To Robert Englund’s credit, he might not have carved out a career as a film director, but “976-Evil” is like an extended EC Comic segment. It’s colored wonderfully, the direction is quite excellent, and Englund is able to create a bleak revenge horror film that ends on a note suggesting a wider story at hand. It’s too bad the sequel didn’t expand on these ideas, in spite of its guilty pleasure status.
Perhaps it’s because I’m just a slasher geek, maybe it’s because I’m basically forgiving when it comes to the Halloween series, but I’m not typically in agreement when people call “Halloween: Resurrection” the worst Halloween sequel primarily because as a standalone tale it would work as a wicked slasher film and thriller. This is an installment that arrived at the cusp of the reality television craze, and deep down it feels as if someone took a screenplay for another horror film and tagged buffers to connect it to the prior “Halloween” films and it shows often with a narrative that is seemingly disconnected from the rest of the series beyond the prologue.
For its time, I guess “Halloween H20” felt like a good idea. Jamie Lee Curtis who was once a scream queen spent most of her career attempting to re-invent herself beyond the horror brand. But the reunion of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers seemed inevitable. Since Donald Pleasance died during the making of “The Curse of Michael Myers,” his lack of presence sorely hinders the reunion between Michael and Laurie. Even with bringing back the nurse from the first film, and introducing Laurie’s son who happens to be Michael’s nephew, Donald Pleasance is very painfully missed.
Director Joe Chappelle’s crack at Michael Myers is not only very forgettable, but with Miramax running the show, this new installment of the series feels different. Where in the first two films felt stark and filled with urgency, while parts four and five retained some of that energy, “The Curse of Michael Myers” feels dreary.
Granted, Ellie Cornell wasn’t the most enthusiastic or memorable actress, but she did add a sense of sanity and empathy to the plight of Jamie Lloyd when facing Michael Myers. Cornell’s decision to be killed off in Part five sullied the movie and completely destroyed any emotional base that it could have. After a very cheap death at the hands of Michael Myers, he begins to stalk Jamie Lloyd again and roams around Haddonfield again just wandering around. He really has no purpose in the movie other than to just kill Jamie.
There was no need for a sequel. I don’t care how good Michael Myers was as a character, there was no need to further the misadventures of Michael and Laurie. I would have loved to see what the writers would have mustered up with their idea for a “Halloween” anthology movie series, but sadly, we were given “Halloween II.” As a sequel it’s not a bad film, by any means. It just takes the opposite direction of the original film by turning Michael in to a hack and slash killer, rather than a force of nature. Instead of Michael receding in to the night to await his next rumble with someone tasked by fate, Michael is not quite done with Laurie just yet.
I really love that if producers were planning on engaging us in an anthology of horror films that they’d include elements from the holiday to incorporate in to a movie. I think with enough out of the box thinking, there could have been at least six movies about the horrors of Halloween or Samhain. But then this was the eighties. Audiences didn’t want out of the box. They liked it all boxed up and easy to consume. “Halloween” had a Halloween masked killer stalking babysitters during Halloween night. And here’s “Halloween III” about the idea of sacrifices and samhain all thanks to an… evil Halloween mask maker. And his army of robots.