It’s the prime season for scary movies, and right now, Halloween is riding high. After the excellent 2018 reboot/sequel, the recently released Halloween Kills has continued a hot streak that could certainly continue through Halloween Ends. But it hasn’t always been plain sailing for the venerable franchise, which has a number of critical and box office flops to its name.
But, in a strange twist, one of the worst is having itself a moment on streaming media: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.
This 1995 movie is the fifth sequel (or fourth, depending whether you count Halloween 3) to the 1978 original, and is an attempt to explain why Myers is so difficult to kill. It turns out that Michael is the subject of an ancient Druidic curse that drives him to kill his next of kin on Halloween night. This feeds into a ludicrous plot about Laurie Strode’s cousins, a mad scientist seeking to clone Myers, and an evil cult.
The response from test audiences was brutal, with the film undergoing extensive reshoots that were complicated by the death of star Donald Pleasance after principal photography. The end result is a garbled and convoluted flick that rightly sits at 9% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer and is widely considered to be a lowlight in the franchise. The general consensus was that abandoning the simplicity of the original in favor of magic Druid curses and cloning was a dumb idea. I can’t disagree.
None of that explains why audiences are tuning into this now. Obviously, ’tis the season for Halloween movies, but you could pick almost any other entry in the series and have a better time. My only theory is that people are being drawn in by the title and simply want some Michael Myers action.
If you’ve checked out Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, please let us know why in the comments.
In the meantime, there’s a much better Halloween movie — Halloween Kills — in theaters and streaming on Peacock now.
Published: Oct 22, 2021 08:55 am