Well, they are not all available for streaming on Stan.
Stan typically seems to have all the movies available in a particular collection, if they have any of them. Examples in the past have included Harry Potter and James Bond. Why not Michael Myers?
Maybe because Halloween 5 and 6 are so bad that nobody wants to watch them?
Actually, there's a pretty big dropoff between Halloween: The Revenge of Michael Myers and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. In the opening credits of the movies themselves, they don't have the series number, but retroactively, it seems to have been applied, perhaps to help us make sense of what goes where.
Some of this dropoff can be attributed to the abrupt change between 1980s filmmaking and 1990s filmmaking.
Halloween 4 and 5 came out only a year apart in 1988 and 1989, and you may remember, I couldn't work up any specific hatred for Halloween 4. Halloween 5 -- directed by the series' fifth separate director, Dominique Othenin-Girard -- is pretty much of a piece with Halloween 4, as the actors all are about the same age and the filmmaking style is pretty much the same.
When you then shift forward six years to Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, bad 1980s horror filmmaking is then replaced by bad 1990s horror filmmaking, which is much worse than bad 1980s horror filmmaking. While there is a certain nostalgia to 80s horror cheese, especially for someone my age, 90s horror cheese has none of that, mostly because it tries to take itself seriously through darker lighting, ill-conceived editing and other showy gestures that are also empty. Nineteen ninety-five was also the year Se7en was released, and though they came out in too close proximity for one to seriously influence the other, both are indicative of a change in the way movies about serial killers are made. That was good for Se7en, not so good for Halloween.
I should pause to note that this is undoubtedly one of the most interesting aspects of watching these movies back-to-back-to-back. Being scared by them is not even a consideration at this point, which makes it unfortunate for the month when I'm trying to be scared by movies -- but then again, I wasn't really scared by the horror comedy I saw last year either. Seeing how the same raw materials -- oh so much the same -- appear through the filters of different filmmaking techniques? Now that's a worthy exercise, even if in the case of Curse, it results in the least good Halloween movie I've seen.
But before we step back and start to go chronologically, I should probably finish my opening thought. Yeah, I had to fork over $3.99 for each of these movies. None too pleased about that.
So I have two questions right off the bat about The Revenge of Michael Myers:
1) Why on earth does this guy need revenge? As far as I can tell, people might want revenge against him, but not the other way around. Just further proof that they'll make up nonsensical titles for movies just because they need a weighted word, not because that word applies to the story or character or franchise in general.
2) Why on earth does a vagrant living by the water nurse Michael back to health for a year, only for Michael to rise up and kill him after completing his convalescence?
It's this last one I really want an answer to.
Okay, to catch you up -- and I will pull out that likely unnecessary SPOILER WARNING just to cover my bases -- the latest method of allegedly disposing of Michael, at the end of the previous film, saw him shot into a pit in the woods that collapsed in on itself, supposedly burying Michael in building refuse and allowing Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis to quip that he'd gone to hell where he belongs. Just to be sure, though, they tossed a stick of dynamite into the pit.
At the start of this movie, we see that Michael actually wormed his way out of the pit and into a nearby river just before the dynamite exploded. A rather silly nod to "realism," because how could Michael ever possibly survive a stick of dynamite, right?
So apparently that took all the strength he had, and Michael collapses after pulling himself up on a river bank a little ways down. Which is where some vagrant is living in a little encampment that is more than just a single tent, but a fairly sophisticated little domicile where apparently no one bothers him.
That he takes this man wearing a frightening mask, whom he would likely know from local lore is the famous killer Michael Myers, into his care for a day or two is strange, but maybe not inexplicable. Perhaps this guy has a soft spot for famous killers.
But the really absurd thing is that when another Halloween strikes the following year, Michael sits bolt upright, and kills this man who has been looking after him for the past 365 days.
There's obviously the problem of Michael's ingratitude. Without this man, he'd surely be dead, or as dead as Michael Myers gets, anyway.
But then, what's going on in this man's head that he keeps a comatose serial killer in his tent encampment for a whole year? How does he care for Michael? How does he feed him? How does Michael use the toilet? If Michael has been in a coma for a year, how long does this man plan to go on cheerily caring for him? What's in it for this guy?
It would be one thing if this vagrant were made out as some sort of Satan worshipper, hoping for some of Michael's evil to rub off on him. But he seems more like a good samaritan who decided that holding some stew up to Michael's comatose lips for a whole year was a better medical approach then, I don't know, bringing him to a hospital.
After that, Halloween 5 is fairly conventionally boring and unremarkable. Pleasence is back again for some outsized dialogue and general overacting, Michael hunts the little girl from the last movie (Jamie) again, everything you would expect.
Though there's one other thing I wanted to mention before moving on to Halloween 6.
The "final girl" from the last film, played by Ellie Cornell, was Rachel, the adoptive sister of Jamie (Danielle Harris), Laurie Strode's daughter who is now the focus of Michael's bloodlust. Rachel was the one looking out for Jamie at the end of the film and the one who dodged all of Michael's knife thrusts successfully.
She's back in this film, but is curiously used indeed. She has some time at the beginning and then appears again at the end as a corpse, though I don't believe we ever see her get killed. (I can't say for sure, this stuff is all starting to blend together, especially if I don't write about it straight away.) Instead, the woman playing this role in this movie is Tina, Rachel's friend, played by Wendy Kaplan. She's not your typical final girl in that she's got a slutty side and a really stupid boyfriend (who gets killed very early on) despite the fact that she also wants to come visit Jamie in the hospital for traumatized children where she lives. The film never properly establishes her connection to Jamie, though, so when Jamie spends the second half of the movie always crying for "Tina! Tina!" like she is her sole lifeline -- while never asking where her adopted sister Rachel has gone -- it just doesn't make any sense.
That's all I remember about Halloween 5 at the moment.
I just watched Halloween 6 last night, so it's "fresh" -- though that is hardly the appropriate word to describe it.
Other than looking like a really tawdry version of a "serious" 1990s serial killer movie, Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers has one extremely noteworthy element:
Paul Rudd.
Only, he was Paul Stephen Rudd at the time, something I never knew.
This was actually released after Clueless -- and here I always thought of Clueless as a 1996 movie -- but Rudd still gets an "introducing" credit.
Well, it wasn't a great introduction. I hope this guy can still manage to have a career.
Sixth franchise director Joe Chappelle, who would go on to direct episodes of The Wire, doesn't get much out of the young Rudd, certainly nothing of the impish charm that would go on to characterize the man. There isn't a hint of humor here, and some of his line readings are painful. He was probably always miscast, but there isn't a lot to be hopeful about here. You never know who is going to surprise you.
Rudd does represent a form of continuity to the original film, though, in this, finally Pleasence's final appearance in the franchise. (He likely would have kept going, but dying on the 2nd of February that year kind of put a damper on that.) Rudd plays Tommy Doyle, who was one of the kids Laurie was babysitting for in the first movie. Not a character who, by any means, needed to pop back up again for the first time in five movies and in 17 years of time in the narrative, but hey, when you're desperate, you're desperate.
He plays kind of a weirdo 25-year-old who still lives across the street from the Strode house, where he gives people the creeps by watching them from his window. And guess who is the Strode house -- more Strodes!
That's right, the house still hasn't sold because of being the location of multiple acts of grisly murder, so the brother of the Strode paterfamilias moves into the place without telling his family he knew what happened there.
(I'm getting a little confused about the timeline though. The original murder was, of course, in the Myers house, not the Strode house, because the Strodes adopted Laurie after her parents and older sister died and her brother was institutionalized. Was the Strode house the location of the climax of the first Halloween? Or was that the Myers house again? In any case, there have been dastardly deeds done in both houses at one point or another.)
So there's yet another Laurie Strode surrogate this time, not Rachel (R.I.P.), not Tina (R.I.P.), but this time Kara (Marianne Hagan), a Strode daughter, who is in Laurie's generation (Laurie's adoptive cousin I suppose), but has her own son, Danny. Is Danny a variation on Danielle? Everything has to connect.
In any case, it is for a moment suggested that this curse of Michael Myers might be passing to the youngest Strode -- even though the Strodes have no biological relationship to Laurie, and therefore, to Michael -- as Danny has a foreboding moment with a knife. But this is dropped like a hot potato and never comes back.
Oh, we have to get back to Danielle here. And because I already told you this was going to include spoilers, we have to reveal the fate of Danielle -- especially since that contributes to the absurdity of this movie.
I don't remember this happening in Halloween 5, but apparently, Jamie is taken at the end. All they really show happening is a mysterious man in black shooting up a police station and once again freeing the not-dead Michael Myers. If my memory of three days ago serves me, Jamie sees that Michael has escaped and has another of her anxious freakouts. (No shade on this actress, who was good.) Not taken, though.
At the start of this film, she's definitely a captive, and -- only six years later, mind you -- she's shown giving birth to a baby. (Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you -- Michael is after a baby in this movie.) She's been kept by a bunch of creepy psychopaths led by this mysterious man in black (whose reveal later in this movie is utterly banal), and in a dungeon-like setting, she gives birth. Now, Jamie is Laurie Strode's daughter, don't forget. So in only 17 years from the original Halloween, Laurie Strode would have gone from a teenage babysitter to a ... grandmother? (Had she not died of course. Though of course, she's not dead, just "misplaced" until Jamie Lee Curtis decides to return to the series.)
So that makes this baby -- Paul Rudd's character calls him Steven, I think -- Michael Myers' grand nephew. Jeez.
So that means that Jamie, who looked like this in 1988/1989:
Has been kept in captivity with the specific intention of producing an offspring, and looks like this in 1995:
Sorry, I'm just not buying it. I know a woman can give birth at age 13 or younger, but the actress playing Jamie here -- J.C. Brandy -- was 20 in 1995, and too right, considering what they put her through on screen. (We don't have to go into too much detail about how Jamie buys it.)
Also, what exactly are the rules regarding how many new generations of Myers there must be? If Jamie is held captive specifically to produce another descendant, was she ever in any danger in any of the previous movies? And does that mean this child will have to grow old enough to father his own baby before Michael can strike again?
I am starting to ramble and have no hope of encapsulating all the ways this movie fails, so I'll just say it's a one-star stinker.
Though, farewell to Donald Pleasence, a consistent if sometimes absurd pleasure in five Halloween movies, all of which I've watched in the last ten days.
I'll watch one more Halloween movie before going out of town for five days and giving myself a break from all this. I should probably write about that one on its own, because this combo post was way too long and you probably stopped reading long before now. I'm probably talking to nobody.
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