I am a ride-or-die Halloween franchise fan. A Halloween stan, as the kids say. I’ve seen all of ’em multiple times, and yes, I do kind of like Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers if not mostly for Paul Rudd’s ridiculous acting. The mystery of Michael Myers in the early installments really base him in that unknowable, primordial fear, and the films display what the worst of humanity is truly capable of…outside of capitalism! Zing!!!
The worst of Halloween‘s producers and directors, however, came up with Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, a true slog that sidelines Danielle Harris’ Jamie with a strange, psychic catatonia and kills off the much-more interesting heroine from Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and replaces her with a friend with a tenuous connection to the plot, at best. Plus, the mask is dumb and fat and Michael cries and…just, ugh. At least Donald Pleasance is there, crazy and silly as ever.
Halloween 5 is also the first installment to introduce the occult aspects to Myers’ indestructibility, with that gal-darn Thorn Rune bullshit. This was the first truly divisive entry in the series. However, with great power comes great responsibility to show that power off, right? Well, the Michael Myers of Halloween 5, Don Shanks, described a scene recently that was shot but has never been released, even as an extra on home video.
The scene featured Shanks, as Myers, decimating the entirety of Haddonfield’s SWAT team, in graphic detail, and here’s how he describes it:
“There’s one guy, and I mean they show it, when they’re taking out one of the bodies, whose head is twisted around,” recalled the actor. “They put the wardrobe on him backwards, and he looks like his head’s been twisted one hundred and eighty degrees. And another, the direction was, ‘Take an M16 rifle, and you’re just walking through these guys and killing them.’
There’s Donre Samson, a big tall black guy that I kill, and another one, I put the M16 through his head, and another guy, I break his neck and stomp on him, you know. The whole idea was that you’d hear everybody screaming (over the radio) when he’s killing everybody. So we did all these really quick shots. You know: ‘Pick this guy up. Knock this guy down. Stab this guy.’”
While this would have been cool to see in action, I think the choice that they went with in the final film, of the characters in the movie just hearing screams followed by abrupt silence over a police radio, is much more sinister. It’s honestly a classier move that showing the blood-n-guts action. Doing that would be better suited to a Friday the 13th sequel, which, weren’t we supposed to get one of those kinda recently? Ope.
In any case, this franchise is still going strong, with a Halloween (2018) sequel confirmed to be in the works, thankfully sans David Gordon Green and Danny McBride. Maybe Michael will get back to his “using a firearm as a melee instrument of death and demise, which is kind of ironic if you think about it” mode in the next one. Just like Myers himself, Halloween will never die.
