Producer's Cut
After a bit of thought, I decided to go with the Producer's Cut first, see what the original intention was. Now this one had a bit of a handicap before it got started, in that it had to follow up Halloween 5's stupid, stupid ending. How that one ended was that Michael Myers has been caught, he's in a jail cell at the Haddonfield Sheriff's station, awaiting a prison transfer, but then this weird guy in a black coat, hat, and cowboy shoes (complete with spurs) turns up, massacres everyone there with a machine gun, blows open Michael's cell, and takes him away, the only witness being Michael's niece Jamie Lloyd. Oh, and this guy has a thorn rune tattooed on his wrist, just like the one on Michael's wrist.... which we've never seen before, and hasn't been a thing at all until this movie. Apparently the makers of that one, for all their other sins, decided to just say "fuck it, let the guy doing the sequel figure it out", so had no idea themselves who The Man in Black was, or what the rune meant. So the makers of this one decided to try and explain what all that was about, and weirdly the direction they went with almost means that some of the ideas from part III coming back into the franchise. No, not the robots, the whole druid angle.
Yes, as we start this one, it has a now teenage Jamie Lloyd escaping with a newborn baby from an evil cult, which Michael is apparently in the thrall of, who wear robes so silly it makes the Time Lords' outfits look restrained, . And this leads to a chain of events involving a returning Dr. Loomis, in one of Donald Pleasence's final performances, a branch of the Strode family that lives in the old Myers house, and the return of a couple of minor characters from the first film, Dr. Wyn and Tommy Jarvis. The latter is interesting for two reasons; firstly, it's clear that they realised that Donald Pleasence can't do these forever (as he'd prove when he passed away shortly after filming ended), so they needed to establish a new "Ahab" character for future sequels; having the kid from the first grow up obsessed by Myers makes sense. The second because it's an almost baby faced Paul Rudd playing him! Yeah, Ant-Man vs. Michael Myers! Sadly though, he's playing the Srz Bznz character, so no real chance to show off his comedic skills, missed a trick there movie. Mind, his character does get some of the biggest laughs, in that he info dumps us to explain that not only is Michael Myers' power and evil the result of The Cult of Thorn, not only is it directly linked to that Thorn Rune I mentioned, but it goes so far as cause a Thorn shaped constellation to appear whenever a Halloween film took place! Yes, really; how did no astronomers notice this in 1963, 1978, 1988, 1989, or 1995, I'm not really sure.
Now that sounds like a lot of plot; well there's more! That's the big problem with this one; there's way too much stuff going on! I haven't even mentioned the shock jock radio host coming to Haddonfield, who are having their first Halloween celebration in six years. That business of the branch of the Strodes living in the Myers house (because Strode Estates own it, and reasonably nobody in Haddonfield wants to buy it) includes a young Danny Strode, who seems to be being groomed by the forces the cult commands into becoming a new Michael Myers. Not sure why, the old one seems to be still going fine given the bodycount here. Oh, and Dr. Wyn is trying to get Loomis to agree to come back to Smith Grove Sanitarium to take over, which takes on an extra significance since (SPOILER ALERT), he's The Man in Black, in charge of the cult! Oh, and that baby was conceived as part of a ritua- OH CHRIST!!! Remember how damn simple the first Halloween was, how lean, simple, and efficient an exercise in fear was? Yeah, this feels like they had three different ideas for sequels (the cult, the Strodes, Haddonfield bringing back the celebration) and used all of them, leaving many of these threads feeling a bit underserved. I like that they tried to pay a lot of homage to the original, but it's overstuffed with these points, and it calls to attention the fact that there's no way you can look at the events of the first and reconcile them with the cult's plans revealed in here. That last point extends to something I really don't like; the baby's father is Michael. Now, as well as the fact that Jamie is his niece (oh no!), that really doesn't fit the whole point of Michael being someone who never got past his childhood, and I don't buy the whole "cult did it" handwave for that.
I've ragged on the story for this one a lot, but the thing is I actually quite enjoyed the film overall. There's a lot to like in here, just a bit too much that doesn't really fit well together. There are some great gothic parts with the cult's lair beneath Smith Grove, the Michael stalking characters parts are great, as he's filmed with a sense of mystery and menace again, the characters and acting are a lot more fleshed out than in previous films, it's enjoyable when that shock jock gets murdered, and it's got a tonne of atmosphere. A lot of that comes from Alan Howarth, using a lot of Carpenter themes from the original, and a few extra tracks, one of which sounds an awful lot like Popol Voh's score to the Werner Herzog take on Nosferatu. Even Michael's mask looks a lot better. The issue is that the story does veer all over the place somewhat, and some of the revelations do over explain things. The ending does fizzle out a bit, as Tommy manages to stop Michael by... putting some runic stones on the floor and saying Samhain (and yes, he says it as "Sam-Hain", not as it should be "Sah-Wen"). It does lead to a good stinger of a final scene though, suggesting that the cult isn't finished yet, and Michael may now have an entirely new agenda of his own. So yeah, despite it being something of an overegged pudding, I had a good time with this. It's not great, nowhere near the original's level, or Season of the Witch's charm, but I'd put it high on my list of Michael Myers films. Dimension Pictures however didn't agree, so let's see what changed when it was actually unleashed on audiences.
Theatrical Cut
This is different right from the opening shot, with a different logo, music track, style of credits (he's Paul Stephen Rudd in here), and an attempt to make it look as much like a music video as possible. Oh yeah, and it's far less scary. And that's a running theme throughout a lot of this cut. Apparently, the goal was make a "more intense" movie; given this was the mid-nineties all I can think of is the process of adding more "attitude". Now up until a point towards the end I'll get to later, most of the differences in this version in terms of plot are fairly minor, but there's been one big change that wrecks a lot of the atmosphere I liked with the Producer's Cut; the music. It's nowhere near as effectively used here, a lot of the same cues are still around, but not all in the same places. For example, that Nosferatu sounding one I mentioned before is used far less often, which is a shame. Also, the version of the Halloween theme we hear first is a terrible guitar version, which helps wrecks Michael's first appearance in the film. Also, I don't know if it's more a case of different HD transfers, or a case of colour grading the finished film, but this one has a different look, which makes it feel a lot cheaper, more like a TV movie. Whatever the cause, a lot of the atmosphere of the film is pretty much ruined.
For most of the runtime, the different edits are small, but plentiful. Some of these changes are just awkward; like how there's an almost identical opening narration, but now done by Tommy Doyle rather Loomis, despite the fact there's barely any real difference in what's being said, so why bother changing it? There's also a lot of needless extra gore added in, like how one character just goes from being electrocuted to having the current somehow be enough to make his head explode, which just looks stupid. Quite a few other cuts seem to just be there to make the film shorter, which is odd in that the original cut is only 95 minutes, this one is 88, and as a result we lose a lot of good character beats as a result. One I really miss is a shot of Loomis getting out his revolver after hearing Jamie on the radio, which has a good "getting back in the saddle" feel. Speaking of Loomis, a major problem for them doing the reshoots was that Donald Pleasence had passed away at this point, so there are some very awkward cuts to try to match what they had to what they newly shot. This is really noticeable towards the end in one discussion with Wynn, which is very obviously two entirely different scenes; Loomis' replies don't match Wynn's new dialogue at all. Also, the total amount of Loomis footage is cut back a lot; I wouldn't be surprised if Dimension Pictures wanted to cut him out of the film entirely, as they would think "teens don't want to see this old guy!". It's such a shame that his last performance in one of his most iconic roles got this treatment.
OK, so let's get to the ending. Now I said before that my big problem with the Producer's Cut was the overabundance of plot; well at least in that one, the plots had endings! This one, in trying to make a newer, and more exciting climax ends up utterly breaking the storylines. There's no big cult ritual trying to make Danny the new Michael; instead it's implied that it's all some scientific experiment to get (for lack of a better word) The Evil Gene from Michael. Yes, really. So then, if there's no final ritual, that means Danny's visions of The Man in Black are pointless, it's really unclear what role the baby has in all of this, and there's no need to kidnap Kara as a sacrifice. Then there's a scene where Michael kills all of the cultists in an operating theatre lit by a Strode- sorry, strobe light, and he does this because... erm... reasons? Oh, and if we're going down this route, why leave in all the Thorn Rune infodump stuff early on in the film? It's also very obvious that this was shot later than the main film, because Michael has suddenly lost a lot of muscle mass between scenes (it's a different stunt guy under the mask). And I know it wasn't that good an ending doing the rune spell originally, but at least that gave an impression of weird supernatural forces at work; here, they just jab some green stuff in Michael, and beat him up with a bit of pipe; some ultimate evil!
Conclusion
There really was no need to do this reshoot process; the original cut wasn't perfect, but it was perhaps the most effective Michael Myers sequel yet, with the style and direction making up for a lot. It has it's problems, but the new version didn't fix any of them really; yes it has a more exciting ending, but a sillier one. In fact, the film mocks the idea of having "Michael Myers in Space" at one point (Jason would do that first!), but it ends in this ridiculous looking Sci-Fi lab set that wouldn't be accepted on Classic Doctor Who; glass houses movie! I do think, looking at how the ending plays out, that maybe director Joe Chappelle and Paul Rudd were not happy about this, as the directing for when Myers on screen is noticeably clumsier, not as careful as before having him just wander into places, and Tommy Doyle's personality suddenly changes, he now behaves... well, a lot more like Paul Rudd! There's only one thing I liked a bit better, downplaying the idea of Michael the father, but apart from that the theatrical cut is a complete mess, leaving so many plot threads dangling. If they were doing a re-edit, why not take away the stuff the new ending would make redundant? It's not even close, the Producer's Cut wins hands down for me! If it had been released as was, I think it would have done perfectly fine at the box office, Dimension Pictures really could have saved themselves a lot of time and money.
Do I recommend the Producer's Cut then, is it a good movie? Hmm, that's a trickier question. I'd say it's enjoyable, it's worth the effort to see if you like the Halloween series, but of course it's far from the top tier of the franchise. If you actually try to reconcile the events of this one with those of the first film, you may feel your brain start to melt... but then again, the franchise has been doing that since part 2, and it had a lot of work to do cleaning up after 5's mess. I do say give it a go though; you'll need a multi-region blu ray player, but those aren't too expensive. It's no wonder though that after this one, the franchise would hit the reset button, as I'm still trying to work out the whole Man in Black business...
BTW, a bit of news came out recently that with the two Halloween films coming in the next couple of years, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, the character of Tommy Doyle is coming back in them. Sadly, he's not being Paul Rudd this time, it's Anthony Michael Hall in the part. Shame, I'd be interested to see what a modern Rudd would do with the character, if he had a bit more freedom to put a spin on him.
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