed look and unhinged intensity that suggests that he might pick up Michael Myers’ mask at any moment and finish what the butcher of Haddonfield started.
Using a then-revolutionary device known as a “computer”, Tommy somehow ascertains that Michael Myers’ seeming immortality comes from the ancient druid cult of Thorn.
Because of the curse, Michael is driven to murder every member of his family on Halloween. Like Dom Toretto in the Fast and the Furious franchise, the Curse of Thorn has an expansive view of family.
Here, it applies to Michael Myers’ blood relatives, as well as to Laurie Strode’s adoptive family, who conveniently live in the house where the Myers family used to live.
This turns out to be a case where moving into an evil murder house proves to be a poor decision. The Myers' malevolent murder house is now occupied by Laurie’s adopted mother and father, John and Debra (named after John Carpenter and Debra Hill, Michael Myers’ creators), and their children Kara and Tim, and Kara's six-year-old son Danny, who is haunted by voices telling him to kill.
In her bid to escape the evil cult that wants her baby for nefarious purposes, Jamie ends up at a phone booth in a bus station, where she seeks help from the most reasonable and dependable possible source: Howard Stern-like shock jock Barry Simms, who can be reached at 1-800-YOU-SUCK.
Listeners call in to share brilliant observations like, “I’d just like to say that I understand how things have changed in the 90s. Gays in the military, cut off your husband’s dojigger, become a national hero. I just can’t see any sense in bringing Halloween back to Haddonfield.”
He makes several excellent points. As someone who lived through the nineties, the decade was defined by homosexuals in uniform, serving their country, and hundreds, if not thousands, of women cutting off their husbands' penises and becoming instant folk heroes.
Jamie’s desperate, if misplaced, cry for help reaches Tommy, who heads to the bus station to scoop up the baby, which he names Steven, as well as Donald Pleasance’s Dr. Loomis.
Dr. Loomis is enjoying retirement when he’s visited by an old work colleague, Dr. Terrence Wynn (Mitchell Ryan), an administrator at Smith's Grove Sanitarium, and (SPOILER) the Man in Black, the head of the evil cult behind Michael's massacres.
The filmmakers wanted Christopher Lee, who was also a top choice for the role of Dr. Loomis, but had to settle for a journeyman character actor rather than horror royalty.
Barry Simms then takes his show on the road, literally, when he broadcasts from Haddonfield’s most notorious murder house as a gimmick.
It’s what I would very originally deem “dangertainment”, which is a portmanteau I made up combining danger and entertainment.
When Tim’s girlfriend issues an impassioned plea to bring back Halloween, Barry replies with a smug, “Does she get this riled up in the sack, Tim? I bet she wears crotchless panties and barks like a dog.”
Barry proposes moving the action to the house where it all went down, but he is brutally murdered before he can do so. Death is too good for that degenerate.
The third act of the Producer’s Cut that I watched differs substantially from the version that played half-empty theaters. It delves much deeper into Druid lore than the film itself does, which sounds much more interesting and bizarre than it actually is.
The cult wants Michael to finish killing off his bloodline by murdering Steven so that the curse will then go to Danny.
Tommy foils their sinister scheme, but Dr. Loomis ends up inheriting the Thorn symbol on his wrist and with it leadership of the cult. This displeases the intense doctor, who cries out in horror.
Reading about Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, I found myself thinking, “How bad could it possibly be?” Then I watched it and got my answer: very bad, even by slasher standards.
I’d rather watch a three-hour documentary about the making and unmaking of Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers than the film itself. Hopefully, Farrands can work through his issues and give us the fourteen-hour documentary about the Halloween franchise that we deserve.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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