Don’t Blink Or You’ll Miss Some Gore Movie Review
“Mommy, it’s raining red, and it’s warm!” cries a little boy dressed up in a Halloween angel costume and standing under a tree. Moments later, a dripping corpse plops down from above, but the camera lingers barely long enough to take note of the body.
Such is the accelerating rate of carnage in “Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.”
Talk about overkill, if you’ll pardon the expression. Easily the most inept episode of the “Halloween” series, “The Curse of Michael Myers,” which opened Friday, is so busy cramming half-baked supernatural rigmarole into its formula that it has forgotten how to be suspenseful.
In trying to explain the behavior of Michael Myers, the indestructible, white-masked serial killer who still haunts the northern Illinois town of Haddonfield, the movie resorts to talk of ancient Druid rites.
The film, which was directed by Joe Chappelle from an impossibly convoluted screenplay by Daniel Farrands, focuses on the Strode family, the unlucky occupants of the killer’s childhood home.
As the same old trouble starts up again, Michael’s one-time psychiatrist Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence, who died shortly after the movie was completed) is reluctantly called out of retirement.
The movie’s shock effects are applied with such hamfisted regularity that they quickly backfire. And the killer in his silly white mask is visible during so much of the film that his fiendish mystique evaporates before the movie is half over.
Although the series has obviously run out of steam, the ending leaves the door open for Michael’s return. Really, it’s about time the masks were removed once and for and all, and the red taken out of the rain.
xxxx “HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS” Location: Lincoln Heights, Lyons and Coeur d’Alene cinemas Credits: Directed by Joe Chappelle; starring Donald Pleasence, Mitch Ryan, Marianne Hagan, Paul Rudd and Mariah O’Brien Running time: 87 minutes Rating: R