A couple of weeks ago, I published a post for the Sunday
“Bad” Movies that was related to the movie Friday the 13th: A New
Beginning. In that post, I wrote about
how the big three slasher franchises had evolved through the addition of humour
or a deepened mythology. This week’s
post was prompted by a movie in one of the other big three franchises that also
tried to evolve its respective series.
This movie is Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, the sixth movie in
the Halloween franchise.
In relation to that post, Halloween: The Curse of Michael
Myers is part of the mythology deepening era of the Halloween franchise. All of the movies, outside of the unrelated
third installment, have some sort of historical importance to the sixth
movie. Whether it be the relationship
between Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis (introduced in the first film and present
through all of the others), Jamie Lloyd (introduced in the fourth and present
since then), the man in black (introduced in the fifth film), Tommy Doyle (a
character from the first film), or the recycled setting of a hospital (the
setting of the second film), Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers builds on
everything that came before it. But that’s
not what I want to write about this week.
What I want to discuss is how a lot of horror movies tend to have
characters, both on and off screen, that act in ways that people wouldn’t
normally act, in order to cause scares and have action occur.
Quick note before I move forward. Of course I know that there are horror movies
that don’t do this kind of stupidity. I
know that. There are lots of them out
there. But for the sake of this post,
I’m looking at the ones that do pull this kind of buffoonery. That’s all.
Moving on.
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is filled with moments
that I don’t understand because the characters and/or assumed characters would
have done other things in the real world.
This is not to say that the Halloween series presents an entirely real
world, but they try to make everything as true to our reality as possible. Many of the situations throughout the runtime
of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers should have never happened. A lack of sincerity is all that I felt while
watching the movie. I want to quickly
outline some of the stuff I witnessed.
There will be some spoilers up ahead.
Consider yourself warned.
The first scene that I want to bring up is the scene in
which the matriarch of the Strode household is slain. If you’ve seen Halloween: The Curse of
Michael Myers, you should know what I’m writing about. Michael Myers chases Mrs. Strode through her
house and into the backyard. In typical
slasher film fashion, there is lots of laundry hanging out to dry in the
yard. Most of it is white sheets. Mother Strode pushes her way through the
sheets only to be trapped because of the fence that is enclosing the yard. There is a look that crosses her face that
makes it seem as though she had never seen the fence before. This boggles my mind. She lives in the house but does not know that
there is a fence on the other side of the laundry that she has hung out to
dry. How did the fence slip her
mind? Maybe the adrenaline caused that
memory to disappear. I don’t know. It seems strange to me that she wouldn’t
remember the fence being there.
That scene was just a little bit of observational
confusion. What I’m about to describe is
the scene that involves the most suspension of disbelief, in my opinion. No, it doesn’t involve the runes and cult
stuff that other parts of the movie do, but there’s some common sense lacking
from this part. It involves a bus
station. Jamie Lloyd is being chased by
Michael Myers and hides in a bus station.
She goes to a phone and calls a radio station. Her blood leaves a puddle on the floor. Then Jamie goes to the bathroom, hides the
baby, and runs away, leading Michael away from the baby. The next day, Tommy Doyle finds out about the
bus terminal, and goes to investigate. When
he arrives at the station, he sees the blood on the floor near the phones, and
then discovers the baby crying in the bathroom.
My questions here are fairly simple.
Why is there still blood on the floor?
Shouldn’t someone have mopped it up?
Isn’t there a janitor to do that?
It seems unsafe and unsanitary to leave a puddle of blood on the floor
overnight. Someone should have noticed
it during the day when there were hundreds of people going through the station. Also, shouldn’t someone have noticed the
crying baby in the washroom? Maybe not
the janitor because the janitor clearly doesn’t exist. But anybody who used the washroom should have
been able to hear the baby crying in there.
Someone should have noticed.
There is no reason for the baby to still be in the bathroom, or for the
blood to still be on the floor. Tommy
Doyle should not have been able to find these things because somebody should
have cleaned up the blood and somebody should have noticed the baby.
I know that neither of these things are quite as egregious
as someone running up the stairs instead of out the open front door while being
chased by a killer, but they are both things that happen due to a lack of
thought put into the writing. The
characters are either absent-minded for no reason or they are absent
altogether. I guess that saying “for no
reason” is wrong. There is a
reason. The reason is to get to more
kills and more action. All it does for
me is snowball into one giant removal of any possible suspension of disbelief
that I had. I can deal with the
spiritual aspects of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. I can deal with the fact that both Michael
Myers and Dr. Loomis have survived situations that would kill most people. I can even deal with an inept police force
who don’t do anything. But when you
build a fantastical world on top of a real world, then remove all traces of
common sense, the movie falls apart for me.
It takes me right out of the movie and I’m left in a state of
bewilderment.
This is not to say that I dislike slasher flicks. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is
still an entertaining movie. The
difficulty comes in the form of the investment that a viewer can have for the
characters. The killer is the character
that is most fleshed out. The rest of
the characters are meant to be meat for the killer to carve. Everything in a slasher flick is meant to
serve the sole purpose of leading to a murder.
It becomes less about making sense and more about watching people die in
exceedingly violent ways. It’s fun to
see how many different situations that a filmmaker can think of for a person to
die, but it comes at the expense of realistic characterization.
It’s a shame that Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
succumbs to this sort of laziness. The
mythology building that is being done in the movie is interesting. It seems that in slasher movies, you can’t
have both a deep mythology and rational characters. When the writers focus on one thing, they
forget that they need the basics in order to create a fully immersive
story. It really is a shame that so many
slasher flicks forget that.
There are a few notes that I would like to make right now:
- If you have any suggestions for future Sunday “Bad” Movies, tell me on Twitter. Or leave a comment. Either way works. I’ll see the suggestions if you suggest.
- Mitch Ryan was in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. He was also in Ed.
- I talked about the growth of slasher franchises in the post for Friday the 13th: A New Beginning.
- Two other slashers that I wrote about were Backwoods Bloodbath: Curse of the Black Hodag and April Fools.
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