Finding an admirable balance
between serious and comedy roles, Rudd is now famous for turns in acclaimed
dramas like The Cider House Rules
and Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things, as well as a high profile
stint on Friends (he played Mike, the guy who married Phoebe) and supporting
roles in hit comedies Anchorman, The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up.
Things really started moving for Rudd back in 1995, when he broke out
of the TV movie ghetto (where he starred in such classics as Jamie’s
Secret and Runaway Daughters) with a sizeable supporting part in the
hit high school comedy, Clueless. But with every yin there comes a yang,
every silver lining has a cloud and every breakout hit must be balanced
out by a shitty horror sequel – in this case the worst entry in
the barely coherent Halloween franchise.
Lest we forget, John Carpenter’s original Halloween is one of the
true greats of the horror genre – a streamlined and ruthless exercise
in screen terror that owes more to Hitchcock than to the slasher movies
that would follow. Almost devoid of gore, and with only a handful of
artfully staged murders, Carpenter’s vision of eerie killer Michael
Myers was grounded in atmosphere and a commendably ambiguous motive – we
never find out why Michael is such a monster. He simply is.
Naturally, by the time the series had farted along to this sixth entry,
such fanciful notions had long since been trampled into the dirt. That’s
why the movie serves up a procession of spectacularly stupid and gory
death scenes and, worse, tries to convince the hapless viewer that Michael
Myers is actually a cosmic servant of a druidic cult, doomed to kill
his own family so that others may live. Oh yes.
Rudd plays Tommy Doyle, supposedly one of the kids Jamie Lee Curtis was
babysitting in the original movie, now all grown up and obsessed by his
close encounter with the masked visage of Myers. He rents a room opposite
the old Myers house, papers his walls with clippings about Michael’s
murder sprees and waits for the killer to make his inevitable return.
Once the new Myers family members have been hastily invented, introduced
and even more hastily bumped off, it’s up to Tommy to defend the
last of the bloodline – a young baby that, if the convoluted family
tree presented by this movie is accurate, is actually Michael’s
grand-niece. Yes, that’s the level of dumb they’re working
with here.
After an agonising middle act during which pointless secondary characters
are stabbed, disembowelled and electrocuted, Tommy finally faces off
with Myers in a hospital that also doubles as the base of operations
for the druid cult. He stabs the unstoppable and supernaturally charged
slayer with a fistful of syringes filled with green liquid and then twats
him into submission with a big metal pipe. Then he grabs the baby and
legs
it.
Presumably this gives him some measure of closure on his childhood trauma,
as he looks a lot happier afterwards.
Or he may have just been thinking
about all the proper films he’d be able to make once this piece
of crap was finished.
Need to know: Halloween 6 was the last movie Donald
Pleasance would make, returning for the final time as Myers’ nemesis, Dr Loomis.
Aged 76, he visibly struggles through the movie, often barely able to
walk. It’s a depressing sight for any fan of the wonderful actor,
and a great many of his scenes were cut before release.
In fact, the original cut of the movie - commonly known
as "the producer's cut" - contains almost 45 minutes of unused footage,
excised for the theatrical release. Bootleg copies of this cut are common
but, despite claims to the contrary by fans of the franchise, the
film remains a load of old toss.
One year later, in 1996, Wes Craven’s Scream made the slasher
genre both hip and commercially viable once more, and Halloween was
revamped
in line with this new trend in 1998 as Halloween: H20, with a cast
including Josh Hartnett, LL Cool J and Jamie Lee Curtis, returning
to the series
for the first time since 1981. Halloween Resurrection followed in
2002, swiftly pissing on whatever credibility the franchise had reclaimed
by
pitting Michael against text-messaging teens and kung-fu fighting
rapper Busta Rhymes.
Availability: You can pick up all eight Halloween
movies, including this one, in a big fat UK DVD boxset.
