After the release of the Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers Producer’s Cut, the masses finally had the chance to see the elusive version few had ever laid eyes on. The cut had been notorious for decades as something that fixed all the numerous plot holes of the theatrical release. It had been available only in horrible quality bootlegs for years and years. But Scream Factory eventually did the unthinkable and completely restored it. Watching the Halloween 6 Producer’s Cut is a must for any Halloween fan. It really is like watching a completely different movie.
The reason for the major differences can be attributed to disagreements between the studio and the producers. The Weinsteins didn’t really understand the movie that producer Moustapha Akkad was trying to make. So over half the feature was re-shot behind his back, and that forms the bulk of the theatrical cut which was the only available version until October 2014. It’s great to see it restored to what it was initially intended to be.
But it is not the sacred Halloween film to fix all the continuity problems. It’s very much the movie that’s responsible for a good number of the problems. The Producer’s Cut doesn’t do away with some of the biggest issues with Curse of Michael Myers, because the biggest issue is the intent of the picture itself.
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John Carpenter is a great storyteller. He put a lot of thought into Halloween, despite how effortless the movie looks. Michael is not even referred to as Michael Myers in the script, he’s referred to as the shape. The entire concept is that this is not a human being, this is the very absence of humanity. It’s the boogeyman. That’s why you have this white, featureless mask. It’s a blank slate that you can project almost anything onto. There’s no reasoning with the shape, there’s no bargaining and there’s no sympathy. That’s why this silent ghost of a killer is so terrifying.
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That’s why The Curse of Michael Myers was inherently a bad idea. It was created with the prospect in mind of revealing everything about Michael’s supernatural nature and where he comes from. I understand that Halloween 5 didn’t make things any easier for them.
It created a lot of new problems and added a lot to the mythology that the director had no intention of dealing with. There was the problem of the mysterious man in black and the Thorn tattoo inscribed on Myers’ wrist. The next movie would certainly be expected to explain these problems. But there should be a balance of what to explain and what not to expound upon.
Because of these problems, Curse of Michael Myers took it upon itself to explain everything. If there were questions that needed to be answered, the filmmakers figured that they might as well try and answer everything at once. That turned out to be an unnecessary move that didn’t really help the production.
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By explaining away Michael Myers and cementing him as an overtly supernatural presence, they ironically de-mystified him. Michael was not only turned into an essentially possessed person endowed with otherworldly powers, but was a pawn to a larger cult. While it’s bad enough to try and give Michael too much of an origin, it’s only insult to injury to then not even make him the main antagonist of the feature.
There’s stuff to enjoy in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, but it is a very flawed movie. It has a great Halloween atmosphere and really looks and feels like October, especially on Blu-Ray. The kills are actually pretty imaginative and are a main lure of the feature. Alan Howarth’s renewed score for the Producer’s Cut, which had been all but lost, is also great and helps sell the gothic undertones at least a little bit.
If Curse of Michael Myers wanted to fit as a Halloween movie, it should have been the film that tied Season of the Witch to the rest of the franchise, because it has a lot more in common with that than any of the entries to actually feature Michael Myers. Ultimately, while I’m always interested to see franchises take new directions, this one definitely did more harm than good. It explained away everything that made this boogeyman figure compelling, but luckily it didn’t work.
I don’t—and I think most fans would agree—find myself watching the original and thinking back to the ancient cult that is pulling everyone’s strings. These things stand on their own, and when Halloween H20 was released three years later the events of Curse of Michael Myers were all but forgotten. And the new timeline has followed suit by retconning everything but the first.
