After six years away the Halloween franchise returned and if it didn’t quite hit rock bottom (that dubious honour was still to come with the dreadful Halloween Resurrection (2002)) but it’s far and away the worst of the initial series of films. A troubled production didn’t help much and a much-praised “Producer’s Cut” is less coherent but just as silly as the head-scratching theatrical cut.

What happens in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers depends on which version you watch. Theatrical and Producer’s Cuts largely follow the same basic idea though and at first there are more similarities than not – the major deviation comes at the very end. In broad strokes, the film begins where Halloween 5 (1989) left off with Michael Myers (George P. Wilbur) and his niece Jamie Lloyd (Dannielle Harris in stock footage) are snatched from Haddonfield Police Station by a mysterious “man in black.” Six years later, as Halloween approaches again, Jamie (now played by J.C. Brandy) is a prisoner of a cult of druids and gives birth to a baby that the group plan to sacrifice to Michael. She manages to escape with Michael in hot pursuit and leaves the baby in the toilet in a bus station before being attacked by Michael (in the theatrical cut she dies but lives longer in the Producer’s Cut, long enough to give us a flashback to fill in the gap between this and the last film before being shot). Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and  Dr Terence Wynn (Mitchell Ryan), the chief administrator of Smith’s Grove Sanatorium from where Michael had escaped all those tears ago, are soon on Michael’s trail with the help of Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd), the now grown-up young boy that Laurie Strode had been babysitting in 1978. Tommy believes that Michael is the victim of an ancient Celtic curse, Thorn, and is doomed to sacrifice his next of kin on the night of Samhain. There are more Strode’s now, including single mum Kara (Marianne Hagan) and her son Danny (Devin Gardner) who is hearing a voice (that may or may not be Michael) urging him to kill.

After that, it all gets a bit muddled – in both versions, Wynn is revealed to be the mysterious “man in black” but in the theatrical cut he’s involved in some sort of cloning experiment to recreate Michael and his evil and in the Producer’s Cut he turns out to be just a standard issue cultist and protector of Michael who can now be stopped in his tracks by runic symbols. At the end of both versions the fates of Loomis and Michael remain obscure, leaving the door open for a sequel that by now no-one was even remotely interested in.

Director Joe Chappelle has a way with those edge of frame appearances by Michael Myers that John Carpenter had done so well in the first film but he’s facing a constant battle with a lame-brained screenplay that tries to offer more back story than we really need about Michael and ends up just looking foolish. The Producer’s Cut restores the ending soundly rejected by test screening audiences and some more footage of a visibly ailing Donald Pleasence (he would die before the film was finally released and it’s dedicated to his memory). But what it can’t do is overcome the ludicrous plot that ties Michael to an ancient druid cult, a thread picked up from earlier films and developed into something completely baffling.

“Michael,” gasps Wynn in the climax of the Producer’s Cut, “what have they done to you?” You might well ask. The move to transform Michael into something more akin to the Terminator of the hulking, unstoppable Jason Vorhees is taken to absurd extremes here and curiously, Michael seems to be speaking here (though it’s hard to tell if the voice is meant to be him or the druid leader or someone else entirely). Despite his menacing presence, in the Producer’s Cut at least he seems to need Wynn as a protector and trying to fit Wynn and his cult into what we saw in Halloween (1978) and Halloween II (1981) is a fool’s errand (though they might have been more at home in Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) both it and this film featuring characters named Blankenship).

It’s hard to find any sort of through line from the first film to this one beyond the presence of Michael Myers though now he’s very far from the mysterious, almost ghostly figure that stalked the first film. Once, Michael was an unhinged child who murdered his sister for reasons too twisted to fathom. Now he’s some sort of cursed Druidic hitman.

The sight of a more subdued and clearly unwell Donald Pleasence is a tragic one and was gone before he was able to film all of his scenes for the reshot ending which does little to help an already muddled finale. Paul Rudd appeared on our screens first in television series like Sisters (1991-1996) and Wild Oats (1994) and The Curse of Michael Myers should have been his first big screen role. But the reshoots took so long that the film he shot next, Clueless (1995), got into cinemas first. Danielle Harris is conspicuous by her absence other than in scenes borrowed from the previous film, and although she was probably upset at the time she had a narrow escape. Her absence is down purely to the fact that new producers Miramax Films didn’t want to cough up her fee.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is utter nonsense and by now the continuity of the Halloween series had become so convoluted that it unravels at every turn. Subsequent sequels and reboots (Halloween H20 (1998), Halloween Resurrection (2002), Halloween (2018)) all ignored the Rob Zombie films (Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009)) and magicked away parts 3 to 6, thus freeing themselves of the unwieldy and nonsensical continuity.

Some will tell you that the Producer’s Cut (a Director’s Cut is also said to exist) is the preferable version and up to a point they’re right. It’s less muddled than the theatrical cut and does away with the DNA experiments and cloning nonsense. But the story is still about Michael Myers being the agent of a druid cult getting up to… who knows what?

It was sad and muddled end to a series that had begun with a stone-cold genre classic and – with the exception of the underrated Halloween III: Season of the Witch – had got progressively worse. The next time we saw Michael Myers he’d shed most of his family members and Jaime Lee Curtis was back in Halloween H2O which, as noted, just ignores everything from the climax of Halloween II onwards. It wasn’t the greatest of films, but it was a hell of a lot better than any of these increasingly tawdry sequels.

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