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does your mind go when you hear the word halloween?

Is it jack-o-lanterns?

Skeletons?

And witches?

Candy and trick-or-treaters?

Front lawns adored with fake gravestones and oversized spider webs.

Maybe?

I mean any of these answers would be totally acceptable.

Halloween can mean any number of things to any number of people.

For Christ's sake back in the 1700s it was believed that October 31st was the one day

of the year that the boundary between the living and the dead was at its thinnest,

allowing the spirits of the departed to cross

back and forth between the realms seamlessly.

I'm not making this up.

Halloween is a time of year.

It's a holiday celebrated in several countries around the world.

It's that feeling when the newly covered leaves are falling and little kids in the

neighborhood seem to be getting into trouble a little more often than usual.

We were those kids once, remember?

But Halloween is more than that.

Skeletons and pumpkins and all that good stuff do

eventually pop into my head like they do anyone else's.

But they're secondary.

Halloween, for me, is the most important thing.

The legendary horror film franchise.

The birthplace of possibly the most famous slasher of all time, Michael Myers.

In a series that has spanned over 40 years, it's hard to believe that it's not

over and done with, and that we won't be able to truly put

a bow on this retrospective with the definitive ending.

But if there's one thing we know for sure, it's that evil never dies.

What's up Dan Dans?

My name is Ian and across the next six months we are going to dive deeper into

this storied franchise than you ever thought was possible.

From that faithful night, 1978, to silver shamrock novelties, through the

Thorin Trilogy, into reboots and re-re-boots, there's a lot of meat on this bone.

So grab your popcorn or whatever else the hell

it is you like to snack on and get comfortable.

Because this is only the beginning.

Welcome to the history of Halloween Part 1, the night he came home.

Let's get one thing straight right off the bat.

This franchise is a mess.

Yes, we all love it and it's been around for more than four decades as we've

established, but we have to be honest with ourselves.

It's been a total train wreck for a long, long time.

From the third film eliminating all of the established

canon and starting fresh in a new direction.

Only to shit-can that idea and bring back the prior lore in the very next sequel.

Only to shit-can the next three movies all together

and start all over again as if they'd never happened.

Only to shit-can that and see what I mean.

This is going to be a long, winding road of ups and downs and in and outs,

but I assure you, I'll guide you through the whole thing.

We'll navigate this maze together.

Don't worry.

The best way to not get lost in this crazy shuffle is to start at the very beginning.

Before Michael Myers existed, before Jamie Lee Curtis

signed on for the role that would change her life forever.

Before Halloween, the film was originally titled The Babysitter Murders.

And it came to life when indie film producer Erwin Yablans pitched Mustafa

Akad, a much wealthier producer in his own right, an idea for a film revolving around

a group of babysitters being stalked by a killer in a small town.

As far as writing and directing were concerned, both Yablans and Akad had their

eyes on John Carpenter, who was fresh off 1976's Assault on Precinct 13.

Carpenter was in as long as he was given full

creative control, and luckily that wasn't an issue.

Also involved with the project and a co-writing and producing role was

Carpenter's then-girlfriend Debra Hill, who

prior to this film had worked on... nothing.

But she was a package deal John Carpenter,

and honestly it's a damn good thing she was.

It was Hill who wrote the entire first script before John Carpenter even had his

first pass at it, as Carpenter was pulled away from the babysitter murders almost

immediately after agreeing to write and

direct, in order to finish up another project.

Changing the name of the film to simply

Halloween came to be during the writing process.

It was Erwin Yablans who pitched at the events take place on Halloween night,

and the entire team sort of realized there is no movie just called Halloween,

and they ran with it.

It's funny how some of these things happen, right?

The debuting Jamie Lee Curtis was cast as Laurie Strode, the lead for the film,

with one very interesting connection known well by Debra Hill going in.

Jamie Lee Curtis was the daughter of Psycho Star Janet Lee.

I wonder if the ability to scream has passed down

through generations the way other traits are.

Stepping into the shoes of psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis, no not that Sam Loomis,

but that's two psycho connections already, would be the one and only Donald Pleasants

known for his roles in myriad horror films, as well as the lead villain in You

Only Live Twice, which would serve as the basis for

Michael Myers Dr. Evil character 30 years later.

Sorry, I meant Mike Myers, not Michael Myers.

I know I've only listed off two actors here, but that's really all you need to know.

Look, this was an extremely low-cost project.

The entire production from day one all the way

through to completion had a budget of just $300,000.

That's money that would change my life or your life, sure, but this is Hollywood.

Avengers End Game costs $356 million to make.

The ring costs damn near 50 million.

Jesus, child's play had a budget of $9 million

and that was only 10 years after Halloween.

You get the point.

This film was made for pennies in the grand scheme.

Just asked John Carpenter.

Dude was paid $10,000 for his work as a writer and director here.

10 grand.

That's unbelievable.

And now with the foundation for how Halloween came to be out of the way,

I think it's time to dive into the events of the film itself.

The story, as it were.

Look, I know that's why you're all here.

I get it.

But when we get into the nitty gritty like this, it's

gonna make it all more fun in the long run, I promise.

When you boil it down, the plot of Halloween is extraordinarily simple.

There are no ghosts, no ancient gods emerging from the depths, nothing like that.

Halloween night 1963 in Hadenfield, Illinois, six-year-old Michael Myers

murdered his older sister with a knife he grabbed out of the drawer in the kitchen.

He was institutionalized.

On the 15th anniversary of his grisly crime, he escapes from the mental

hospital, prompting his longtime psychiatrist to track him down.

Throughout the course of the night, Michael stalks several teenage girls in

his hometown of Hadenfield, claiming several more lives along the way.

When it's all said and done, Laurie strode is the only one of the girls left standing.

And after eating six bullets to the chest directly from the revolver of Dr.

Loomis and falling off a balcony, Michael Myers somehow disappears into the night,

signaling to the captivated audience that this tale is far from over.

And that's gonna do it.

Thanks for tuning in.

I'm just kidding.

Come on.

On the surface, though, that is what we have here.

A psychotic killer stalking and murdering

people in his hometown for seemingly no reason.

There have been theories thrown out for decades over

what the underlying message of 1978's Halloween truly is.

I've heard everything from, oh, it was John Carpenter spreading a

conservative message about sexuality and violence.

I've heard it was a feminist uprising tale, establishing

the young and powerful Laurie strode as an icon.

All of this is bullshit.

John Carpenter himself has stated that the power of Halloween, one of the things that

made it so compelling, is that there is no underlying theme.

There is no message.

There's nothing he was trying to coily dump into your skull.

Carpenter described Halloween as having the

illusion of depth without any depth whatsoever.

Around 15 minutes into the film, we get this slow zoom on Laurie in the

classroom while her teacher cuts a promo about fate and destiny.

In any other movie, this would be foreshadowing.

A subliminal way to progress the story.

Here?

Nope.

Just a girl in class with a rambling teacher.

But that speech, man.

It gives the viewer something to latch on to.

Was this horrible scenario always going to play out this way?

Were these grisly murders unavoidable?

It's great.

The fact that there's really nothing to it, it's fantastic.

Michael Myers, arguably the king of all slashers, is

rarely referred to by his full name in this entire film.

We hear it spoken here and there, but Dr. Loomis, Michael's longtime

psychiatrist, seemingly refuses to utter his patient's name.

Over the 15 years that he spent with Michael, what he had

seen had opened his eyes to what was truly before him.

The monologue at the 38 minute mark may be, to this

day, the most iconic in the franchise's entire history.

He tells the sheriff that he'd met him when he was just six years old,

right after he'd been institutionalized for the murder

of his sister, and that he was told there's nothing left.

No reason, no conscience, no understanding of

the most rudimentary sense of life or death.

Good or evil, right or wrong.

He describes the child as having, the blackest eyes, the devil's eyes.

These characterizations paint Michael as nothing

but a walking, breathing vessel of pure evil.

He's not a man with a taste for blood.

He's not on some familial mission to wipe out his bloodline yet.

He's not being guided by the stars yet.

He's just... it is just an instrument of evil.

For God's sake, just before this amazing promo, Loomis and the sheriff happened

upon the still warm corpse of a neighborhood dog, to which Loomis utters,

in the credits of the film, Michael is listed as the shape, rather than Michael

Myers, because that's how Carpenter saw him and wrote him in the script.

He didn't envision, and then the mad man jumped out.

To Carpenter, Michael was merely a presence, a shadow,

who would occasionally reveal himself from the darkness.

It's also worth noting that the devil's eyes, monologue, Donald Pleasant's

delivered, was inspired by a field trip John Carpenter had gone on as a young man.

For whatever reason, his school brought his class to a mental institution,

where the students were able to observe what were,

in his words, the most serious mentally ill patients.

Am I the only one that never experienced

anything like that in my days as a young student?

Jesus Christ.

At this point, everyone knows what the Michael Myers character looks like.

Dark blue mechanics, jumpsuit, white mask, big ass knife.

I always found it fascinating for some reason when I was

little, that we get a full-on explanation for the look.

The jumpsuit simple.

Michael killed a mechanic on the side of the road and stole his outfit.

He can't be walking around in a hospital gown letting

his ass breathe like his frank Reynolds, can he?

That'd be a whole different kind of movie.

The mask?

Well, the sheriff seems to believe that some young punks

broke into the hardware store and stole a few things.

He specifically lists off a Halloween mask, some rope, yada yada.

We know it wasn't a group of kids.

We know it was Michael.

It's cool to see how the look came to be, even if it's ridiculous in later films

that he goes out of his way to recreate the look he had

here, as if he cares about his fashion or something.

I'm getting a little off track here, but I always

kind of scratched my head at the poster for Halloween.

What the hell is this evil pumpkin doing holding a knife?

I guess maybe they wanted to keep Michael's actual

appearance a mystery until you see him on screen?

I don't know.

Hey, did you ever notice the hidden face on this poster?

Look at the hand holding the knife.

Now you're never going to unsee that.

You also might wonder forever what this film might have looked like if they'd gone

with the original mask for Michael that they planned for, which was a sad clown

design mirroring the happy clown mask young Michael wore in the opening scene.

I think I'm glad they went the way they did.

One of the film's main strength is its subtlety.

It's restraint.

This is indeed a slasher film, but there's almost

no bloodshed throughout the entire runtime.

I love when the girls are unknowingly being tailed by Michael

while listening to Don't Fear the Reaper on the radio.

The story takes place on Halloween, but not every house in the neighborhood is

covered from lawn to roof and gaudy over the top decorations.

It feels real.

We've all been there, right?

It's October 29th and you look around at your

street going, man, nobody even tried this year.

This sucks.

The presence of the holiday is mainly

communicated to the audience through the children.

Both Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace are entranced

by late-night monster movies on the television.

They're obsessed with carving jack-o-lanterns on Halloween night.

I'm still a big fan of Halloween as a holiday.

It's my favorite holiday without a doubt.

I was Tommy Doyle once upon a time.

My ass parked on the couch watching either... I mean it was probably either

Friday the 13th part 3 or this very Halloween film as a matter of fact.

And I still carve pumpkins every year.

I never miss an opportunity to celebrate.

Let me know in the comments if you still celebrate Halloween.

I want to hear your stories.

I mentioned earlier that the only main characters that

you need to know are Laurie Strode and Dr. Loomis.

And I stand by that, but glossing over the

remaining cast would not be doing them justice.

And there wouldn't be any context for when I eventually talk about their deaths,

so let's get to it.

Laurie's friends Annie and Linda, played by Nancy Keyes and PJ Soles

respectively, are the quintessential Ditzy movie high school girls.

Obsessed with their boyfriends, hiding the weed they're smoking from their parents.

Annie's dad is the sheriff after all, so that would be trouble.

They're teasing each other about the boys they're gonna ask of the dance.

It's all here.

And maybe you want to make fun of that and say, oh that's bad writing.

There's no depth to the female characters.

Well, Debra Hill based these girls from their dialogue to their decision making on

herself and her friends for when she was a babysitter in high school.

So, tell it to the judge, not me.

I'm well aware that this is not the first Halloween retrospective in the world.

And with that in mind, I don't want to spend an unnecessary amount of time

covering things that all those other retrospectives already have.

Some fans are aware that the role of Dr. Loomis was initially pitched to horror

icons Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, both of which passed on the offer.

We all know Michael's legendary mask was created by cutting the sideburns off of

William Shatner, Captain Kirk mask and

coloring it with a $2 can of white spray paint.

You may even know that the Myers house still stands.

It's been moved across the street and these days serves as a chiropractor's office.

But did you ever notice John Carpenter's cigarette smoke getting caught on camera?

Have you ever realized that though this movie takes place in the fall?

It's clearly not fall, as all of the trees have very full, fresh green leaves?

The leaves that we do see blowing in the wind were

thrown into the shot by John Carpenter himself.

Look across the street.

Not a leaf in sight.

I guess it's not fall over there.

Though the movie takes place in the fictional town of Haddonfield,

Illinois, I can tell you as a Chicagoan

myself, we do not have palm trees in Illinois.

Why is Linda okay with her boyfriend joking about including the 10-year-old

Lindsey Wallace on their sex plans for the evening?

Okay, first I rip your clothes off, then you rip

my clothes off, then we rip Lindsey's clothes off.

Yeah, I think I got it.

Totally.

I get that he's joking, but that's a major red flag.

Let's get into the violence though, shall we?

Up to this point, 21-year-old Michael Myers has just one kill to his name.

As the franchise rolls on, the kill count gets higher and higher.

And here in the original, we're tallying up five total.

His older sister from the beginning, the mechanic he stole the jumpsuit from,

Annie Brackett, who gets her throat slit when Michael pops out of the backseat.

Linda's boyfriend Bob gets lifted choke slam style with one hand and stuck to the

wall with a knife to the chest, which is our first real indication that

Michael's strength far exceeds that of a normal man's.

And Linda herself, who is strangled with a telephone cord, while Michael has a sheet

over his head like a cartoon ghost, what was he doing here?

Did he think this was funny?

The idea that he might have decided to wear

this strictly to entertain himself is ghastly.

As a kid, it really wasn't any of the kills that scared me.

And I mean, none of them are really all that over the top.

Plus, by the time I had seen Halloween, I'd been playing Mortal Kombat for years,

so this was tame in comparison.

What did bother me though, is the night that

Michael escapes from Smith's Rogue Sanitarium.

I'm not talking about the part where he scales the car like a madman and bashes in

the window with his bare hand like he's Goldberg on an episode of Nitro.

I'm talking about when Loomis and Nurse Chambers pull up to the Sanitarium and

amidst the darkness and thunderstorm conditions, we see the patience of the

asylum wandering in the fields aimlessly in the pouring rain.

Fuck this.

I hate this part.

Visually, it's top tier, it's super scary, but just the

idea of pulling up and seeing that, I don't like it.

I don't like it.

What I do like though, is the story that the cemetery groundskeeper is telling Dr.

Loomis on the way to Michael's mother's grave.

You know, every time there's something like this happen.

I remember over in Russellville on Charlie Bold about 15 years ago.

He finished dinner and he he excused himself from the table.

He got himself a hacksaw and he kissed his wife

and his two children goodbye and then he proceeded.

Where are we?

Oh, I want to know the rest of this story.

I want a whole movie about that guy, man.

Who's with me on this one?

The chase at the end of the movie, in my mind, still

holds up as one of the best in the entire genre.

There have been many since, but Michael Myers was

the first horror villain I ever saw take his time.

There is no rushing.

There's no panic on his end.

He spent who knows how long posing the corpses of his victims in various locations.

He somehow rigged up Bob's big ass to come swinging

out of the closet when Laurie got too close to it.

Much like the sheet over his head from Linda's

death, this seems like it's fun for Michael.

The image of that ghostly mask emerging from

the blackest depths of the shadows is chillin.

After barely avoiding a kill shot, Laurie takes a Mick

Foley bump over the stair railing and somehow keeps going.

And this is where it's getting intense.

Laurie's screaming bloody murder for the children to let her in while she's

pounding on the door outside is as suspenseful as it gets.

Every time she looks over her shoulder, Michael is closer and closer.

When it goes from a game of cat and mouse to a life

and death struggle, Laurie actually holds her own.

She stabs her stalker in the neck with a gigantic knitting

needle, but it's not enough to keep him down for good.

When he busts through the closet door to find her, she sticks him in the eye with a

wire hanger, which once again is a short-term incapacitation.

And I hate to pause right in the middle of the action, but crashing through the

closet door, the descending of the staircase,

the out of focus, slow sit-up in the background.

These are the iconic images of this film.

Wrestling fans may compare Michael's sit-up to the undertaker or cane.

Where do you think they got it from?

You're damn right.

In the final struggle, Laurie is even able to remove Michael's mass, showing us the

mysterious killer's face for the first time.

Many fans believes his droopy left eye was caused by a physical deformity,

but that's actually not the case.

It's supposed to be the result of the hanger stabbing he took to the eye socket,

but without any blood to accompany the swelling, I don't think it plays very well.

When it's all said and done, Loomis shows up in the nick of time to pump six rounds

into Michael's chest without any hesitation, sending

the killer backwards off the second-story balcony.

But when he peers over the edge, Michael is nowhere to be found.

This seems like the ultimate cliffhanger to set up a sequel, right?

Where's the body?

Where did Michael go?

How was Michael gonna react now that he knows that even his own doctors after him?

There were so many questions that came from the end of Halloween.

Questions that were never supposed to be answered.

I mentioned earlier that the film's budget was tiny at just

over a quarter of a million dollars, but here's the thing.

Halloween made 70 million dollars at the box office.

The chances of a sequel not being produced were 0.0%

because that's just how things work in Hollywood.

The love of the art is secondary to the love of the almighty dollar.

And time and time again, it shows.

Production of Halloween 2 began in early 1981,

three years after the release of the original film.

This sounds par for the course, right?

Sequels always take time to get cooking before they're ready to roll.

John Carpenter had directed The Fog and escape from New York in the meantime,

and now it was time to turn his sights back to

the series that set the horror world on fire.

But there was one major, major problem.

Carpenter had absolutely no interest in doing a sequel to Halloween.

I'm talking to the point of agreeing to write

it, but straight up refusing to direct it.

His involvement with Halloween 2 was brought on by a lawsuit, so I'm really not

kidding when I say he was practically forced into participating.

Carpenter has gone on records stating that when the time came to sit down and pen the

script, there was, and I quote, no story here.

Would he and Debra Hill did wind up writing, though,

would change the course of the franchise forever?

The original movie is centered around an escaped mental

patient who was stalking and murdering people at random.

That's the crux of the whole thing.

We have no idea why Michael is doing what he's doing.

He's just this force of nature, as John Carpenter described him,

painting portraits of death in the town where he grew up.

Halloween 2 wipes away the mystery completely.

It totally wipes away the indiscriminate nature of what Michael is doing.

Halloween 2 gives him a motive.

There's no point in dancing around it like

it's a spoiler, so let's just put it out there.

Halloween 2 establishes that Michael Myers

is apparently Laurie Strode's older brother.

His murders were not random.

He was killing Laurie's friends because they were in the

way of him getting to Laurie, who was the real target.

There are no clues in Halloween to hint at this being

the big reveal because it was never supposed to happen.

And if you have a faint memory of their being hints in the original movie,

it's because you saw the television version that

was released just before Halloween 2 hit theaters.

The network needed Halloween 1 to fill a two-hour time slot, and even with

commercials, there wasn't enough meat on the bone.

So, during the production of Halloween 2, Carpenter and the crew shot 11 minutes

worth of additional scenes to slot into this newer,

longer, updated version of the original film.

In this rare television cut, we see Dr. Loomis berating a young Michael Myers who

stares out the window completely ignoring him, which Loomis claims is all an act.

But more importantly, we get a scene of Loomis visiting

Smith's Grove Sanitarium the day after Michael's escape.

The room has been torn apart and on the wall, written in blood, is the word sister.

Remember the subtlety of the first movie?

To say it's out the window here would be an understatement.

With John Carpenter refusing to direct the sequel, several

names were thrown around for who could take the chair.

Namely, David Lynch.

Can you imagine what the hell Halloween 2 would

have looked like with David Lynch at the helm?

Call me.

The studio settled on Rick Rosenthal, who was fresh off.

Well, he had never directed anything prior to

this, so these were some big shoes to fill.

We can delve into the general reaction to the film in a little bit.

First, I want to go through the story and where Halloween 2 takes us.

I would say we're picking up right where Halloween ended, but that's not true.

We actually replayed the ending of the original film and go from there.

Quick aside, I always found it fascinating that they

actually messed up with the recreation of Michael's demise.

Dr. Loomis shouts to a police officer,

but he actually shoots him seven times,

which is impossible considering a revolver like

the one Loomis is holding only carries six rounds.

Anyway, the cliffhanger of where Michael's body went is answered immediately.

We see through his eyes that he's prowling the neighborhood, evading police.

He slyly steals a knife from an unsuspecting old woman

and even murders the girl next door for no reason.

This sets the tone, in my mind, for what Halloween 2 was going to be.

There was no projectile blood spatter in the original.

This sequel was going for the throat, literally.

Laurie is taken to the hospital, the news of an escaped mental patient

remaining at large after committing several murders is hitting the airwaves, and Dr.

Loomis is absolutely desperate to get the police to help him in tracking

down and stopping Michael before this gets even worse.

Loomis is panicked to the point that the police have to stop him from pointing his

gun and opening fire near children, and a person he thinks might possibly be Michael.

The person runs into the street, is crushed between

a speeding cop car and a news van, and it explodes.

Spoiler, that's not Michael.

This is later revealed to be Ben Tramer.

A local 17-year-old kid who was drunkenly walking home from a party.

Whoops.

I love how the cop who hit him just says,

dude you were doing like 50 in a residential.

What the hell doesn't matter with you?

At the hospital, this EMT is hitting on Laurie.

Laurie's all doped up on pain medication and anesthesia, and

this guy Bud is only concerned with nailing one of the nurses.

Loomis and the cops head to the school in response to a break-in report,

and they find a foreshadowing drawing, as well as

the word Sawen, scrawled in blood on the chalkboard.

Loomis mispronounces it throughout the whole ordeal, but I assure you it's Sawen.

Michael finds his way to Hadenfield Memorial Hospital.

He disposes of all possible distractions one by one, in gruesome fashion,

which we'll cover in depth in just a minute.

Dr. Loomis is alerted by Nurse Chambers that the governor is ordering him to be

removed from the situation, and in the car ride back, she drops a bombshell.

This is where it's revealed that Michael is

Laurie's older brother, like we covered before.

Connecting the dots, Loomis orders the officer behind the wheel to head to the

hospital at once, knowing for certain that

Michael will be there to complete his mission.

Obviously, this goes poorly.

Michael enters the hospital like he's the fucking Kool-Aid man, survives several

more shots directly to the upper body, and slits the throat of the poor police

officer who was foolish enough to check on him.

In the finale, we see Loomis and Laurie cowering in a

room that Michael once again enters like the Kool-Aid man.

Before sticking Loomis in the chest with a scalpel, Laurie addresses her brother by

name, possibly as an attempt to call him off, but it doesn't work.

So she BLAST his eyes out!

What a shot young Laurie strode is, huh?

Good lord.

This still isn't enough to put Michael down, as he attempts to cut the entire

room in half of he has to, as long as he captures his prey.

A struggling Loomis empties a can of oxygen into the room to distract Michael,

which Laurie mimics before taking Loomis's orders to leave the hospital.

In his final act, Loomis bids Michael farewell and flicks his lighter,

igniting the myriad gases filling the room, blowing it to pieces.

It's finally over.

No, it's not!

Michael exits the room, his entire body, a raging

inferno, before finally succumbing to the flames.

In the back of an ambulance, Laurie stares off into the distance like a

trauma-stricken war veteran, as we cut to black.

Jesus Christ, there's a lot to go over here.

From the strongly increased presence of brutal violence to how the change and

director affected the movie overall, there's a ton to cover.

I just had to take a second to let all this sink in.

The mask in Halloween 2 looks slightly different from that of the original movie,

but it's not.

This is the OG Shatner mask.

The reason it looks different is because it

got banged around on the set of the first film.

Nick Castle, who played Michael in 1978, would

stuff it in his back pocket between shoots.

In the three years between Halloween and Halloween 2, the mask reportedly sat under

the bed of co-writer Debra Hill, where it yellowed badly.

It was re-spray-painted to try and capture a

fresher look, but the shape still looks off.

The shape of the mask, I mean, not Michael's nickname.

That's because Nick Castle is no longer the man under the hood.

He's been replaced by Dick Warlock, who has a differently shaped head.

What are you gonna do about that?

This might seem like super nerdy inside baseball talk, but man, when I was a kid,

nothing was cooler than Michael's mask.

I'll be doing a side video down the line where I rank all of the different designs

throughout the franchise, so be on the lookout for that.

Let's talk about the violence and the update to Michael's kill count.

That's always fun, right?

I mentioned the no-reason stabbing with the blood shooting

out set the tone for the sequel's feel, and it's true.

This very first kill is gnarlier than anything from the original.

Ben Tramer wasn't killed by Michael, but his death was certainly spectacular.

Watching this poor kid's corpse burn is just... wow, man.

The big boy hospital security man takes a claw hammer to the top of his head,

which is outrageous.

Bud gets strangled, his girlfriend nurse is drowned in scalding hot water.

God damn!

The head surgeon is off with a needle to the eyeball, and the nurse who came in to

find him is killed with a syringe full of air injected straight into her brain.

My God.

Michael puts away the head nurse by administering an IV and siphoning every

drop of blood in her body out onto the floor, which

Jimmy slips in, concussing himself to hell and back.

Nurse Franco is lifted in the air off a scalpel to the spinal cord, and we've

already seen the poor cop who gets his throat slit to cap it off.

I think most horror movie fans, myself included,

love some good old violence, but not everyone does.

And the change in direction the sequel saw was problematic for several people

involved with the project, namely Dr. Lewis himself, Donald Pleasance.

Pleasance went on record several times, stating that he much preferred the subtle,

suspenseful approach of the first film, and that Halloween

II's level of gore was too violent for his taste.

At this point, you might be wondering why the gore

level was pumped up to such an extreme degree.

Well, I'm glad you asked.

You see, we covered that John Carpenter stepped out of the director's chair,

and Rick Rosenthal took the reins.

That didn't go so well.

After viewing Rosenthal's first cut, Carpenter

hated it, and had the entire film recut.

Rosenthal's second cut also sucked, according to Carpenter, who stepped in to

film new scenes and make the movie more entertaining.

What did Carpenter add, exactly?

Basically, all of the horrific violence we just went over.

Kinda makes you wonder what those first two

passes at Halloween II really looked like, right?

This is where we dig into the nitty gritty of

what a mess Halloween II was behind the scenes.

John Carpenter wanted nothing to do with it.

Deborah Hill thought the story between Lori

Strode and Dr. Loomis had already run its course.

Yikes.

Rick Rosenthal apparently had no idea how to direct this thing.

It was a nightmare.

John Carpenter has made it abundantly clear.

He hates Halloween II.

He's called it not only a terrible film, but an abomination.

But what do I think?

I mean, no disrespect to the man himself, but fuck John Carpenter.

I love Halloween II.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, obviously.

I'm not trying to say John Carpenter is wrong for thinking the way he does.

I'm not saying Donald Pleasance was wrong for being against the gore factor.

But me, as my own man, I love this one on the same level I love the original.

The fact that they take place in the same night,

in the same window of just a few hours, is so cool.

Watching them both as a double feature on Halloween Day is untouchable.

I love the new sound to the music.

It doesn't get any more 80s horror than this.

Donald Pleasance's delivery on his monologue still pops me big time.

You don't know what death is?

No man could take six months.

I've told you this isn't a man.

That wasn't Michael Myers burning up in that car, and

a lot of other kids are going to be slotted tonight.

I am talking about the real possibility that he is still out there.

The sound of Lori's fingernails scraping across

the pavement when she's trying to scream for help.

My god.

Jimmy's slipping in the blood is an incredible visual.

How about evil genius Michael Myers, by the way, letting the air out of every

tire in the parking lot, draining blood, causing

embolisms by injecting air into the bloodstream.

He's on another level here.

Oh, and I can't forget the little kid who goes into

the emergency room with the razor blade in his mouth.

How many of you grew up hearing those stories?

That there were nut jobs out there slipping razor

blades into the candy they gave out on Halloween.

I wonder how many people saw this movie and thought.

I knew those stories were true, even though this is fiction.

Quick aside on the razor blade in the apple scene, when I was little,

there was no Blu-ray, there was no 4K streaming.

I owned Halloween 2 on VHS, and if you didn't know, if you've

never seen one of those tapes, they were fuzzy as hell.

I had no idea that what I was looking at was a razor blade stuck in this kid's mouth.

I thought it was a big piece of glass, so I spent years going, how the fuck did

this little idiot get that big chunk of glass in his mouth?

Come to find out, it was a razor blade, like the stories that used to hear as a kid.

Who knew?

It's not only John Carpenter and Donald Pleasance that had issues with the film,

though.

There are apparently Halloween fans out there that

take offense to the direction that this sequel takes.

Some see the decision to give Michael a motive, rather than just killing for the

sake of killing, to be an absolute betrayal of the original film.

Jamie Lee Curtis has questioned why Lori is constantly cowering or laid out on a

hospital bed, which, to me, doesn't make any sense.

Her ankle is broken, she's had a hell of a night,

her arm got stabbed, she's doped up on medications.

What do you want her to do?

Pop up in box 12 rounds with Michael?

Learn how to fight in seconds and kick everyone's ass like she's race guy walker?

Come on.

Once again, you can have your opinion, that's all right.

But if you're on that side, I'm not with you.

I will continue to love Halloween 2 just as much as the original.

Thank you very much.

When it came to the box office, Halloween 2 was successful.

With a budget of $2.5 million, it drew over $25 million in theaters.

That pales in comparison to the original 70 mil, which I'm sure was disappointing,

but it was a success nonetheless.

Critics, on the other hand, weren't impressed.

They hated the violence.

They felt the characters were paper thin.

Roger Ebert called it up, fall from grace that

doesn't even attempt to do justice to the original.

Instead, it tries to outdo all of the violent

Halloween ripoffs of the last several years.

Other critics praised the film, but I've already gushed over this one,

so we don't have to go down that lane again.

Where do you stand on Halloween 2?

I'd love to know.

Also, it's worth noting that there is indeed an

extremely rare television cut of Halloween 2.

It wasn't made widely available until 2012, and was later re-released in the now

out-of-print complete Blu-ray collection, which I happen to own.

I also just recently found out that it goes for an astronomical amount these days.

Holy shit.

The impact that Halloween and, yes, Halloween 2

made on the horror genre is impossible to verbalize.

Some of your favorite horror films from the past 40 years have borrowed from,

straight stolen from, and honorably paid tribute to

this franchise in more ways than any of us can count.

I was introduced to Halloween at an extremely early age, and I was hooked instantly.

I'd have to imagine I was 10 years old.

I have distinct memories of my friend Tim's mom

allowing us to watch Halloween and Terminator.

As long as she was in the room, because she'd

stand in front of the TV whenever there was nudity.

Grizzly murders?

A-okay.

Titties?

Not a chance in hell.

By the time I was 12 years old, I was dressing as the shape for Halloween.

On Halloween night in 2002, I even laid in the front lawn with my hands tucked into

my jumpsuit so that I'd appear as a decoration, only to scare the approaching

trick-or-treaters with the classic sit-up move.

Maybe it's weird for a little kid to be super into a horror franchise.

Maybe it's not.

I don't know.

I think I'd turn out all right, and I don't regret a damn thing.

Thank you so much for joining me for this, the history of Halloween part one,

the night he came home.

This series is just getting started, and next month

I'm going to be back with a brand new installment.

The history of Halloween part two, the failed anthology, premieres July 30th, 2021.

Halloween 3 is a really, really crazy story about a studio taking a sharp right

turn with a franchise and then going, oh my god, what did we do?

If you liked this video, consider heading over to patreon.com slash six one six

entertainment and signing up at any level you choose.

Every little bit makes a massive difference in what I do.

Until next time, I love you.

And I will see you soon.

The year is 1982.

John Carpenter, Deborah Hill, and the team at Universal Pictures have turned the

horror genre upside down with their 1978 smash hit, Halloween.

The 1981 sequel, Halloween 2, continued the forward progress of the original,

dominating the box office, and spawning dozens of fictional copycat killers.

Michael Myers, Dr. Loomis, and Laurie Strode had

become key figures in anyone's slasher lexicon.

And with two box office success stories under their belt, the studio was obviously

going to exercise their right to produce the third film in the series.

There was only one problem.

Well, actually, that's a lie.

There were a multitude of problems, so we'll take them one at a time.

First off, two of the three main characters I just listed, including our

villain, our dead, having been blown to pieces

or burned alive at the end of the last film.

Secondly, Carpenter and Hill didn't want anything to do with Halloween 2,

and only participated at the risk of a lawsuit.

So, what the hell was the plan to get them involved with yet another sequel?

The duo were absolutely done with Haddonfield's resident serial killer,

and they'd made their stance abundantly clear.

There was nothing in this world that could possibly change their minds.

This, then, begs the question.

How does Universal Pictures convince John Carpenter

and Deborah Hill to participate in Halloween 3?

Well, that's pretty simple, silly.

You just... don't include Michael Myers.

You know, the face of the franchise?

The most famous of all slashers?

Yeah, him.

Cut him out.

He's done.

Hello, Dan Dans, it's time to jump into the single most

divisive entry to ever grace the Halloween franchise.

You know, it's a ballsy idea to take the most marketable, most recognizable face

your entire series has going for it, and leave them behind completely.

But that's exactly what Universal Pictures intended to do.

Michael Myers, to them, was the thing in the past.

That's a hell of a concept today in 2021, where

we've known the character for over 40 years.

He starred in nearly a dozen movies at this point.

But at the time, this was the direction they chose.

Before I get too far into the weeds, let me get myself off camera by saying

thank you for tuning in to the history of Halloween part 2, the failed anthology.

Now let's get to it.

No matter how many times you say it, it feels like it doesn't make any sense, right?

Just imagine pulling the lead character out of any other film series.

Hey, are you guys gonna go see Superman 3?

Yeah, Superman's not in this one, though.

The full title is actually Superman 3, Metropolis Uprising.

It's about the citizens of the big city rushing the streets and reclaiming their

lives from under the foot of the corporate fat cats.

Not interested?

Oh, okay, let's, uh, let's go see Rambo 3 instead.

You know the one, right?

Rambo 3, Pencils and Erasers?

John Rambo is off taking care of business somewhere, doing whatever he's doing.

And we're following his school teacher's sister who's trying to make a difference

in the lives of as many young children as possible.

Hey, where's everybody going?

This is the stance many fans took back in 1982, and

sadly, it's the stance many still carry to this day.

Erwin Yablans, producer of Halloween and Halloween 2, has stated loudly and proudly

that he thinks removing Michael Myers from the franchise was downright stupid,

and that he was not consulted on the decision at all.

I take no responsibility for Halloween 3.

Yablans said in a 2014 interview, we know that

Michael Myers is the backbone of this whole franchise.

Why have they decided to leave that?

I do not know.

There is an answer to that question, but it's up to you

to decide whether it was admirable or truly ill-advised.

John Carpenter hated Halloween 2.

He was done with it.

The only way Halloween 3 was going to happen was if the series shifted in a

brand new flames, motionless, succumbing to a fire

that easily could have left him as a pile of ashes.

I get that he survived gunshots and nasty falls, but if the man has no skin and his

muscles and tendons have burnt away, that's it.

It's curtains.

Dr. Loomis blew the hell up.

Lori is probably in a sanitarium somewhere.

It's over.

It couldn't be more over, right?

So why not move on?

Why not take this recognizable name of Halloween and tell a new story?

Hell, tell 5 new stories, 10 new stories, tell a new story literally every year.

A guy with a knife isn't the only scary thing in the world, right?

So why pigeonhole the franchise around one guy?

Yeah, yeah, that's it.

It'll work.

It has to work.

When you actually take a second to think about it, it's not a bad concept.

A new scary story dropping every year, always around the titular October holiday,

it's a hell of an idea.

The series wasn't called Michael Myers, right?

No.

It was called Halloween.

And as I stated in part one, Halloween can mean

any number of things to any number of people.

Michael Myers may have been the first story told here, but who's to say we can't

find another iconic character across these spooky tales?

I imagine some of these early creative meetings opening with, so if it's not

about Michael, what the hell's it gonna be about?

Much like the original film in the franchise, it was Debra Hill who put the

skeletal structure of Halloween 3 together with one simple sentence.

Witchcraft in the computer age.

That's it.

That was the first seed planted in the soil.

In the director's chair this time around was originally a man by the name of Joe

Dante, who by 1982 had already gained experience directing

horror with such films as Piranha and The Howling.

Dante was chosen specifically by John Carpenter, but he left the job behind,

opening up the opportunity for somebody else.

Dante's career would then totally flatline.

He definitely didn't go on to direct gremlins, the burbs, gremlins,

two small soldiers, and other successful projects.

He just completely disappeared.

Yep, let's go with that.

Tommy Lee Wallace, the production designer and editor from the original Halloween,

would eventually step in as director for Halloween 3.

What's funny is that Wallace was actually offered the role of director on Halloween

2, once again a spot handpicked by John Carpenter, but he passed, having been a

little less than impressed with the script for Halloween's first sequel.

Much like Carpenter and Hill in this regard, Wallace was intrigued by Halloween

3, specifically because Michael Myers wasn't in it.

This would be Tommy Lee Wallace's directorial debut after all, and stepping

into the shoes of another filmmakers franchise, carrying

on something that was their work, didn't get him excited.

But a blank slate, a fresh canvas with which he could paint his own portrait,

was much more enticing.

It's funny that the question of how can you take Michael out of the movie is so

often asked when the answer is actually super admirable from an artistic standpoint.

It wasn't about the money for once, it was about

creating something you could truly be proud of.

Sure, we've got a cash cow on our hands, but what about our integrity as filmmakers?

I'm sorry, but that's awesome, and I respect the hell out of it.

Another janky piece of Halloween 3's background

comes into the writing credits on this film.

You see, Tommy Lee Wallace is listed as not only the director of this film,

but the writer as well.

And no one will tell you that's a bigger load of shit than Wallace himself.

Here's the deal.

A man by the name of Nigel Neil was contracted to write the script.

Nigel Neil was famous for his science fiction work, most notably on the Quater

Mask series, which drew millions upon millions of

viewers to their television sets in the mid 50s.

Neil put together a script that both John Carpenter and Tommy Lee Wallace liked,

but thought needed a little bit of work in order to get it ready for the screen.

With this in mind, Carpenter penned a rewrite.

Wallace then took Carpenter's script and rewrote that.

By the time this thing was deemed ready for production, Neil was so pissed off

that his original script had been changed and was so dismayed by what Carpenter and

Wallace had done to it that he demanded his

name be completely removed from the credits.

Carpenter was never attached as a writer to begin with, so that wasn't an option.

And now, Tommy Lee Wallace is listed as the sole writer.

Does it feel like maybe things aren't running as smoothly as possible here,

or is it just me?

Either way, with the script finalized and a director in the chair, it was time to

fill the shoes of our brand new characters.

Much like the franchise's original entry, there are

only three main roles I'm going to shed light on.

Yes, we have a full cast with some good performances, but do you want to watch a

fun retrospective or read a complete list of credits verbatim?

Exactly.

Our star, our leading man, is none other than Tom Atkins, who had previously worked

with our dude John Carpenter on the fog and escaped from New York.

Atkins plays Dr. Don Chalice, a hero who, well,

calling him a hero kind of lowers the bar a little bit.

He's never there for his kids.

He skips out on his job constantly.

He's a medical doctor, mind you.

He's not calling off his shift at the video store.

People need him.

And he's definitely got a drinking problem.

But he's our star, dammit, and we love him.

His tag team partner of sorts, played by Stacey Nelkin, is Miss Ellie Grimbridge.

Our main heel, though, played by actor Dan

O'Hurlihy, is a man by the name of Connell Cochran.

He's a business tycoon, a wildly successful one at

that, and he's the master of the practical joke.

I know that's a lot of information all at once, but

this is all super important stuff for a retrospective.

And I know there might be comments coming through

like, oh, you forgot about the novelization.

You forgot about this.

I assure you, I didn't forget anything.

I can't uncover every stone.

If I did that, we'd be here for three and a half hours, and that's just ridiculous.

I got to pick and choose my stories here.

You know what I mean?

And speaking of stories, look at that.

I think this movie has a hell of a story to tell, so why don't we check it out.

Dan Nes, this is Halloween 3, season of The Witch.

It's about a week out from Halloween.

We open with a dude running for his life.

He's hiding behind any little piece of cover he can find in

a junkyard before he's snatched up by some goon in a suit.

Not looking to die in the parking lot of dirty old dump, our dude pulls some slick

tricks and winds up crushing his attacker between two cars before making his escape.

Who the hell are these suited sons of bitches?

The running man seeks refuge in a nearby auto garage

where Walter, this fine gentleman here, is chilling out.

Feet kicked up, watching some shows and flipping through a magazine.

The ad on the TV is from Silver Shamrock Novelties,

and the products they're selling are the Halloween 3.

Yes, this trio of masks are being marketed as the Halloween 3.

There's your cheeky reasoning for why this is titled what it's titled, and no,

I'm not kidding.

This was director Tommy Lee Wallace's idea, and I actually think it's pretty clever.

Anyway, Scary Crazy Escapie man busts in like a bat out of hell, clutching one of

the Halloween 3, spouting off some crazy shit like they're coming.

Walter drives his maniac to the hospital, and it's a good thing he did, because

those suited guys were already on their way.

Switch over to Dr. Dan Chalice, our star, who

is visiting his ex-wife and their two kids.

He brought them each shitty little dollar store Halloween masks, and they're like,

fuck you, dad.

I'm already bought us these Silver Shamrock masks.

These are the new hotness.

Don't you know anything?

And there's that commercial again.

This campaign is really sweeping the nation, isn't it?

Hey, wait a minute.

Dr. Chalice's ex-wife, isn't that Annie Brackett from Halloween and Halloween 2?

Yeah, it is.

Her real name is Nancy Keys, and yes, that is her.

Man, they're doubling down on the, hey, this isn't

the old story thing right in the beginning, huh?

Dr. Chalice is called away to the hospital,

obviously, as the crazy man has just been rushed in.

Walter's still here, explaining how important

it is to help someone when they're in need.

I told you Walter was this shit.

And there's that goddamn commercial again!

This time it wakes up our hospitalized madman, and he starts talking about,

they're going to kill us.

All of us.

It's at this point that Walter gets the fuck out of the hospital.

Not only is he the man, but he's smart.

All seems well until one of those suited guys walks into the

hospital and rips the mystery man's brain and skull in half.

Holy shit.

I have never seen that one before.

What happens next?

The suit man makes a quiet escape?

Nope!

He calmly exits the hospital, hops in his four

door sedan, and blows himself the fuck up.

Dr. Chalice tried to chase him down to get some answers,

but holy jesus, what are you doing this scenario?

You do what he did.

Stare at it like, holy shit.

The only thing anyone even knew about this mystery man was

that the mask he was holding seemed very important to him.

The next day, the man's daughter shows up to positively identify the body.

Is she a babe?

Yeah, she's a babe, so what?

You might be asking yourself, why are you bringing attention to her looks?

I'll tell you why, because Dan Chalice is a doctor, dammit, and he has diagnosed

Ellie Grimbridge with a bad, bad case of baby ptosis.

I'm sorry, that was horrible.

The next day, Dr. Chalice is, where else?

At the bar, sipping on gimmicks and smoking cigarettes.

You get him, Doc.

Hey, I've seen that movie before.

And who might be sponsoring this showing of the 1978 horror classic?

Well, Silver Shamrock, of course.

Ellie Grimbridge shows up telling Dr. Chalice

that the nurses said she could find him here.

Yeah, that's a good sign.

And the two get to talking.

They wind up heading to Ellie's dad's shop, where Ellie checks her father's records.

The last item he checked off on the list was to head to the Silver Shamrock factory

to pick up more masks for his store.

Ellie's got a hell of a plan to try and learn more about her father's tragic death.

And it would be nice if Dr. Chalice could help, but he's a doctor.

He has patience to care for.

And he's got kids at home.

He can't be running around, just kidding.

He cancels his time with his kids, lies who his ex-wife about having to

attend a doctor's meeting, and grabs a six-pack of Steve Wiser's before hitting

the road with this hot young distressed woman who just waltzed into his life.

What a guy.

Jesus Christ, this commercial is everywhere.

They're insisting that kids wear their masks

in front of the TV during some big giveaway.

Interesting.

The town where the factory is located is creepy as hell.

The type of place where everybody knows everybody

else's business, and someone is always watching.

Maybe more than just someone.

In a place like this, two single adult out of

towners are going to stick out like a sore thumb.

So Dr. Chalice poses our tag team as a married couple in order to help them blend in.

And there we have it.

Ellie's dad did indeed stay at this motel.

Business is picking up.

Goodness gracious is it picking up, as the region's number one mask salesman,

Buddy Kupfer, just rolled into town with his family in tow.

This pleasant woman shows up too.

Damn, factory.

Got their orders all screwed up.

Now have to stay in this dump again.

What a hot spot.

Time to do some detective work, right?

We'll go directly to the factory.

Whoa, hold on, slow down.

It's getting late.

I could use a drink.

Or not.

Jesus, Dr. Chalice, you need to go to rehab.

Maybe I had to get another room.

That would look sort of suspicious, wouldn't it?

I could sleep in the car.

Would you want to sleep, Dr. Chalice?

That's a dumb question, Miss Grimbridge.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, they're banging already?

I thought we were investigating her dad's shady death.

Well, while our stars are bumping deals in this shitty

motel room, the town locks down into curfew at 6 p.m.

Even the cat has to come in.

No!

This place is beyond creepy.

The ever-watchful eye sees everything, including Dr. Chalice

exiting a liquor store or the full bottle of dad soda.

This fucking guy, man.

He encounters a homeless man who drops one of the greatest lines I've ever heard.

I saw that bottle.

It sounded pretty heavy.

Before he gets all weird about the town, the cameras, and the factory.

He says they're evil and he's going to burn the place to the ground.

He says that Connell Cochran, silver shamrock's owner, is always listening.

He's always watching.

They part ways and less than a minute later, hey, it's the suit guys.

Holy fuck!

They ripped his goddamn head off!

I told you this town was trouble.

Marge Gutman from earlier chats up Ellie for a minute, just being neighborly.

But she happens to mention that one of the

masks from her previous order was defective.

The logo plate fell off.

Hey, that thing looks odd, doesn't it?

Marge fiddles with the trademark plate, which appears to have a computer chip in it.

Why would Halloween masks need a computer chip?

There's no time to wonder about that, because just

then it blasts her in the mouth with a laser beam.

Ellie and Dr. Chalice don't come to help because they are having sex again.

What's that?

Who cares?

Poor Marge Gutman chokes to death on her own blood and pieces of her teeth,

as carnivorous insects begin to pour out of her gaping wound.

This is messed up, for sure.

But I also want to tell you really quickly that only after having sex with her

multiple times, does Dr. Chalice eventually ask Ellie how old she is?

Goodness me, Dan Dan's.

Our stars only come out to check on the commotion when

there's a whole team of guys wheeling Marge out of her room.

The motel owner says that Connell Cochran will be overseeing her care.

Did I mention that they're saying she's gonna be all right?

What the hell is a business man gonna do for an injured woman?

And they're taking her not to the hospital, but the factory.

When Cochran asks what happened, one of the guys responds, misfire.

This is officially bonkers.

Dr. Chalice learns from Teddy back in the hospital that in all of her searches,

she hasn't come across a damn thing pointing to who the

man was who blew himself up after killing Ellie's dad.

It's like there was no one in that car at all.

After coming up empty-handed at the factory, Chalice and Ellie are about to

leave when, what do you know, good old buddy cup for his here?

And he's about to get a full tour of the factory from Connell Cochran himself,

as a thank you for being his greatest salesman.

Ever the charmer, Buddy invites Chalice and Ellie to participate.

Connell Cochran is a weird, weird man.

He's incredibly charismatic.

He seems nice enough, but every little thing he says

in this town literally gets him a standing ovation.

I don't like it.

It sends a shiver up my ass.

Let me just say, this tour of the mask factory is so, so cool.

This was like a dream of mine as a child.

I thought masks of all kinds were super interesting,

and to see how they were made, come on dude.

Cochran refuses little Buddy a mask off the assembly line, because it hasn't gone

through final processing, which even catches the attention of Buddy's senior.

What final process?

Don't ask me.

He questions Cochran several times, but ultimately gets nowhere.

Have you noticed that the guys in suits are here at

the factory, and that they're acting very strangely?

Ellie spots her departed father's car hidden away in the factory garage,

and the suited men spring to life, blocking her path before she can get close.

This is where our tag team has seen enough, and it's time to get the hell out of here.

They've got to get a hold of the police from somewhere else.

This whole town is compromised, but it's too late.

Ellie is missing, and the men in the suits are hot on Dr. Chalice's trail.

This is the exact situation Ellie's dad found himself in, running for his life,

trying to avoid these henchmen.

Chalice hides in the damn factory, which I guess isn't a bad idea.

I mean, who would think to look for him there?

Isn't that where he's trying to get away from?

He tries to ask this old woman for help, and her head falls off!

Wait a minute.

What?

Uh-oh!

He got got.

The fight is on now, and this suited some bitch is no

selling punches, like Sting taking Jeff Jarrett's guitar.

It's looking bad for our main dude, until he hits a beautiful sweep right into

half-guard, and goes to work on Suit Man's body.

What the hell is that?

Alright, hold on.

The old lady's head fell off, Suit Man is filled with wires.

Are you telling me that every single one of Cochran's

cronies are robots he built that carry out his bidding?

And that's why this town is so goddamn strange?

Good lord.

Cochran waltzes in, barely bothered at all about any of this.

He's more concerned with the broken head of the old lady

robot, which he reveals was a rare piece built in 1785.

Oh, and he knows who Ellie and Dr. Charles really are.

He never bought the couple from out of town cover for a second.

Cochran even goes into detail on the creation of the robots, as if he couldn't

wait to brag about his work to someone who would react to it in a human manner.

He mentions that the robotic inner workings were surprisingly much easier to

create than the outer flesh, but in the end, creating a

realistic looking human is just another form of mask making.

Come on dude, that is fucking awesome!

Connel Cochran is a superb heel.

And this is where the diabolical plan is finally revealed.

The Silver Shamrock commercial that's inviting children to

wear their masks while they tune in for the big giveaway.

It's all a trap.

The computer chips hidden in the logo plate contain microscopic shavings of

Stonehenge, which, when in the presence of the specific audio frequency, the giveaway

commercial broadcasts, will trigger an ancient evil energy across the entire world.

If everything goes according to plan, millions of children will be viciously

murdered as an offering to the ancient gods.

The ancient gods who, in Cochran's mind, are the true owners of Halloween.

Children running around in silly costumes, begging for candy from strangers,

having fun and laughing, this isn't what Halloween is about.

It's an embarrassment, an abomination.

And with this plan, Cochran intends to take it back.

We see a live feed of the Kupfer family who believe they have been invited to take

part in a focus group for a new ad campaign.

But no.

This is a trial run before the big event.

Little Buddy Donce's mask sits in front of the television and oh my god.

The child's head begins to rot.

Insects and venomous snakes pour from the cavities forming in his brain.

This is absolutely grotesque.

And honestly, one of the coolest fucking things I've ever seen.

Buddy and his wife are done in by the snake's

venom and it's good night cup for family.

Cochran intends to inflict this suffering on millions

upon millions of innocent people around the world.

Making him, without a doubt, the greatest, most diabolical

mastermind the Halloween franchise ever has or ever will see.

Children from Seattle, San Francisco, Omaha, all over the place.

They're wearing their masks and celebrating what

may be their final round of trick or treating.

As the sun sets, we see Dr. Chalice's own children wearing

their silver shamrock masks, awaiting the big giveaway.

Don't you dare try and tell me Halloween 3 isn't fucking awesome, man.

I won't have it.

It's worth mentioning right here that Teddy gets killed with a power drill to

the brain just after putting the pieces together that

there was indeed no living human inside that car.

Too bad she'll never have the chance to share her discovery.

Dr. Chalice is fucked.

Cochran's got him all gamicked up, tied to a chair, and he puts a mask over

his head, hoping for him to suffer the same fate as the children.

The giveaway is at 9 and the clock is ticking, so Dr. Chalice gets to work.

He drop kicks to television and uses a shard

of glass to free himself from his restraints.

We're given peaks at what time it is, building the suspense, and Halloween and

Halloween 2 we had the chase, where Laurie was trying to get away from Michael Myers.

In Halloween 3, we've got the opposite.

Dr. Chalice finds his way to a telephone to warn his ex-wife about their kids'

masks, and he rescues Ellie off the gurney she was strapped to, but after that,

he's on a mission to get too Cochran, and he does.

He tampers with the controls, turns up the frequency, and dumps thousands of gimmick

logo plates from the rafters, wiping out Cochran's entire fleet of robotic henchmen.

The frequency of the commercial triggers the massive piece of stone hedge to come

to life, activating a sacrificial circle around Cochran,

who catches eyes with Ellie and Dr. Chalice overhead.

And this is the best part.

Rio recognizes Rio, and Cochran knows he's been beaten.

Call it a trick, call it a treat, the master of the practical joke has been

one-upped, and he offers applause to our heroes

before he's vaporized by the stone's energy.

Honestly, I don't know what the fuck is actually happening here.

This is like some HP Lovecraft shit, where you

can't even begin to explain what you're looking at.

The factory burns to the ground, and that's the end, right?

Wrong!

Ellie's a goddamn robot now.

She was turned while she was incapacitated at the

factory, and Dr. Chalice has to do away with her.

Sadly, with the clock nearing nine, he sprints through

the night and winds up once again at Walter's Auto Garage.

Chalice calls every television station you can think of, begging and pleading for

them to pull the advertisement, and one-by-one, they do.

Except for the last station.

The frequency builds, the imagery flashes, and Dr. Chalice screams into the telephone

for them to shut it all down for the sake of

lives of millions, as the screen cuts to black.

And that's the story of Halloween 3 season of The Witch.

Did that last network pull the ad?

We don't know.

Did hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions

of children and their families die that night?

We don't know.

Even in death, did Connell Cocker and Succeed in pulling off his vile evil scheme.

We don't know.

And that is fucking awesome.

You know who didn't think that ending was very awesome?

Universal Pictures.

They worried that the ambiguous nature of the climax might leave audiences

distressed and actually push for a more concrete, happier finish to the film.

John Carpenter heard their complaints and brought them to the attention of director

Tommy Lee Wallace, who stood firm in that the ambiguity was the way to go.

Ever the badass and respectful artist, Carpenter went back to Universal and said,

nah, we're gonna leave it the way it is.

It was very important to Wallace for this film to

stand apart from the prior two entries in the series.

Wallace is jokingly referred to the original and its sequel as knife movies,

whereas Halloween 3 is rooted much more in the science fiction and a cult realm,

borrowing greatly from invasion of the body snatchers.

The warning being issued by the main character

at the close, straight out of invasion.

A trusted co-star being compromised and turned to the

other side in a big reveal spot, straight out of invasion.

The comparisons are numerous, but never approach copycat territory.

It's interesting to note that Nigel Neal, the original writer of Halloween 3,

didn't have any of these crazy situations present in his script.

The story was in no way related to Stonehenge.

We didn't see any child's heads rotting, Cochrane's goons

weren't secretly robotic henchmen, so on and so forth.

Kinda makes you wonder what the hell Neal's film might have looked like, right?

I obviously haven't been playing the music from the film, because this is YouTube

after all, and that's copyright city, but I do have a funny story that I want to

tell you guys about the Happy Happy Halloween

song, The Silver Shamrock Jingle, as it were.

You see, I used to manage a used electronics slash record store,

and we would control all of the music that would play over the speakers.

Now, the Halloween 3 soundtrack is on Spotify.

Anybody can listen to it.

You can listen to it.

What I would do is I would queue up that Silver

Shamrock song nine or ten times per shift.

It would play.

People would laugh.

They'd be like, oh, yeah, I know this song.

A couple songs would go by, and it would come on again.

And then you'd get the look of, really?

A couple songs go by, it plays, it plays again in a row.

That's four times now.

And at this point, people are just like, will you fucking stop doing this?

When that happens, two to three more times you go insane,

and the entire cycle starts over, and it's all funny again.

And I feel like you had to be there for it, but if you heard this song ten times

inside of 45 minutes, let me tell you something.

You'd be losing your mind, too.

Okay, let's get back to business.

I just had to tell you that story.

Did you know that the man's voice on the commercial

is actually that of director Tommy Lee Wallace?

Did you notice that Halloween 3 carries on the

legacy of the opening credits featuring a pumpkin?

This time, rather than a physically carved jack-o-lantern, the image comes together

digitally on a television screen, which is a fantastic ode, as well as a

beautiful piece of foreshadowing as for how the story connects to technology.

I was always a little curious about these kids' costumes.

When I was little, everyone had a specific look they set out to achieve.

Maybe you were ghost face from scream, my brother and I went as the blues

brothers one year, even though everyone

thought we were trying to be the men in black.

Maybe you went out as... I don't know what the hell you did.

But what are these costumes?

Oh, I'm a skateboarding ballerina pumpkin head.

Okay.

Oh, I'm a witch with a pumpkin head.

Actually, you know what?

That one looks awesome.

I can't hate on that.

You know what?

Fuck it.

I'm not going to hate on any of them.

Except for this one.

I like how Dr. Loomis and Halloween 2 invented

his own pronunciation of the name Sowen.

Samhain.

But here in Halloween 3, Cochran absolutely nails it.

I can talk about interesting little tidbits surrounding the film all I want.

I'm only delaying the inevitable.

We need to talk about how Halloween 3 was received, not only by critics,

but fans as well.

I won't dance around it.

Halloween 3 was brutalized by most review outlets.

They lambasted the decision to move on from Michael Myers.

Many found the story to be overly zany.

Some considered the ambiguous ending to be too dark to enjoy.

The film's commentary around consumerism, evil corporate overlords, and the complete

replacement of an honest worker were sometimes lauded.

But otherwise cast aside is nonsense.

This was 1982.

These reviews were written in an era where everybody and their brother were incensed

by the fact that we now had a Halloween movie without Michael Myers.

Don't let anyone tell you this film bombed entirely though, because it didn't.

On a budget of just over $2 million, season

of The Witch would roast nearly $15 million.

Is that anywhere near the first two entries drawing power?

No, definitely not.

But Universal didn't lose their ass here.

They just didn't pull what they wanted to pull.

Tommy Lee Wallace himself has stated that the ultimate failure,

which he admits he had a hand in, was on the marketing.

He's made it clear that he doesn't believe audiences were ready for, or even made

fully aware, of how massive a deviation this film would be from its predecessors,

and that had the message been stated more clearly, things may have gone differently.

Hell, Wallace has made a case that dropping Halloween 3 from the title

altogether might have allowed the film to find

its footing much faster than it actually did.

And that's the thing.

Halloween 3, in the end, found itself.

Or should I say, the audience found Halloween 3, in the years and decades to come.

What was once looked at as the bastard child of the franchise, the weak spot,

the Achilles heel that's not even worth watching at all, is now celebrated.

And I'm here to tell you, as someone who wore those

not worth watching shoes for a long time, I was wrong.

I discovered Halloween when I was a child, as I stated back in part one of the series.

To me, Michael Myers was the story.

He was the best part.

He was what I was watching the movies for.

So I can empathize with viewers back in 1982 who

didn't want to go to the theater to see this movie.

Because even 20 years after this movie came out, when I was 12 years old,

I still hadn't seen this one.

I was in my early 20s when I thought, you know what, I've been avoiding this

movie for my entire life based on what it isn't.

Shouldn't I at least give it a chance to find out what it is?

And I am damn glad that I did.

The critical reception and much lower box office numbers were all universal pictures

needed to see, and the new anthology approach

to Halloween was dead and buried on the spot.

The proposed ideas about ghosts and other night fears were all cancelled.

Michael Myers was definitely going to come back.

They just needed to figure out how to pull it off.

Halloween 3, Season of the Witch, is still divisive

in 2021, just about 30 years after its release.

Director Tommy Lee Wallace has given extremely honest interviews over the

decades regarding the film's reputation, admitting that when it first came out,

I was crushed.

But he's since made peace with it.

It helps that nowadays fans flock to him whenever

he appears at horror conventions or screenings.

All with their Halloween 3 merchandise that they'd like in design, so that's good.

Wallace always believed that Halloween 3 was a good movie,

regardless of the drama surrounding a certain character.

And dammit, I agree with him.

If you're watching this right now and you haven't seen Season of the Witch,

do yourself a favor.

Did I already tell you about the whole thing?

Yeah, I did.

But you should really feel it for yourself.

It's been this long and you haven't given it a chance, right?

Come on.

It's almost time.

And don't forget to wear your mask.

Thank you so much for watching the history of Halloween Part 2, the failed anthology.

I hope you've learned a little something, or if you're an established super fan,

I hope at least you had a good time watching.

Next time out, we're doing it big with the

history of Halloween Part 3, the Thorn Trilogy.

You see, Halloween 4, 5, and 6 all follow the same story threads.

And across these three films, the Michael Myers lore expands.

Now is that a good thing?

We'll talk about that on August 27, 2021.

And listen, if you liked this video, feel free to head over to patreon.

com slash 616 entertainment to support the channel at any level you choose.

You don't have to, but if you want to, that's fine with me.

Until next time, I love you, and I will see you soon.

Halloween 3, Season of the Witch, damage the franchise almost beyond repair.

Regardless of what your opinion of the third installment in the series is,

here in 2021, the box office in 1982 spoke loud and clear.

To put the failure into perspective, let me come at it like this.

Jason Voorhees and Friday the 13th popped up in Halloween's wake.

Without Halloween changing the face of horror and popularizing

the mass killer sect of the genre, there is no Jason.

That's just the way it is.

So you can imagine how universal pictures felt when Halloween 3's box office gross

was doubled by that of Friday the 13th Part 3.

That's like if the Asylum Transmorphers movie drew a

larger audience than the official Transformers films.

Okay, honestly, it's not that bad.

I love Jason and Friday the 13th.

I'm taking this joke too far.

Look, listen, the point is this.

The new anthology approach for Halloween telling a new scary story every year?

Yeah, out the fucking window.

Producer Mustafa Akad knew two things.

First, he needed Michael Myers back.

And second, he was gonna do whatever it took to get Michael Myers back.

What's up, Dan Dan?

My name is Ian.

Welcome to the history of Halloween Part 3, the thorn trilogy.

I hope you're strapped in and ready for this one because over the next,

uh, I don't know, hour or so, we're gonna dive deep into the three film art that not

only brought star slasher Michael Myers back to life, but expanded on his

background, his motivation, his... oh god, this one

goes off the rails really hard and it gets ugly.

But without further ado, let's get to it.

By this point, you may be tired of hearing about the many ups and downs surrounding

John Carpenter and Debra Hill's involvement with the franchise.

They didn't want to do a sequel, they got forced into it.

They didn't want to use Michael Myers, so they didn't, and it went to hell.

Well, guess what?

The production of Halloween 4 was the last straw for our beloved duo.

The tag team were still against the idea of continuing the Myers saga, but

Carpenter came up with what he saw as a compromise.

He hired Dennis Etchison, the writer responsible for the novelizations of

Halloween 2, Halloween 3, and the fog to pen the script for Halloween 4.

Etchison's story followed Lindsay Wallace and Tommy Doyle, the children from the

original Halloween, who were to be haunted by a

ghostly, fantasmal iteration of Michael Myers.

Listen, it's got Michael Myers in it.

He's just not a guy with a knife anymore.

It's more of like a ghost story.

At the end, he's like fucking 12 feet tall.

It's crazy.

It's not a slasher.

It's like a psychological thriller.

No.

Michael Myers.

I want Michael fucking Myers.

No ghosts, no seasons, no witches, no seasons of witches with ghosts.

I want fucking Michael Myers, blue suit,

white mask, stab, stabbing, fucking no ghosts.

More or less, that's pretty much how it went.

So John Carpenter and Debra Hill were out.

For good, for real.

They were done.

And I'm not saying they sat out for one film.

No.

They sold their shares in the franchise and gladly walked away from the whole thing.

Mustafa Akad bought them out in hell.

He bought out Erwin Yablons as well.

Full control of the series now rested solely

with Mustafa Akad to do with as he pleased.

And what did he please?

Well, he wanted the return of Michael Myers.

He also didn't want to deal with paying professional writer the big bucks,

so he literally put out an open call asking

anyone if they had a cool idea for Halloween 4.

They could write up a treatment and send it in.

I am not kidding.

Three friends by the names of Danny Lipschis, Larry Ratner,

and Benjamin Ruffner came up with the story Akad liked.

He bought it and hired Alan B.

McElroy to turn the story into a cleaned up ready to shoot movie script.

Which he did, by the way, in 11 days.

There was a writer strike approaching and Mustafa Akad was like, fuck writer strike.

I want Michael Myers.

Michael fucking Myers.

No strike.

No writer strike.

As soon as the script was finished and all things were a go, Akad rushed the film's

announcement with an ad that was riddled with errors and head-scratching decisions.

The ad featured a note written by Michael Myers himself

apologizing for not being able to attend your Halloween party?

Myers is misspelled.

The four is depicted in Roman numerals, which the final film ditched entirely.

Look, I don't know what to tell you about this thing other than maybe it was better

when one dude didn't have full control of the series.

When it came to the cast, they certainly couldn't call this one the return of

Laurie Strode, because Jamie Lee Curtis wasn't involved in any way.

She was like Carpenter and Hill.

No more Halloween's for me, thank you.

Donald Pleasant's though, good old Dr. Loomis, is back.

How the fuck did he survive this blast at the end of Halloween 2?

Look at this, the entire room explodes.

Now look at him in Halloween 4 with a little burn scar on his cheek.

Give me a break, man.

What's funnier than their total retcon of the deaths of Loomis in the shape though,

is Donald Pleasant's comments regarding his return to the series.

He stated, I was free, the money was good,

and it would be kind of hard to do without me.

He was also apparently told that John Carpenter loved the script, which wasn't true.

But Pleasant's himself did indeed demand to finish script before he signed on to

play Loomis again, so either way, he liked it.

And that's what matters the most.

Directing Halloween 4, the return of Michael Myers, would be Dwight H.

Little, who had previous experience and horror on the set of the Nightmare in Elm

Street inspired television series, Freddy's Nightmares.

How's that for a little crossover action?

The story of Halloween 4 is back to basics, and that's by design.

That's exactly what Mustafu Akad was looking for.

You know how Star Wars Episode 7, The Force Awakens,

was criticized for being very similar to a new hope?

It's the same deal here.

Force Awakens was made to wash that prequel trilogy taste out of your mouth.

Halloween 4 is saying forget about Halloween 3.

Remember the big knife?

Remember the scary man?

It's back to basics.

The question is, does the story work, or does it fall all over itself?

I know I went super granular with Halloween 3's

story, and that's because I felt like I had to.

That's the entry with the least amount of fanfare,

going forward we don't have to do straight play by play.

Halloween 4, the return of Michael Myers, kicks off with what else?

The reveal that Michael Myers did not die at the end of Halloween 2.

He's been in a coma for 10 years.

He's been held at this hospital that's described as where society dumps its worst

nightmares, but now he's getting transferred out.

Here's the problem.

On the way to the new place, one of the doctors mentions that Michael's got a

niece out there somewhere, and oh fuck, he's

awake, should have kept your mouth shut, idiot.

Dr. Loomis storms into the hospital the next morning, demanding

to know why his patient was moved without his knowledge.

And that's when the phone call comes through.

The ambulance never made it to the new location.

Loomis rushes to the scene, and yeah, this is what he was warning you guys about.

So, the chase is on.

Loomis has to find Michael before Michael finds his niece.

Michael's niece is Jamie Lloyd, played by Danielle Harris.

The name Jamie is indeed a nod to the series original heroine, Jamie Lee Curtis,

and yes, this is Laurie Strode's daughter.

Laurie Strode died off-screen somehow.

They really don't elaborate on it much.

That's unfortunate.

But I guess they have to set up the whole familial thing, and without Laurie,

they had to do something, right?

Jamie suffers from nightmares revolving around a scary man who was coming together.

Somehow she knows what her uncle looks like.

Listen, just don't think about it too much.

She lives with her foster family, and along with her foster sister,

Rachel, we've got our two new leads.

Michael's going around town, killing people, getting all set for his big day.

Seriously, he kills a mechanic to get another blue jumpsuit.

He steals the same mask from the discount

mart where he literally bumps into his niece.

Yeah, this isn't one of Jamie's hallucinations.

He's right there.

This really happened.

But for real, hold on a second.

Why does Michael seek out the same outfit he wore 10 years ago?

If he's not a man, if he's evil incarnate as Dr. Loomis puts it, why is he so

concerned with capturing the same look he had last time he had a night on the town?

I mean, we know the real reason why this happens.

It's because the blue suit and the white mask are the marketable costume.

But the character of Michael Myers, never mind, moving on.

Michael's body count here in Halloween 4 is ridiculous.

Across the first two films, Michael killed a total of 15 people.

In the fourth installment alone, he matches those combined efforts,

doubling his total body count.

We've got our first ever skull crush.

You got the thumb to the brain.

An entire police force has massacred in their own department.

At one point, Michael gets his hands on a shotgun.

Holy shit, the shape using a gun?

Hell yeah, he is.

He plunges it through the torso of this poor girl and impales her into the wall.

Gun stab.

Goodness gracious.

My favorite kill in Halloween 4 is right here where he pulls Earl's throat out.

Yeah.

Okay, sorry, I got a little ahead of myself.

Loomis alerts Sheriff Meeker that Michael is on the loose, and unlike Sheriff

Bracket from Halloween in Halloween 2, Sheriff Meeker actually cares about the

people in his town and everything goes into lockdown.

The local news alert towns people and businesses that their lives are in danger,

so it's best to close up shop and stay inside.

Can you imagine if it were that easy to get people to protect themselves in real life?

The local good old boys get their guns and

immediately are like, we'll solve the problem.

Why is it always old whites and red hats that do this?

Anyway, they immediately kill an innocent person by mistake.

Geez, who would have thought a bunch of untrained

idiots with guns would have wound up hurting somebody.

Sheriff Meeker, another cop, Rachel, Jamie, Rachel's cheating boyfriend,

and the girl he was cheating with are all holed up in Meeker's house.

They've got more guns and ammo than they know what to do with, and if Michael Myers

dares show his face around here, he's gonna fuck, he's already here, isn't he?

Gun stabs, skull crush, son of a bitch, this is bad.

This is really bad.

The shape gives chase to Rachel and Jamie all around the

house until they're up on the roof, and oh, that's not good.

Jamie scurries into the night and right into the arms of Dr. Loomis, who has the

idea to lock down the local elementary school.

No matter where Michael's coming from, they'll be able to see him, right?

These big open hallways?

WRONG!

Loomis gets Marty genetic through a window, and once again, Jamie is on her own.

We got a pause right here for a second.

I'm sorry, but you probably saw it.

What in Sam Hell is going on with Michael's mask here?

It's flesh tone with blonde hair.

This is one of the records saying that the wrong mask was brought to set.

They shot the scene and they noticed the

mistake in post, but it was too late to fix it.

I hate to interrupt right here, but what are you talking about?

It was noticed in post?

You're telling me that not one person in the moment, between set up action and cut,

between setting up the lights and tearing everything down, not one person said,

hey, what's with the mask?

Are you fucking kidding me?

It's not a minor change.

It couldn't be more obvious.

That excuse is so bad.

It almost doesn't even sound real, but it is.

Anyway, back to business.

We're almost done with the story.

I just, I had to get that out.

Rachel's not dead.

She makes the same with a trusty fire extinguisher

to the face, just as the good old boys pull up.

Everybody piles into a truck and they hit the road.

Look, they're not going to beat Michael Myers, right?

So just get the hell out of dodge.

It's a good strategy.

It's not like the shape can catch them.

They're in a truck.

I mean, unless he was hanging on to the axle

underneath the truck, like some Cape Fear bullshit.

Oh wait, that's exactly what he did.

This is comically silly, but that's what he was doing.

How did he get under there?

Everyone look, just don't think about it.

One by one, the hillbillies are dispatched.

Let's get another shot of Earl's throat getting torn out.

Yeah!

Rachel takes the wheel and she's whipping this truck around the road like Mad Max,

but the shape will not let go.

He even uses his own head to smash the windshield in.

I'm sorry, but that is so fucking funny looking.

Finally, she shakes him loose, but he's not done.

No way.

Rachel floors the truck and smashes it into him, sending Michael flying through

the air, crashing down through a wooden fence post.

For whatever reason, maybe it was morbid curiosity that took over.

Maybe it was something supernatural.

Jamie exits the truck and approaches her uncle.

She holds his burnt, scarred hand as the cavalry shows up.

Obviously, they flip out.

Michael wakes up and they absolutely blow him away with shotguns, rifles, pistols.

You name it, they had it.

Sheriff from Jurassic Park, he ain't playing.

This ain't no sheriff, bracket bullshit.

Michael's body disappears into an abandoned well, and that's all she wrote.

The family returns home so they can finally rest.

That is until Jamie slips on her favorite Halloween mask, grabs a pair of scissors,

and murders her foster mother, starting the cycle all over again.

The sheer terror in the agonized screams of Dr. Sam Loomis are the stuff of nightmares.

Evil never dies.

There it is, Halloween 4 the return of Michael Myers.

And, according to director Dwight Little, the death of Michael Myers.

In Little's mind, this was the end of the line for Haddonfield's favorite slasher.

Obviously, we're gonna continue forward with Jamie Lloyd as the new killer, right?

I mean, the end of this movie clearly sets the table for that scenario.

Well, not so much, but we'll get to that a little bit.

I've got a few more things to say about

Halloween 4 before we delve into the next sequel.

Director Dwight Little obviously cared about this film.

He cared about the characters, he cared about the story, and he cared

about the fact that he was stepping in to direct a

gigantic installment in an outrageously popular franchise.

Nothing in Halloween 4 is half-assed.

And this is only made more obvious in how many

questions Little has answered over the years.

He's gone on record confirming that, in least in his mind,

Michael wasn't actually on a mission to murder his niece.

Little could be wrong, you know.

He didn't write the script and he wasn't involved in future installments at all,

but no.

He saw this story as Michael Myers wanting to connect with his niece.

Little stated, I think Michael wanted to connect with Jamie, but he's so lost in

his own psychosis that he doesn't even know how to do it.

He's also clarified that Jamie's murder of her foster mother was brought on by the

connection she made with Michael in the field,

and that his energy had transferred into her.

This would explain why a load of gunshots were able to put Michael down this time

around, whereas in the past, he wouldn't even wait to not

dip into any supernatural elements of Michael's character.

It was important to him to portray the shape strictly

as a highly dangerous escaped mental patient.

And in this film, that's what he is.

Dwight Little, in my opinion, was the right man for the job.

Look, I think it's pretty obvious across this franchise which directors took the

job seriously, and which ones had no idea

what the hell was going on in this franchise.

Who the hell any of these characters were, or what

the hell they were actually supposed to be doing.

So there, I just wanted to show a little bit of love to Dwight H.

Little right here.

I mean, we've talked about John Carpenter and Debra Hill and

Tommy Lee Wallace to death, so I figured it was only fair.

Dwight Little.

Put some respect on that name.

Now let's talk about some of the shit I don't like in this movie.

Can anyone tell me why Michael Myers looks like this?

What the hell is his body shape like?

He looks like Pat from those old SNL sketches.

The mask is super different looking.

It's extremely pale and there's black mesh covering the eye holes this time.

I kind of like this mask, which I know is not a very popular opinion, but what I

don't like is how Dr. Loomis is kind of a non-factor when you really think about it.

Don't get me wrong, Donald Pleasance delivers another fantastic performance.

But what does Dr. Loomis do?

He chases Michael.

He finds him.

He gets thrown through a window and he's just

there at the end like, well, I'm glad that's over.

I just feel like for the magnitude of this character to retcon his death and bring

him back, he should have been more of a factor.

He does have that incredible scene with the old preacher who gives him a ride though.

We can't leave that out.

Listen, I can't show you the whole thing.

Universal Pictures will pull it down in a second,

but watch the movie or just look this scene up.

It's fantastic.

And this guy here, the preacher, he's Loomis from another timeline,

another dimension, another lifetime.

Much like the graveyard man from the original film,

I wish we could have gotten a movie about this guy.

There's no doubt about it.

And really quick, before we get this Halloween 4 show on the road, it's funny.

I've seen this movie a million times and there are

still things I'm noticing about it to this day.

This big bald man mask at the discount mark also

appears at the Silver Shamrock factory in Halloween 3.

It's a Don Post mask based on professional wrestler and actor, Tor Johnson,

who appeared in several Ed Wood films.

Don Post Studios were responsible for the original 1975 Kirk

mask, which obviously the Michael Myers mask was a play on.

But this mask here, doesn't it kind of look like Connell Cochran?

Are big bad from Halloween 3?

I'm not saying it is for sure, but it certainly looks like him.

I've never heard anybody point this out or make this connection, so either I just

stumbled on something big or I'm totally wrong.

Either way, it's pretty interesting.

I love in the ambulance murder scene how we can clearly see

the edge of the prosthetic arm they used for this stunt.

Whoops.

And hey, Special shout out to Bucky, the power man, who

Michael tosses into the wires and gets cooked alive.

I'm not shouting him out for dying.

I just love the way he threatens Michael, like a parent scolding a child.

Don't try that Halloween shit with me.

Alright, I'm on the telephone to the police right now.

You're not on the telephone to the police, you're standing right in front of me,

you idiot.

Of course you got cooked.

Man, I love this movie.

And that's for real, man.

I love Halloween 4.

Was this movie totally unnecessary?

Yeah.

Was the love of the art totally tossed down

the toilet in favor of box office dollars?

Yeah.

But this is not a bad sequel at all.

And trust me, we are on our way to those.

Just sit tight.

So after all the hubbub of Michael Myers is the star, how

could they have taken Michael Myers out of Halloween movies?

Obviously his return would set the world on fire all over again, right?

Halloween 3 pulled in $14.4 million without him.

And Halloween 4 grossed $17.8 million with him front

and center on the poster and his name in the title.

That's an increase, sure, but I would imagine Universal

was hoping for something much, much more impressive.

We mentioned Friday the 13th at the top and to compare releases that year,

Halloween 4 grossed $17.8 million.

Friday the 13th part 7 grossed $19.1 million.

It's a close race, but Jason still got a stranglehold on the box office title.

Just kidding, Nightmare at Elm Street 4, the dream

master, drew a box office of about $50 million.

Freddy Krueger was on fire, no pun intended.

Pulling in more than Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees combined.

But that's neither here nor there.

Look, Halloween 4 is remembered quite fondly and for good reason.

It's great.

It's not perfect and it's a bit of a rehash, but all things considered,

you can't go wrong here.

That is until you get to Halloween 5, the Revenge of Michael Myers.

If you've watched this far into the history of Halloween, you've seen me

praise all four films in the franchise up to this point.

They've all got their issues, sure, but from a top down perspective,

these are four good movies and I've had a lot to say about all of them.

I wouldn't blame you if you've started to wonder, am I a fanboy?

Am I going to gush my critical thinking skills are

perfectly capable of separating the good from the bad.

And before we even jump into this next chapter, I want you to know, it is my

opinion that Halloween 5, the Revenge of Michael Myers fucking sucks.

It is a complete piece of shit.

That's my opinion.

As always, I've done extensive research on the film and I can't wait to share with

you why Halloween 5 is so terrible from a factual

perspective, with my opinion cast way off into the background.

Because let me tell you, calling the production of Halloween 5 an utter mess

would be far too generous.

Now let's get to it.

Let's uh, let's get this over with.

Let's get the story out of the way first for a change.

We know from the ending of Halloween 4 that Jamie is the new killer.

Having just murdered her foster mother while wearing the exact same costume

Michael wore when he committed his first murder.

It's mysterious, it's symbolic.

It's also completely thrown out the fucking window by director Dominique

Otherton and Gerard, who made the change

because the audience expects Jamie to be evil.

I don't want to do that.

I make her innocent.

So there goes this new, intriguing angle for the franchise.

Done.

Just like that.

Oh and Jamie's foster mother isn't dead anymore.

She was only injured in the murder.

I mean, the stabbing.

She's also referred to several times as Jamie's

stepmother, which is not the same thing as a foster mother.

Not even close.

Jamie's being held in a hospital and she can't speak anymore.

Most of her communication is done through writing on a tiny chalkboard.

She's now linked telepathically with Michael and she

goes into screaming fits when the visions take hold.

I am not shitting you when I say that the majority of this film is listening to a 10

year old girl scream cry thrash around and yell so loud that the only sound emanating

from her body is the air being pushed through her voice box.

This gets old very, very quickly, as you might imagine.

I know what you're thinking.

What do you mean she's seen through Michael's eyes?

Michael is dead.

They shot him with like 87 guns at the end of Halloween 4 and he fell in a well.

And you're right.

Ash director Dwight Little, he thought Michael was dead too, so don't feel stupid.

You weren't far off.

That's where things were left.

But Dominico, the Ninjurard, didn't like that.

And what is a tremendous retcon?

Michael didn't just fall into the well.

Apparently they also threw dynamite down the

goddamn hole to ensure he'd never come back.

Why didn't they show us that in Halloween 4?

I mean in Halloween 4 we can see a split second

of one of the good old boys lighting up a fuse.

So why did they cut this out?

I don't know.

I also don't know how these people come up with some of this shit.

How did Michael escape the well?

That's the burning question.

Check this out.

It wasn't just a pit down there.

No.

There was a massive pre-dug tunnel that led perfectly to safety.

Just a few yards away.

The dynamite didn't even touch him.

Thank God.

I mean he's still full of more holes in this film's

plot, but that'll be taken care of in a little bit.

The shape flees into a stream where the current takes him on a fun ride to the

shore right at the doorstep of some weird guy living in a shack.

Michael attempts to kill the man but is unable

to before finally succumbing to his wounds.

This hermit doesn't call 911.

He doesn't even get all weird and bury the body.

He doesn't push him back into the stream to continue

living his hermit life like this ain't out of my business.

No.

He takes Michael in, puts him in a bed and

just lets him lay there for a fucking year.

An entire year goes by and this masked asshole laying in a bed in your house full

of fucking bullet holes and you just let him stay there.

This is just ungodly bad writing.

This isn't even what this scene initially was either, but we'll get to the cut

content, deleted scenes, and alterations later.

So after a year of hibernation and healing all of his wounds like he's fucking

wolverine, Michael wakes up, puts on his mask and kills the shithead.

Great.

Good.

Upon breaking his 364 day long nap, the first

thing we see is a tattoo on Michael's wrist.

Excuse me?

When did Michael Myers get a tattoo?

We'll get into this in a little bit.

Jamie's freaking out because she can feel Michael's presence and

is experiencing the hermit's murder through her uncle's eyes.

She's unable to breathe and just before a doctor performs an emergency tracheotomy

to open her windpipe and save her life, Dr. Loomis

appears in the operating room saying don't do it.

She'll snap out of it.

First of all, how did he get in here?

Second of all, why is this surgeon taking advice from a psychiatrist?

Does an auto mechanic take orders from a pilot?

The next day, Rachel's here.

Good to see our Halloween 4 heroines reunited.

Also good to know Rachel holds no grudge against Jamie for trying to kill her mom.

I mean, Rachel hasn't been affected at all by the traumatic experience a year prior.

She's bebop and around this whole movie.

Oh wait, did I say whole movie?

I meant all 20 minutes that she's in it.

No, I'm not kidding.

Rachel is killed 20 minutes into Halloween 5.

There's no fight.

There's no struggle.

We see her naked through the shower curtain.

She walks around in a towel and she gets scissors jammed into her collarbone.

Our determined, experienced, powerful lead for the prior

film minimized to eye candy and killed off within minutes.

Goodbye.

Why does Rachel die 20 minutes into Halloween 5?

I'll tell you why.

Director Dominic Ozen in Gerard didn't like her.

He thought she was too tame.

He thought she was too plain.

And here's the real kicker, he wanted a hero with dark hair.

I'm not kidding.

This is how this movie was made.

For the rest of the film, Tina is apparently our new main girl.

She's pretty.

She's bombastic.

She's constantly singing through her dialogue, giggling for absolutely no reason.

Look, I'm just gonna say it.

Every character in this movie is fucking

annoying and I could not wait for them to die.

There's no better signifier in a horror movie that your characters suck if the

audience is counting down the seconds until they're killed.

And let me tell you, every single one of the teenagers in this movie are horrible.

This little stuttering kid Billy gets zero background

whatsoever, but apparently he's Jamie's friend.

At one point, Billy was supposed to be a BMX writer and in the final chase,

he was going to ride up Michael's back like a

ramp, forcing Michael to fall on his own knife.

But the actor playing Billy couldn't ride a bike very

well, so they cut the BMX portion from the script entirely.

Tina and her friend Samantha are planning a big Halloween

date night where Samantha is going to lose her virginity.

Yes, that's a central plot point.

Let's check in with an actual quote from director Dominique real quick.

They're innocent, but with sexual desires.

And then the feeling of guilty.

And if you're guilty, you die.

That's Halloween.

That's the premise.

The teams ride around together, they steal beer for the big party, whatever.

There's a chase scene in the hospital where the audience

is supposed to believe Michael is stalking Jamie.

And some viewers laud this scene as being extremely suspenseful, but I'm sorry,

how gullible are you?

Did anyone watching this video right now fall for this

and actually think this was the shape coming for her?

Five seconds into the damn scene, it's abundantly clear we're in for a swerve.

And holy shit, this chase goes on forever.

Just dragging it out for far too long.

Dr. Loomis is fucking crazy in this movie.

Did I mention that?

He's no longer out to protect little Jamie Lloyd.

No.

Now he wants to kill Michael Myers, no matter what it takes.

He grabs and shakes Jamie, screaming at her to tell him what she knows.

It's worth noting that Donald Pleasant's consistently clashed with the director

during the filming of Halloween Five, and that he was not a fan of where the

series was going in any way, which is so sad.

There's a scene where a bus pulls into town and we see some

steel-toed boots step off and kick a sweetie little dog.

Whoever this guy is, fuck this guy.

Ready for another head scratcher?

Loomis heads to the Myers house to what is this place?

Look at the size of these interiors.

This is a fucking completely different house.

When asked why the house looks so different,

Dominique, Othene, and Gerard had this to say.

The house looks so different because I made a choice.

Seriously, he just didn't care.

Oh, a long time fan and viewer.

You can tell it's a totally different setting.

Well, fuck you.

I've decided this is the Myers house deal with it.

This guy sucked.

I'm telling you, he was a complete fucking hack.

And I hate to be so nasty, but jesus christ.

This is horrible filmmaking.

It is a question of cat and mouse.

And we see the cat and we see the mouse and the mouse knows about the cat.

And the cat is going out to the mouse.

It's about it together.

Luckily Tina's boyfriend gets a garden tool through his skull.

One down.

Michael picks up Tina in the boyfriend's car wearing

the mask that Tina had gotten for him earlier that day.

She sweet talks and even kisses the shape right on the face who

does nothing other than squeeze the steering wheel in return.

Jamie has another episode which is a pleasure to endure once again.

Honestly, it's three minutes of a child struggling to breathe and speak while

attempting to describe a painting on the side of a gas station.

I think woman.

Who wants to watch this?

Who thought this was interesting or entertaining in any way?

Maybe it was the fucking cookie woman.

The man in black is walking around again.

Still no idea who he is, but more on that later.

Look, let's kick this horse shit into high gear.

Michael kills Tina's friends at the party and thank fucking god he did because I

cannot put into words how drawn out these scenes and annoying these people are.

He chases down Tina, Billy,

and just fucking run them over.

It's like that scene in Austin Powers where Scotty is trying to tell Dr.

Evil that this could all be so easy.

Billie was supposed to get run over here, but they decided to cut that.

And who cares?

Tina gets stabbed in the chest and that's it.

She's dead.

Good thing this wasn't Rachel, sacrificing herself for her foster sister.

Good thing it was some idiot moron introduced 45 minutes ago.

Really meant a lot.

I sure was heartbroken when this happened.

The new plan is for the cops in Loomis to seat

Jamie in the Myers house and use her as bait.

When Michael shows up, they're gonna shoot him 2561

more times and that'll finally be the end of it.

Only Loomis goes rogue.

He's got a secret plan of his own.

Eventually Michael does show up and Dr. Loomis tries to

reason with him, saying that he knows Jamie can help him.

She can help him get rid of this rage that he suffers from.

Michael's like fuck you old man.

This cop gets 10 shots out of a six shot revolver

somehow because no one can fucking count on set.

Michael hangs him out the window with a rope ladder

and Jamie tries to hide in the laundry chute.

It doesn't work.

She gets away and finds herself in the attic

where she stumbles upon the corpse of Rachel.

Upon hearing Michael approaching, Jamie climbs into the casket of a

nine-year-old girl that Michael stole from the cemetery.

Michael raises the knife and is ready to put all Jamie away when she calls him.

This gets through to the shape.

She asks to see his face and he listens.

He removes his mask, shares his identity, and Jamie remarks, it's just like me,

as a lone tear rolls down the cheek of Michael Myers.

I'm going to take myself out of it for a second, share with you what my podcast

co-host, the artist formerly known as Mike Charles, had to

say about this film back in 2017 on one of our old shows.

Super important questions.

The topic was, what's the worst example of character assassination you've ever seen?

And this is what he brought to the table.

Michael Myers, everyone's familiar with them.

He's a fucking completely soulless, mindless killer.

In the fifth movie, she calls him uncle and he like takes his mask off and you see

like in the light shining in through the window, like he's crying.

That, to me, I was a kid, I was like 13 and that was the

first time I saw that movie, I'd seen the other ones.

And I was so pissed off.

I'm like, that just ruined, completely ruined

Michael Myers, like he's not scared anymore.

Now he's just a fucking baby.

Do you agree or disagree?

I'd like to note that despite applying burn scar makeup to Michael's hands,

they didn't do anything to his face.

This fucking guy should look like Freddy Krueger, but he doesn't.

He looks like Lloyd Braun from Seinfeld.

He's a handsome son of a bitch.

And a little behind the scenes trivia, check this out.

The lead makeup designer stated that heading into this shot, the question was

asked several times whether or not Michael would appear scarred and burned.

Director Dominique constantly avoided the question and on the day of this shoot,

ragtag makeup effects were on set in the event he said, yeah, go for it.

But he never made up his mind.

So, they just didn't do anything.

Have I mentioned this guy sucks?

Anyway, Jamie reaches out for Michael, he absolutely

flips out, now he wants to kill her again.

Loomis is alive!

He grabs Jamie up, offers her as a sacrificial lamb, and when Michael gets

close, he drops a chain net from the ceiling, shoots him with a bunch of

tranquilizer darts, and beats him with a 2x4.

He then collapses on top of Michael, dying of a heart attack.

For real.

Dominique Othan and Gerard confirmed that this was intended to be the death of the

Dr. Loomis character, and Donald Pleasance was totally fine with it.

Behind the scenes and even in front of the press, Donald Pleasance had voices

displeasure with the film on several occasions, and was

a-ok with making his exit from the franchise right here.

We see Michael locked at a prison cell with his fucking mask on, which is another

supremely idiotic site before, hey, it's the man in black again.

He shoots up the police station and breaks Michael out of prison.

Our final shot is of Jamie, who, just like us, is horrified to learn that

the series will continue after this load of shit.

That's the story of Halloween 5, The Revenge of

Michael Myers, and I'm gonna be honest with you guys.

Watching this movie so I could sit there and take notes as it went along.

I'm not kidding when I say this.

That's the last fucking time I'm ever gonna watch this movie.

I hate this movie.

When it's not annoying to the point of being rage-inducing, it's boring.

And when it's not boring, it's just fucking stupid.

I didn't even mention these idiot cops who literally have funny

ha ha music playing underneath that ridiculously bad dialogue.

What is this?

Who is this for?

We have to talk about this mask.

When my buddy Tim and I were kids, we always wondered

why the mask was changed from Halloween 4 to 5.

In the movie world, it's just the same old mask that's been

sitting around for a year, so why does it look so different?

Take a wild guess.

If your answer was, because the director made a choice, then you win.

Dominico, the Ninjurad stated, we made a fantastic

mask that had nothing to do with Halloween 4.

Less plastic, white face.

That's unrelatable.

Dominique wanted Michael to look more human, and

so they made a mask that they thought looked angry.

I'm sorry.

I hate to rag on someone so hard, but this is just like the Myers house.

You don't get to just go in and arbitrarily

change things like this without anybody noticing.

It stands out like a sore thumb.

It's blatantly obvious and in the worst way possible.

So you don't like the way the house or the mask looks.

Tough fucking shit.

This isn't a brand new franchise.

This is the fifth installment.

These pieces have been in place for over a decade.

You don't just get to decide that they look

different, the audience doesn't get to bitch about it.

And don't even try to say, oh, the Halloween 4

mask was different from the Halloween 1 and 2 mask.

That's fine.

That makes sense.

He stole another one from a store.

This is the Halloween 4 mask just one year later.

Look, this guy fucking sucks, okay?

How about the title?

Halloween 5, The Revenge of Michael Myers.

Revenge on who?

Rachel?

She's the only character from Halloween 4 that he kills

and that was right in the beginning, so I doubt it.

What's hilarious is that the box says The Revenge of Michael Myers.

The disc says it, but you know what doesn't say Revenge of Michael Myers?

The fucking movie itself.

This subtitle is nowhere to be found.

But here's where we can segue into the nitty-gritty.

Originally, the film was titled Halloween 5, The Killer Inside Me.

The original script was written by Shem Bitterman and it

continued the story of Jamie's horrific turn into darkness.

Obviously, this script was thrown in the garbage.

Literally, as a matter of fact.

The first and threw it in the trash can right in front of everyone.

Stating that if a cod ever wanted to make Halloween 6, this script needed to go.

Dominique made pitches where Michael would come back to life after getting struck by

lightning all out of the Frankenstein monster.

He talked his ass off and Mustafa Akad kept him around for whatever reason.

Here's the thing, too.

Akad initially returned for Halloween 5, but they passed.

Why?

Because they felt like they nailed Halloween 4.

They were really proud of it and they didn't want to fuck it up.

Can I get a standing ovation for some artistic integrity here?

I should also note that I mentioned earlier that Universal may have been

disappointed with Halloween 4's box office gross.

And well, maybe they would have been.

But Universal were out of the Halloween game by this point.

After Halloween 3 underperformed and Akad bought out all the other shareholders to

gain full control, Universal walked away as well, leaving the franchise in the

hands of Akad's Trakas International films.

$17.8 million to an independent is way different

than $17.8 million to a major corporation.

So Trakas was riding high.

So high, in fact, that they let Odin and Gerard

throw the Halloween 5 script in the trash.

Six weeks before cameras were set to roll.

Six weeks.

Michael Jacobs, a writer and friend of Odin and Gerard, penned the new script,

which was originally titled Halloween 5 and things that go bump in the night.

Yep.

Rumor even has it that the script wasn't done when principle photography began and

that the holes were still being filled in as they went along.

Honestly, it shows.

Check this out.

You know the tattoo on Michael's wrist?

Nobody knew what the fuck that was.

And I don't mean they weren't sure what the symbol meant.

I'm saying they shot those scenes, the close-ups on the tattoo, and they had

no fucking idea what they were saying with that.

The thorn symbol, as it would come to be known,

had zero purpose at the time they introduced it.

The man in black, the mysterious guy whose face we never see, who has the same

tattoo, the man who breaks Michael out of jail at the end of the film.

Get ready for this.

We don't see his face because they didn't fucking know who he was.

Not a clue.

I'm not kidding when I say this.

Mustafa Akad demanded that a mysterious character be added

to the film while they were half way through production.

Dominique Ozen and Gerard agreed to shoot the scenes and literally did so with the

mindset that the tattoo and the mystery man were

the problem of whoever was gonna do Halloween 6.

I cannot overstate how irresponsible, unprofessional, and careless that is.

Ozen and Gerard has stated that he saw the man in black as a sole brother from afar

to Michael, but he's not even sure what he means by that.

And get this, when asked about the thorn symbol, Ozen and Gerard declared,

and I quote, I was born under that room.

It links us.

Kill me.

Just fucking kill me this guy.

Also, guess what, the hermit in the beginning wasn't originally an old man.

Ozen and Gerard shot scenes where their hermit was actually a voodoo magician

standing six feet tall and weighing only 80 pounds.

He performed magic spells on Michael over the years they lived together,

healing his wounds.

He also was responsible for waking Michael up through some ritual bullshit.

But was he a supernatural character?

Absolutely not, claims Ozen and Gerard.

He was just a voodoo magician named Dr. Death.

Oh, and he claims that Rob Zombie stole 80% of

his Halloween movies straight from Halloween 5.

To the point that he calls it not inspiration, but a carbon copy.

I cannot talk about this guy anymore.

So I've been burying this film for the last 20 minutes and with good reason,

in my opinion.

I've shared with you my thoughts and the thoughts of my podcast co-host back in 2017.

But we're just two people.

How was Halloween 5 actually received by the public?

By the critics?

How did it perform?

It performed like shit.

And to this day, it holds the record for the worst

box office gross of any Halloween film ever made.

Yes, even less than Halloween 3, which doesn't even have Michael Myers in it.

The film debuted at number 4 at the box office and holds a

reputation for being one of the worst in franchise history.

I didn't like this movie as a kid.

I despise it as an adult.

And like I said earlier, I'm done with it.

I've officially checked it off the list.

I will never sit through this dog shit bad

writing fan fiction feeling garbage ever again.

And if you like this movie, good for you.

I'm happy for you.

You do you.

We can only go up from here, right?

Two thirds of the way through the thorn trilogy.

We've got to be able to pull the nose up on this thing, right?

Well, there's one thing I suppose we should cover right off the bat.

Halloween, the curse of Michael Myers, had the most tortured, strenuous,

agonizing production of any Halloween film to date, and it's not even close.

I mean, where do we begin?

Most of Akad's rights to the franchise expired and he wound up in a bidding war

trying to re-secure the series for further equalization.

You know who the other guy was trying to gain ownership of Halloween?

John fucking carpenter.

Maybe he was tired of seeing his baby continually

dunked in the mud and paraded around to be laughed at.

But hey, maybe he would have gained control and also stumbled with his future.

So, who knows?

There's really no way to know what would have happened and

it doesn't matter because Akad and Miramax came out on top.

Control was back in the Akad camp, but this time it was different.

With Miramax in on the deal, along with their dimension film subsidiary,

this was a brand new ball game.

Akad couldn't just hire and fire whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted.

This was once again a corporate landscape with more red tape, landmines,

and booby traps than anyone in their right mind could ever imagine.

Halloween 6 was the-uh, whoops, sorry.

I forgot I'm not supposed to call it that.

This is Halloween the curse of Michael Myers.

There is no 6 in the title.

This is definitely not Halloween 6.

Here's my question.

How does every installment in the franchise up to this point have a number next to it?

Even the one that took the sharpest left turn of

all time and wifed out all of the known characters.

How does that one have a number next to it?

And this one doesn't.

This movie was made specifically to answer all of the questions left behind by

Halloween 5, and they decide not to call it Halloween 6.

Why is that?

Well, the answer is probably even dumber than you might expect.

Here's the deal, and I'm going to rocket

through these details as quickly as possible.

The original script was called Halloween 666, the origin of evil.

It was written by Phil Rosenberg, not to be confused with

Philip Rosenthal who created everybody loves Raymond.

Mustafakad read the script and hated it so badly that he threw

it across the fucking room, so it was back to square one.

The nitty gritty from here isn't as important as the numbers involved.

All in all, four writers were hired to pen

Halloween 6 scripts, and all four were fired.

It was a man by the name of Daniel Farrens

who wound up with the job, and this is rich.

Years prior, Farrens created a Halloween bible which kept track of who every

character was, how they lived or died, what their storylines and arcs were.

He was a super fan.

He had pitched Mustafakad his own Halloween film,

and while Akad didn't hire him, he kept the bible.

Upon getting the Halloween 6 gig, Farrens says that in his first meeting,

Akad had the bible on his desk, and he said they'd

referenced it numerous times over the years.

Then why the fuck didn't they just hire Farrens years ago then?

How the hell did you wind up with Dominique Oden and shit, it's okay, breathe.

He can't hurt us anymore.

There was a complete breakdown between Mustafakad

and the Weinstein's aka Miramax aka Dimension Films.

Farrens was forced to rewrite his script 10 times.

Even then, it was picked apart, rewritten by people who weren't writers,

and alternate decisions were made on set without even consulting his script at all.

The original cut of the film tanked so badly with test audiences that the

Weinstein stepped in and took control, hoping they could somehow save this film.

That's why this is the only movie you've ever heard of to have a producers cut.

Not a director's cut, no.

A producers cut.

We'll dive into the differences between the two versions in a bit.

First, let me circle back around to the first question.

Why isn't this movie called Halloween 6 the Curse of Michael Myers?

Where is the 6?

Well, after that test screening bombed as hard as

it did, the Weinstein's and Miramax said fuck it.

They wanted to distance themselves from Halloween 5 as much as possible.

Story beats were changed, unanswered questions

were completely ignored, and the 6 was gone.

It's worth noting that Quentin Tarantino was looked at for the writer's role as

well, but obviously this never came together.

And that's for the best too.

His pitch revolved around the man in black and Michael Myers on a road trip,

stopping off and killing people as they went down Route 66.

Yeah, no thanks.

But now we're getting way deep into the weeds and we haven't even gone through the

story of Halloween, the Curse of Michael Myers, so let's get to it.

The theatrical cut is the version that most people have seen.

Anybody who bought a ticket to this film, this is the version they were shown,

so we're going to jump into that first.

I mean, unless you're a Halloween hardcore, you probably don't even know

that a producer's cut exists, so theatrical

cut first, then we'll get to the producers cut.

Don't worry.

Years have passed since the conclusion of Halloween 5, where

Michael was broken out of prison by the mysterious man in black.

We've got a thing or two to talk about here.

Okay, so Jamie and Michael have both been missing for years.

Jamie's been held captive in this creepy-ass dungeon and she's delivering her baby?

We have no idea who the father is.

This change isn't the producer's cut, hold your horses.

And she's broken out of this crazy place by a nurse who goes rogue.

Michael doesn't appreciate that.

The chase is on.

The shape wants that goddamn baby, apparently,

and Jamie is not about to hand him over.

Also, yeah, that's clearly not Danielle Harris playing Jamie Lloyd.

There was a contract dispute, blah, blah, whatever.

Honestly, it's a good thing she's not here.

The Jamie character is 16 at this point, and I'm not really keen on seeing the

nine-year-old girl we followed through the last two movies being mysteriously

impregnated and, well, murdered without a second thought.

Yep, our established lead, our new Jamie Lee Curtis,

as it were, is killed 19 minutes into the film.

Yes, that's one minute faster than Rachel was killed off in Halloween 5.

Unreal.

Anyway, Paul Rudd is here in his second big-screen role ever, and who is he playing?

None other than Tommy Doyle, the little boy who

was being babysapped by Laurie Strode back in 1978.

He's obsessed with Michael Myers and is convinced that he will show his face again.

But this time, Tommy knows how to stop him.

Remember how Dr. Loomis died at the end of Halloween 5?

Fuck Halloween 5.

Loomis is back.

Loomis has died and returned nearly as often as the shape at this point.

Good lord.

Loomis meets up with Dr. Nguyen, who wants him to return

to Smith's Grove and continue his career in medicine.

Oh, who the fuck is Dr. Nguyen?

He's this guy, who appeared in the 1978 original for literally 43 seconds and was

never seen or heard from again across the next five film spanning 16 years.

You're obviously not a hardcore if you didn't know Dr. Nguyen.

I'm kidding.

Realistically, who the hell remembered this character?

There's a new family living in the Myers house as well, which poses a problem.

Who are these people?

They're the strobes.

Yeah, really.

We've got parents John and Deborah.

Yes, those names are indeed tributes to Carpenter and Hill.

We've got Cara and her son Danny and then there's Tim.

Cara's brother.

How were these people related to Laurie Strode?

I guess Cara is like Laurie's cousin?

Look, they don't delve too deep into it.

There are just threads from the first movie all over Halloween.

I mean, curse.

And this is one of them.

Danny is hearing voices telling him to kill and he's

having visions of the man in black telling him to do so.

Tommy Doyle finds the baby in the train station where Jamie hit it.

Loomis visits the scene of the crime where Jamie's body

was found and someone burned the thorn into a bunch of hay.

Tommy and Loomis run into each other and we've got a brand new tag team.

What's Michael up to?

Oh, he's just starting to butcher the strobes.

Axe to mama Deborah yikes.

The streams cross when Tommy Doyle meets Cara Strode and he

informs her that they are living in the bad, bad Myers house.

Michael is coming and they need to get the hell out of there.

Where do they go?

Directly across the street to Mrs. Blankenship's house.

Who is Mrs. Blankenship?

Well, she's the woman who was babysitting Michael

back in 1963, the night he killed his sister.

The reason you've never heard of her is because she didn't exist until just now.

Again, they're trying to link this to the original as much as possible.

Mrs. Blankenship spills the tea that these voices Danny is hearing.

Michael heard them too back on that fateful night.

Lady, you're scaring us.

Here's where Tommy explains to Cara and in turn the audience.

What the secret is behind Michael's evil.

Michael Myers isn't just pure evil after all.

He's actually a victim.

He was a young boy who was inflicted by the curse of the thorn, an ancient rune

that when the stars align in the sky every so often,

the curse springs him to life in a blood rage.

Michael doesn't want to kill his family.

The thorn wants his family killed.

So you're thinking, wait, Michael Myers, the purest form of evil we've ever known,

is actually just a tool?

He's just a plaything acting out the will of a curse?

Yes, that is exactly what I'm telling you.

How about that?

Michael butchers John Strode.

How?

He electrocutes him so bad his head explodes.

Man, Michael must have been playing some mortal combat down in that dungeon.

Holy shit.

There's a great scene where a young girl is

singing about the rain falling from overhead.

The red rain.

Oh boy.

Tim Strode and his girlfriend are murdered by the shape, the latter of which is

witnessed by Cara, so the shit has hit the fan.

Danny, probably being carried by the voices, walks over to the Myers house,

and Cara winds up going toe to toe with Michael in an attempt to save her son.

Honestly, this is one of the better showdown since the original.

It's suspenseful, it's shot well, it's fun as hell.

This part of the chase is pulled straight from the original, but it comes off as a

tribute rather than a cheap knockoff, because it's done really well.

This is where Halloween V's Man in Black is finally identified.

It's Dr. Nguyen, the character from almost 20 years ago, that they dusted off because

someone had to be this asshole, right?

Mrs. Blake and Chip is in on the plot too.

I'm being funny, I'm shining a light on how ridiculous this all is.

I mean, it is ridiculous, but here's the thing.

The reveal that the staff at Smith's Grove, where Michael was initially locked

up, the fact that they've incubated this curse and are

now controlling Michael through the thorn, it's creative.

I'll give them that.

Cara, Danny, and the baby are taken back to the

subterranean dungeon at Smith's Grove for some reason.

It's never really made clear.

Apparently the doctors want to do some sort of

indiscriminate surgical procedure on the baby.

Tommy Doyle breaks Cara out of her cell while barely avoiding the shape,

which leads to another really cool chase.

Paul Rudd's acting right here is the best in the movie.

This is probably how any real person would react in one of these situations.

His... oh my god, I'm probably going to die, smirk as Michael closes in.

Come on, dude, that's legendary.

Michael picks up a machete off a surgical tray.

Why is there a machete in a hospital?

Who knows or cares, because he uses it to slaughter the

entire evil surgical team while the strobe lights boom.

If the doctors in this weird culty group control Michael.

Why is Michael killing them?

That's simple.

It's because this script, the fact that these are Weinstein reshoots, the ten

rewrites of the script, all of that together.

They've now taken what was already a nearly incoherent storyline and turned it

into a fuck-it-make-it-look-cool gore-fest.

A third chase in the last 20 minutes goes on.

Cara finds a bunch of aborted fetuses suspended in tanks

with ancient runes on them, but this is never explained.

Remember that word incoherent I used a second ago?

Michael shows up, our tag team pumps him full

of green liquid through some gnarly syringes.

Tommy Doyle beats the shape of the pipe until the green juice spurts from his face.

I don't know.

They meet back up with Dr. Loomis, who inexplicably

stays behind because he has unfinished business.

We see Michael's mask on the floor, Loomis screams, and it's over.

That is Halloween, the curse of Michael Myers.

There you go, Dan Dan's.

Jamie Lloyd is dead.

The man in black is alive.

Michael Myers is alive.

Any remaining mystique about Michael Myers has been completely washed away,

and that's exactly how things are going to stay,

as this was the end of the original timeline.

Halloween 6, Halloween, the curse of Michael Myers, was the final installment

before everything was retconned, restarted, and picked back up somewhere else.

I promised we'd take a look at the producers cut, and while I'm not going to

give a full play-by-play on this iteration of the

story, I'll hit you with the main differences.

First of all, I mentioned at the top that in this

version, the father of Jamie's baby is not a mystery.

The question, unfortunately, is answered.

Michael Myers is the father of Jamie's baby.

Yeah, in the original script, the shape impregnated his 16 year old niece,

turning Michael Myers

The reason I'm telling you this on camera is because

I don't think I can even say those words on YouTube.

I mean, who would even want to?

But I'm pretty sure I have to bleep that out.

I wish I could bleep this stupid shit out of existence.

I'm not going to delve into that any further.

I think we all know how stupid, how ill-advised,

how fucking terrible of a turn that is.

So, why beat a dead horse?

Elsewhere in the producers?

Yeah, way less medical shit in this cut.

It's way, way more clear that this is a cult.

Want to initiate several sacrifices in order to

pass the evil from Michael into Danny Strode.

What's so crazy is that I feel like any random person on the street.

If you ask them, why does Michael Myers kill?

They would tell you, I think he's trying to kill his whole family, right?

This movie is the movie that I'm trying to do.

The movie is where that narrative comes from.

We knew from the start that he wanted to kill

his sister, and then he was after his niece.

But this is the first time the words wipe out the bloodline are spoken aloud.

And to this day, I think that is still the most common answer.

It's really crazy.

Also in the producers cut before I get too far off track, get this.

Michael isn't taken down my mysterious injections in a beating with a pipe.

Tommy Doyle, with his magic, mastery of runes,

lays out a circle of stones on the floor.

And when Michael enters the circle, he can't leave it.

He's frozen in place, powerless to the influence of the ancient magic.

That's a hell of a thing to look at.

Michael Myers, standing in a hallway like a fucking idiot.

We still close with Loomis saying he's got unfinished business to attend to,

but instead of the camera panning down to the mask on the floor and hearing,

Loomis scream, we actually see Loomis unmasking an unconscious Michael,

only to find Dr. Nguyen under the hood.

Michael disappears into the night, dresses the man in black, and the tattoo

of the thorn appears on the wrist of Dr. Loomis, who screams us into the credits.

There you go.

There's your producers cut.

Somehow, Halloween fans prefer this version.

I think, even with as strange as the theatrical cut is, we dodged a bullet with

this thing being buried for as long as it was.

If there's a script that includes a pile of rips and one

that doesn't, I think I'm always going to prefer the latter.

The mask on the floor shot, which closes the theatrical cut, is extremely

anti-climactic, but that's not the way it was supposed to be.

You see those chains hanging behind Tommy Doyle?

A simple beating with the pipe was just step one.

The follow-up scene was to include Michael being hung by the neck from those chains,

where the onslaught and his death would follow.

Why didn't we see that?

Well, the crew on set had gone into triple overtime, and rather than getting one last

shot or picking up tomorrow, they literally just said fuck it.

Throw the mask on the floor, that's our closer.

I wish I was kidding, but I'm not.

Speaking of dumb shit, how about Dr. Lewis's Burns, right?

There's a quick mention in the film that he got

plastic surgery to remove the damaged tissue.

AKA, Donald Pleasance didn't want to keep sitting in the fucking makeup chair for

hours on end, so they just wrote out the burns.

Fantastic stuff.

I didn't mention the director, Joe Chappelle, at the top of this video.

I did it on purpose.

Joe Chappelle didn't much care for Donald Pleasance, and for that reason,

he cut the role of Dr. Loomis down to only seven minutes of on-screen time.

So fuck, Joe Chappelle.

I'm cutting his inclusion in my video down to someone I do want

to show great respect to, though, is Donald Pleasance himself.

Our long time hero appears in the series for the final time here in Curse, as Mr.

Pleasance unfortunately passed away many months before the film even released.

He was 75 years old, and what a fucking life and career this man had.

If you're anything like me, you've been quoting this man's characters for decades,

so through us, his legacy lives on.

At this moment, I say, go ahead and lift your glass of whatever you're sipping on

in memory of the man himself, Donald Pleasance.

Not only did Donald Pleasance root himself in some of the more

vivid memories of my childhood, but this movie did as well.

I have a specific memory back from the summer of 2002.

My buddy Tim was sleeping over, and he, myself, and my brother were all

going to watch his DVD copy of Halloween, The Curse of Michael Myers.

My brother and I had gotten a used PlayStation 2 for Christmas, and when Tim

popped that disc in, we were greeted with the faithful parental lock.

Now, I didn't set that lock.

My parents didn't set that lock.

They didn't even know how.

So whoever owned this PS2 prior to us put a fucking parental lock on the thing,

and now we couldn't watch this movie.

But this is where the genius of bathroom money Tim Ewers comes into play.

He started digging through the PS2 manual.

He started looking at all the tips and tricks,

all the strategies, and how to fix these things.

And he figured out that when you get to the parental code screen, if you type in

7444, you can completely disable it and watch whatever you want to watch.

Keep that in mind next time your PlayStation 2 won't let you watch an R-rated DVD.

Although that's probably never going to fucking happen to you.

Jesus Christ, I'm old.

It's clear that even though a production of Curse was a fucking nightmare,

tempers flared on set and the film itself was nearly impossible to follow.

I mean, I don't know why I'm wording this, like there's a

beautiful happy ending or a silver lining around this picture.

Halloween 6, god damn it, it's Halloween 6.

Halloween 6 pulled a bigger box office than Halloween 5, but not by much.

And being that this was no longer an independent film being released into the

wild, a $15 million gross was not going to cut it.

The film was looked at as a monetary disappointment by the studio.

A complete failure on the critical side of things, and fans

were now left scratching their heads more than ever before.

Some were straight up done, they'd seen enough.

And could you blame them?

Look, in 1981 Michael Myers was dead.

The franchise had moved on, only to circle back and dig up the slashes remains in

hopes of recapturing that glory, to once again catch lightning in a bottle.

You may not like it, but here's the reality of things.

Bringing Michael Myers back to Halloween was a horrendous swing and a miss.

Halloween 4 is a good movie.

Halloween 5 is an amateur hackneyed piece of shit, and Halloween

6 has no fucking idea what it's even supposed to be doing.

When we were 13 years old, my friends and I

liked Halloween 6 because of the violence.

Who doesn't like an exploding head?

But under any sort of scrutiny?

Hell, when it's watched by anyone who is even slightly paying attention,

it doesn't work.

It's a mess, and it really serves as no shock that

the plug needed to be pulled on this franchise.

Thank you for watching this, the history of Halloween Part 3, the Thorn Trilogy.

This franchise is about to undergo a bigger and stronger left-hand turn than

Season of the Witch brought to the table, and you are not going to want to miss out.

Make sure you stick around for the history of Halloween Part 4, retcons and

resurrections, premiering September 17th, 2021.

If you liked this video and want to support the channel, feel free to head

over to patreon.com slash 616 Entertainment.

This is what I love to do.

I work as hard as I can to ensure these videos

turn out the best that they possibly can be.

And if you want to show some love to a one-man crew, Patreon is the place to be.

Until next time, I love you, and I will see you soon.

Last time out on the history of Halloween Part 3, we covered the Thorn Trilogy.

That's Halloween 4, 5, and 6, which follows Jamie Lloyd, the daughter of the

unfortunately deceased original heroine, Lori Strode.

Halloween 4, the return of Michael Myers, brought the

shape back into the picture and did so with great success.

Halloween 5, the revenge of Michael Myers, was a catastrophic failure on all fronts.

Critically, financially, the whole lot of it was horrendous.

And then there was Halloween, the curse of Michael Myers, which failed to answer

Fives lingering questions in a satisfying manner, and left fans of the franchise as

well as the studio itself in a state of,

well, what the hell are we supposed to do now?

Halloween, the once iconic franchise, was in bad, bad shape.

As a matter of fact, the issues plaguing the

series ran deeper than most are even aware.

The future after curse, or Halloween 6, as I like to call

it, was originally planned to be a straight-to-video release.

Straight-to-video is where once highly regarded horror franchises go to die.

And yes, after the Thorin trilogy, even Halloween was at death's door.

The next step would play out in what was a truly fitting case of life-imitating art,

as Halloween itself, much like its main villain, Michael Myers, refused to be killed.

What's up, Dan Dan?

My name is Ian.

Thank you for tuning in for another installment of the history of Halloween.

After establishing 20 years of lore across six installments, things in this universe

were in a state of disarray, and that's putting it about as nicely as I possibly can.

It just mirrors it, keep getting creepier and creepier in here.

With the clear demotion of a straight-to-video future looming on the

horizon, the series was about to get a frank and stingy and lightning bolt

charged directly into its heart in the shape of its

original star returning to the series that made her.

I'm talking, of course, about Jamie Lee Curtis.

Fundamental parts of the established story needed to be changed, rearranged,

and even undone completely, but what other option

did Miramax and Dimension Films have at this point?

This was one more chance to try and get things right, so sit back, relax,

and get ready for another wild ride in the land of Haddonfield's favorite slasher.

This is the history of Halloween Part 4, retcons, and resurrections.

So that was a hell of a bombshell, right?

Jamie Lee Curtis is back?

The best part is that it wasn't Miramax or Mustafa Akad begging and pleading with the

star of the highest points in the franchise to make a triumphant return,

no.

Laurie Strode coming back to Halloween for the first time since 1981's Halloween 2 is

solely and exclusively credited to Jamie Lee Curtis herself.

And why would she do such a thing?

Her career wasn't failing.

Halloween wasn't her last grasp at relevance.

She was killing the game.

Jamie Lee Curtis has given dozens of interviews over the years regarding her

return to Halloween, and her reason why was clear.

It was important to her to give back to the fanbase that made her career.

It was important to her to say thank you to the people who rocketed her to start him.

Let's take a second to give her a hand for that, because that is awesome.

Especially considering the fact that a script for what was originally titled

Halloween 7, Two Faces of Evil, was already completed and had nothing to

do with Laurie Strode at all, because, I mean, Laurie Strode died somewhere

between Halloween 2 and Halloween 4, duh.

So, obviously, Two Faces of Evil wasn't the film that was put into production.

Jamie Lee Curtis was excited to get back into the shoes of the character that

defined her career, but she wasn't signing on without a care in the world.

There were indeed a list of... not demands, but things she was looking to accomplish.

Number one, she wanted John Carpenter and Debra Hill back on

the team, specifically with Carpenter in the director's chair.

Can you imagine the original Trinity reunited?

Well, I hope you can imagine it, because that's all you're going to get.

Carpenter allegedly agreed to direct Halloween 7 under one condition.

That he'd be paid $10 million to do so.

This wasn't just a flat director's fee, though.

This included what he considered to be back pay and lost royalties dating all the

way back to the 1978 original, a project in

which he was paid a whopping $10,000 to direct.

Miramax and the Weinstein said absolutely not to his request,

and Carpenter basically told him to go fuck themselves.

This term of events unfortunately caused Debra Hill to drop off the project as

well, and would sadly be the last time she was close to the franchise in any way,

and you better do the same for Debra Hill right now, Dan Dan's.

A true legend of the industry.

Number two on Jamie Lee's list was, and this is big, she wanted Michael Myers

killed off for good at the end of the film.

And I mean, for real.

No twists about surviving in Inferno, no turns

where the dynamite gunshots didn't get the job done.

No questions about him slipping away into the night in someone else's clothing.

If she was going to return as Laurie Strode, she wanted finality to the story,

otherwise there was no point.

There'd be no weight behind the decision.

Michael Myers had to die.

That is a huge request, right?

This entire franchise hinges on its villain.

And we already saw the studio try to work without him in Halloween 3, as we covered

on part 2 of this series, so we know how that worked out.

But here's the thing.

They went for it.

And by they, I mean the writer, the director, the studio, they were on board.

Jamie Lee Curtis returning to Halloween made them comfortable

in making this gigantic sacrifice, which is insane.

Though there was one person in particular who founded just a little bit too insane,

but he didn't speak up until the last second.

Put a pin in that.

We'll talk about that later.

I mentioned the writer and director a second ago, and what better time to shed

some light on the engine that made this film move than right now.

First off, in the director's chair, we've got Steve Minor.

If that name sounds familiar to you, it should.

As he directed Friday the 13th part 2, Friday the

13th part 3, 1985's ridiculous at over-the-top house.

The guy had roots and horror prior to this project.

That's for certain.

The writing is another story.

It's a little convoluted, but we're going to get through this as clean as we can.

Here's what's important, and maybe I should have stated this earlier.

The metamorphosis of Halloween 7 becoming Halloween H20 20 years later doesn't

happen without a little film called Scream.

In 1996, Scream blew the lid off the entire horror genre with its

action-packed, super-meta, crazy unpredictable approach to the common slasher.

It was a smash hit, banking nearly $175 million at

the box office, coming from just a $14 million budget.

If you're keeping score, that $175 million box office

is more than all six Halloween films grossed combined.

Yeah, so how does this relate to Halloween?

Well, Scream was distributed by Dimension Films, which was owned by Miramax,

the same company that distributed Halloween.

Seeing a new horror franchise break the bank

wide open, Miramax and Dimension went, hold on.

We're talking about Halloween 7 going straight to video.

Forget that.

Let's get Kevin Williamson, the guy who wrote Scream to write Halloween 7.

We can save this thing.

We can write the ship and make stupid money here.

Let's go.

So that's what they did.

Kevin Williamson came aboard right after Jamie Lee Curtis signed on, and he put

together a treatment for Halloween 7, the Revenge of Laurie Strode.

Fast forward time for the sake of brevity.

Kevin Williamson was extremely busy with tons of other

projects, so his script was handed off to Robert Zappia.

And Zappia's script was eventually cleaned up and retouched by Matt Greenberg.

The title of the film changed many times throughout the writing process,

from the aforementioned Halloween 7, the Revenge of Laurie Strode, to Halloween

blood ties, and eventually the final title was set in place.

Halloween H20, 20 years later.

The title of this film has been made fun of from literally the day it was announced.

I understand the 20 years later part.

What I don't understand is the redundancy in how it's communicated.

Halloween.

Gotcha.

Good.

H20.

So not the molecular structure of water.

No.

H20 breaks down into Halloween 20.

So that means this part of the title already is Halloween Halloween 20.

And then, because we're not done, there's 20 years later the tagline.

So the full title, Halloween H20, 20 years

later, breaks down into Halloween Halloween 20.

20 years later.

It's horrible.

It's terrible.

I've wondered for years who came up with this dog shit title,

but I learned in my research it was actually Jamie Lee Curtis.

And this movie wouldn't have happened without her,

so I'll give it a pass for that, but come on, man.

It's terrible.

I'm gonna leave it there.

I'm not gonna bury it any harder out of respect for the Queen, but we gotta be real.

Before we go any further into the behind-the-scenes material though,

why don't we talk about the story that this film tells?

Here's an extremely important distinction I'm gonna throw out right up front.

Halloween H20 completely rewrites the franchise.

Halloween 3 is a given.

It's not related to anything and was a failed experiment, but I'm serious.

Halloween 4, 5, and 6 never happened.

You know all that time we put into following Jamie Lloyd?

She never existed.

Michael Myers sitting in a coma in a hospital for 10 years following Halloween 2?

Never happened.

H20 retcons the entire Thorn Trilogy.

Michael crying in Halloween 5, the man in black, the cult from Halloween

6, Laurie Strode's off-screen death mentioned in Halloween 4.

None of it ever happened.

Now you know why they strayed from calling this one Halloween 7, right?

You can't have 7 without 3, 4, 5, and 6 for Christ's sake.

Halloween and Halloween 2 are now the only

canon entries in the franchise from here on out.

So with that in mind, with all those films

erased, the last bits of story we have are this.

Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis burned at the end of Halloween

2, and Laurie Strode was taken away in an ambulance.

That's it.

Now, here in 1998, 20 years have passed, and Michael Myers is back.

He breaks into the home of Nurse Chambers, who's reprising her role from the first

two films, where he steals the file on the one that got away, his long-lost sister,

Laurie Strode.

He also kills two neighborhood boys and slits Nurse Chambers' throat on the way out.

What a comeback.

The shape steals a car and is gonezo before the cops even find the bodies.

The detectives mentioned that Nurse Chambers had taken care of Dr.

Loomis for years after his unfortunate accident in 1978.

I don't understand why they'd still go with the... he survived the explosion

route, seeing as though they mentioned here that Loomis had died a few years earlier.

Donald Pleasant died in real life in 1995.

There was no possible way he could have reprised his role, and with the retcon in

place, why not just go with him tragically passing in the explosion?

He sacrificed himself for Laurie all those years ago.

Is that not more sad and more heroic at the same time?

I don't know, whatever.

We see the newspaper clippings that adorn the departed doctor's entire office,

one of which states that Laurie Strode died in a car accident.

Well, that sucks, right?

Nope, because she didn't really die.

Laurie faked her death and went into some sort of witness protection deal,

and is now known as Carrie Tate, the headmistress of a private school in

Summer Glen, California, with her son, John.

John and Laurie, uh, Carrie, Carrie Tate.

I can't go blowing her cover here.

They don't get along very well.

John knows about his mother's past, and because of what she's gone through,

she's an extremely overprotective hover parent.

And it's hard to blame her, right?

But at the same time, imagine being John, having lived your entire life without a

single inkling of anything that troubles your mother, still

being the dictating force in your every waking moment.

It'd be exhausting, and it would feel truly unfair.

Carrie, I got the name right that time, isn't coping so well herself.

Daily visions of her brother, night tears that

cause her to thrash and scream in her sleep.

A cocktail of pills in the medicine cabinet,

and a cocktail in a glass every couple minutes.

She's an alcoholic, self-medicating, paranoid

delusional wreck, but with a good heart.

It says a lot about Laurie slash Carrie, that even with her past trauma and current

day addictions, she hasn't become a bad person.

When more often than not, these sort of characters go off the deep end and wind up

becoming villains themselves, whether they mean to or not.

Her inability to move on can be directly compared to Rachel in Halloween 5,

who, despite going through something extremely similar, is totally fine,

just a year later.

This is what good writing and filmmaking looks

like compared to bad writing and filmmaking, folks.

Carrie and John have a big blow up, and after speaking to her boyfriend about

it, she decides that she's carried this wait for 20 years.

It might be time to let go of her trauma's stranglehold on her son's life.

She even goes as far as revealing her secret past to her boyfriend, who,

when he realizes that the story he's heard for years is now

standing right in front of him, he has no idea what to think.

This is all well and good, but hey, remember that whole It's been 20 years,

you need to let it go thing?

Well, he's here.

Michael Myers has returned to finish the job.

He slaughters John's friends in gruesome fashion.

He even hits John with the old stabby in the thigh

gimmick before coming face to face with his sister.

A reunion 20 years in the making.

But just as soon as he shows up, he's gone.

This might be a good time to regroup.

Whoops, Michael knifes Lori's boyfriend in the back

and hangs him there, straight out of Halloween too.

The game is officially on now, and just like she did 20 years ago,

Lori has answers for Michael's attacks.

She's not one of these jibronies going down in one fell swoop.

She gets her son and his girlfriend out of harm's way just in the nick of time,

and then she tells them to go on without her.

She'll catch up.

Lori Strode is tired of running.

She's done being afraid.

This shit is coming to an end, and it's coming to an end right now.

Seeing someone not run away, but arm themselves and

audibly challenge the shape, this is fucking crazy.

Lori storms back into the school, acts in hand as

Michael descends upon her like a venomous spider.

This chase is heart racing stuff, and when you boil it down here,

Lori beats the shit out of Michael in this battle.

He reopens that 1978 wound on her arm, but so what?

Lori impales him with a flagpole.

She needs to write the unmentionables, which he knows sells.

That's how you know he's truly inhuman.

She stabs him nine goddamn times before he goes

ass over tea kettle off a balcony through a table.

This might sound like I'm reading the description

of an old ECW title match, but I'm not.

This showdown is just that hardcore.

After all this, the ambulances arrive.

They're loading the bodies of the victims, and Lori knows it wasn't enough.

She's seen evil before.

She's come face to face with it.

She's well aware that Michael is still alive in

that body bag, so she hijacks the van at gunpoint.

Right on cue, the shape springs to life, and Lori jacks the

brakes, sending her brother crashing through the windshield.

She taunts him to stand up and nails him at full speed before sending the van down

the hillside, where she's tossed from the vehicle and Michael is crushed between a

tree and the falling automobile with a sickening crunch.

Even still, Lori strode knows that her brother's evil

heart still beats his vile lung still draw breath.

As she approaches, Michael reaches out to her.

For the first time ever, these siblings extend a hand in the other's direction.

But she knows.

Lori knows that whatever this thing is in front of her, it isn't

extending a hand in love, or regret, or sorrow, or remorse.

She's seen it before.

This is a wounded and desperate predator, so she cuts his fucking head off with an

axe, as the original theme that carries us into the darkness.

Holy shit, this was it, this was the end.

No swerves, no secrets, no sneaking away off to the side.

Lori strode killed Michael Myers.

She cut his fucking head off.

She saw to it herself that her brother's evil existence came to an end by her hand.

This is without a doubt the most definitive and most

shocking ending in Halloween history up to this point.

And what a way to redeem itself, right?

These characters, this story, especially considering

the mess that we just came from, this was fantastic.

A truly, truly satisfying ending to a legendary horror storyline.

Before we get into the critical reception in the box office and all that good stuff,

I want to talk about some of the little things.

I adore the fact that the last thing we hear in Halloween 2 is the immortal Mr.

Sandman song, as Lori is being driven away in the ambulance.

Mr. Sandman.

Halloween H2O opens with the neighborhood kids carving pumpkins, fallen leaves on

the ground, and Mr. Sandman playing in the background.

I mentioned Scream earlier in how that film's success

breathed life back into the flatlining Halloween.

Well, check this out.

What movie is playing on the TV and Scream?

Halloween.

And what movie are the girls watching in Halloween H2O?

Scream 2.

A little tip of the hat, right?

Halloween H2O is a love letter to horror in general.

Joseph Gordon Levitt's character, Jimmy, shows up in a hockey mask.

Remember, director Steve Miner was behind Friday the 13th parts 2 and 3,

so there's no question where that came from.

See that decoration on the porch?

That's the Butterball Centabyte from Hellraiser.

We even get Jamie Lee Curtis's real life mom, Janet Lee of Psycho fame,

playing a character named Norma for God's sake.

Janet's appearance in the film was at the request of Jamie Lee Curtis herself,

who not only wanted to share the screen with her mother, but

wanted to let her mom close out her big screen career in style.

Also, yeah, Norma's car is literally the car from Psycho.

I'm telling you, this is a tribute to horror that spared no expense.

The fate speech that Laurie sits through in class back in Halloween 1, she's giving

the speech here in H2O, and it's John's girlfriend

Molly, who notices the shape out through the window.

In an interesting little tidbit, the narration at the beginning,

the original Blackest Eyes promo from Halloween 1 that we hear over the credits,

the crew had zero access to the original recording.

The only audio they had was from the movie itself, which was

already mixed with music and ambient noise underneath it.

So that Dr. Loomis voice you here?

The Blackest Eyes.

The Devil's Eyes.

That's not Donald Pleasance.

That's Tom Kane, who you probably know very well.

He was Professor Utonium in the Powerpuff Girls.

He was Yoda all the way through the Clone Wars.

He was Commissioner Gordon in Batman Arkham Asylum.

Magneto in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, the announcer from the Eric Andre show.

Trust me, you've heard him before.

It's also worth mentioning that Jamie Lee Curtis

lobbied hard for a cameo from actor Mike Myers.

She wanted a scene where he walked past her on the street and she did a double take.

This doesn't make any sense at all.

It's just a stupid joke that would feel totally out of place here, but it doesn't

matter because Mike Myers flat-out refused and

apparently was not interested in the slightest.

Good.

Oh, and Danielle Harris, our Jamie Lloyd actress, tried to get herself a cameo here

in H2O, which apparently the studio shut down hard.

Also good.

Look, I have no problem with Danielle Harris.

She's great, but when you start feeling a serious

movie with in-jokes, it just becomes distracting.

Now, for as positive as I've been up to this point, I do not want to paint the

picture that Halloween H2O is flawless, because that's just not true.

There are a number of things that bobbed me with this film

and who the hell would I be to not share them with you.

It bothers me that with this retcon, the team had the chance to solve some

lingering problems that they completely ignored.

This is a sequel to Halloween 2, right?

Where the last thing we saw was Michael burning alive?

Tell me why.

Given another chance to make it right, they've once again completely ignored the

fact that Michael should be scarred and burnt beyond belief.

Even the Thorn Trilogy did a better job in this

department by at least showing the burns on his hands.

How about Michael's eyes that Laurie shot out with the .357 Magnum in Halloween 2?

The eye holes on the shapes mask are now larger than they've ever been.

And the film makes zero attempt to hide his eyes with creative lighting,

so we can clearly see them every single time he's on screen.

No scars, no scratches, nothing.

It's well known that the orchestral score for Halloween H2O by John Ottman created

gigantic issues for the studio, as it did not fit at all.

But

what about some of these sound effects?

Is this a Looney Tunes episode or something?

I also really can't stand Michael's mannerisms in this movie.

He's always hunched forward, and when he's not stalking someone, he walks like

somebody who has never seen a camera before and

doesn't know what to do when the red light is on.

It's a horrendous portrayal.

I'm sorry.

Inside the costume this time around was stuntman Chris Durand, who, in his words,

wanted to play Michael as if he were a big cat, haunting his prey.

Okay, dude.

Well, it sucks.

Sorry.

And finally, when it comes to issues with this movie,

we have to talk about the infamous mask debacle.

If you've ever seen Halloween H2O before, you

may have an idea of what I'm talking about.

Even if you're not a crazy person who has seen it a hundred times like I have,

there are four completely different masks used in this one film.

And sometimes the mask switches back and forth in the exact same scene.

Here's the deal.

Production began with a mask created by KNB-EFX.

It was stark white with next to zero detail.

This thing had a straight up baby face.

Smoother than marble countertops.

To put it bluntly, in my opinion, it looked like pure shit.

It looks like an $11 knockoff.

The issue, though, is that the Weinstein's and Miramax didn't

say anything about it until three weeks into production.

The bulk of Michael's scenes were already in the

can when the studio called and said absolutely not.

That thing is hideous.

You need to reshoot it all.

The Weinstein's wanted director Steve Miner to use a version of the Halloween 6

mask that had been refined by John Carl Butler.

Miner hated this mask and flat out refused which

nearly resulted in his firing from the film.

You'll notice the Halloween 6 mask in the opening scene and nowhere else.

Because that was the one day Steve Miner was like, you know what, fuck it.

Put the fucking thing on and let's get this done.

The final design, which appears in the vast majority

of the film, was created by the legendary Stan Winston.

And I mentioned before that I don't like this thing, sorry Stan.

No disrespect, it's just not my taste.

The eye holes are too big and the hairs fucked up.

I'm doing a whole video ranking the Michael Myers masks.

Keep an eye out for that.

Check it out though, frame by frame in the same scenes, the

mask switches back and forth between the Winston and the KNB.

Because the studio only ordered reshoots of the close-ups.

Did they really think no one would notice?

It sticks out like nobody's business.

These things don't look anything alike.

And oddly enough, this isn't the first time KNB-EFX wound up in this position.

And another very strange connection to scream.

There is an issue with the mask that can be produced for that picture.

If you watch very closely, you'll see this thing switching

back and forth between the KNB and the fun world designs.

What a weird way to be linked.

If you thought the mask issue was finished

there though, oh no, I saved the worst for last.

There's one close-up that the studio apparently forgot to order a reshoot on.

And instead of cutting it out or going in last second and fixing it, they assured

the director, the editor, the whole crew, that they could have it fixed with CGI.

And this ungodly abomination is what they came up with.

What the fucking hell is that?

How in God's name do you not cut this out?

It's awful!

It would have been less jarring if they left the

fucking KNB piece of shit here instead of this garbage.

Good lord, man.

There's one specific line in Halloween H2O that always makes me laugh and it's the

most innocuous, stupidest, most throwaway line of the whole movie, but sometimes

it's the little things that stick with you.

There's a part where Josh Hartnett and his teenage friends are preparing their little

secret dinner date and they need the corkscrew to get the wine bottle open.

I don't know if Josh Hartnett pissed somebody off or if the person doing an

impression of him for the ADR just didn't do a very good job, but it's clearly not

Josh Hartnett and the person doing this impression

sounds like they're making fun of him so bad.

Where's the face?

We need a corkscrew, man.

What the hell is that?

We need a corkscrew, man.

We need a corkscrew, man.

To this day, if my girlfriend and I are sitting down to dinner and one of us needs

something out of the kitchen, whatever the hell it is, maybe it's a fork or a night

for a spoon, one of us will always say every time we need the corkscrew, man.

And that stupid voice.

I know it's a ridiculous story.

I don't know why we do it, but like I said, sometimes it's the little things

from these movies that stick with you and we need the corkscrew, man.

We need a corkscrew, man.

Definitely stuck with me.

So with all this in mind, with the return of Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode,

with the erasure of the incoherent thorn trilogy, a practically fresh start for the

franchise, how did Halloween H2O perform at the box office?

All of the pieces were in place to shock some life back into this decrepit corpse,

right?

If this doesn't work, nothing will.

Well, guess what?

H2O was a gargantuan success, breaking in over $75 million at the box office,

breaking the series records set all the way back in 1978.

Critical reviews were middling at best, but fans of the franchise had spoken.

Halloween H2O was the step in the right direction

they'd been clamoring for for the last 17 years.

Sure, Halloween 4 was good, but who is Michael Myers without Laurie Strode?

No offense to Jamie Lloyd, but would you rather watch Stone Cold vs.

Bret Hart or Stone Cold vs.

Bruce Hart?

With her return and smashing success, Jamie Lee

Curtis proved that Michael Myers isn't the draw.

Laurie Strode is the draw.

You may scoff at that, but look at the numbers and try and tell me otherwise.

We all love this shape, but the facts are the facts, and this is undeniable.

Before we move on, I want to share another personal aspect of this film with you guys.

This new timeline, Halloween, Halloween 2,

Halloween H2O, this trilogy, this is my timeline.

Michael Myers breaks out of Smith's Grove Sanitarium in 1978 and goes on a rampage.

Halloween and Halloween 2.

And 20 years later, he returns with a vengeance, only to

have the cold and cruel blade turned on him in the end.

Halloween H2O.

When I think of the Halloween films and the lore of Michael Myers, for me,

this is it.

This is the whole shebang.

Halloween 1 through 6 with the Thorn Trilogy, that's something else entirely.

Halloween 3 in its own little universe.

That's also something else entirely.

Look, I'm going to do an entire video explaining all the different Halloween

timelines because there's a shitload of them, believe it or not.

So keep an eye out for that, but yeah, this is it for me.

I'm calling it the 20 years trilogy.

That sounds good.

Why not?

In my mind, that was indeed Michael Myers being decapitated at the end of H2O.

Wait, what?

2002's Halloween Resurrection is what happens

when you just can't leave well enough alone.

You heard me right.

That wasn't Michael Myers getting his head cut off at the end of H2O.

Are you ready for this load of shit?

It was an EMS worker who had arrived early and was

checking on Michael after his fall off the balcony.

The shape sprang to life, crushed his voice box so he couldn't speak,

choked him out, switched clothes with him, and disappeared into the night undetected.

What a load of bull fucking shit.

Jamie Lee Curtis signed on for H2O with the

sole purpose of closing the story and moving on.

So how did this happen?

Well, good old Mustafa Akan technically owns the Michael Myers character,

and it wasn't until the last second that he threatened to cancel the film if there

wasn't a backdoor excuse built into H2O's ending.

Jamie Lee Curtis, director Steve Miner, everybody else involved with this project

all agreed that at the end of their movie,

that's Michael Myers getting his head cut off.

That's the end of the story.

Whatever else they're going to do next, who gives a fuck?

This may be a controversial opinion, and that's fine, but here it is.

For me, the worst thing that ever happened to Halloween up to

this point was Mustafa Akan regaining full control back in 1988.

That was the day that an artist's creative integrity died, and

Akan's desire to milk this franchise to death took full control.

And it's a goddamn shame.

So with all that said, with Jamie Lee Curtis adamant that H2O be the official

conclusion, how the hell did they get her back for Halloween resurrection?

I'll tell you how.

Number one, it cost a lot of money to get her on board.

Number two, she signed a contract for a 30 second cameo in which she demanded that

Lori Strode be killed so that she could walk away from this shit forever.

I'm serious.

30 seconds.

To Jamie Lee Curtis, the story was already over, so this didn't even count.

As the years have passed, she's gone as far as calling

Halloween resurrection a joke and a piece of shit.

Well, Halloween resurrection was a joke.

Look at her character here for God's sake.

Lori Strode looks how Jamie Lee Curtis feels.

And yeah, Lori Strode is indeed killed off in the first 15 minutes of resurrection.

It took a little longer than 30 seconds, which cost the studio a lot more money.

You want to know the best part?

Rumor has it that Jamie Lee Curtis donated her salary on this film to charity.

So holding up the studio for more money went straight

from the pockets of the mega-rich to the very needy.

Hell yeah, Mrs. Curtis.

Halloween resurrection sucks.

It completely sucks.

I'll give it this though.

It's not the same kind of suck that Halloween 5 is.

I would rather paper cut my gooch than ever watch Halloween 5 again.

Whereas resurrection falls into the so bad it's good category.

It's a guilty pleasure.

A guilty, shitty, terrible, how did this even get made type of pleasure?

But it's a guilty pleasure, regardless.

Let's get into the story this film tells and then we'll talk about how it was made.

What do you think?

Two nurses at the psychiatric hospital where Lori Strode is locked up filling the

audience and how this film is even possible.

The whole, she killed the wrong person horse shit.

You know what's funny too?

Is the Michael sneaking into the woods in the EMS outfit?

That's the only footage from the H2O set.

The unmasking of the severed head was shot on Resurrection's lot.

Which is clear as day, seeing as though it's a new mask.

Anyway, Lori's been waiting for Michael to show up for four years.

He does and she traps him.

Goddamn, she has his number, doesn't she?

Well, it turns out she's a fucking idiot because she still doesn't believe it's

Michael, despite him chasing her for five minutes with a knife

while exuding all of the Michael Myers energy in the world.

He snatches her up, stabs her in the back, and this is where Halloween Resurrection

gets its first moment of feeling like straight up amateur fan fiction.

Lori Strode kisses her brother right on the lips

and departs our mortal coil with the tagline.

I'll see you in hell.

The end.

I mean, you'd think it would end there, right?

What the hell does Michael do now?

He just gained the finale to his story that they wouldn't give Lori.

He got her.

Mission accomplished.

It's over.

Only.

It's not.

Michael gives his knife to a patient who idolizes and

obsesses over serial killers before departing the hospital.

So the embodiment of evil, the child with

the devil's eyes, realizes he's a celebrity.

The shape is a mark for himself.

Who knows?

They never even come back to this guy.

But the story does continue.

How?

Well, Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks, or Freddy Enora as their characters are

named, are starting a reality show called Danger Tainment, where they're going to

get college kids to spend the night poking around

the Myers house while wearing webcams on their heads.

And if they make it through the night, their tuition will be covered.

Or some bullshit like that.

So there you go.

The rest of Michael Myers' existence is literally him being grumpy that there are

people poking around his house, and I'm not making that up.

These characters couldn't be any more one note.

They couldn't be any more cookie cutter.

Take Rudy, for example.

He's training to be a chef.

All he fucking talks about is food.

That's it.

That's his whole character.

I like Rudy.

I think he's funny.

I root for Rudy.

But that's all he gets.

He's the chef.

Jen doesn't get anything.

She's just Sarah's annoying friend.

Sarah is our main girl, our protagonist.

If you can call her that.

She's really just one of the people.

Nothing sets her apart from anyone else.

She's got an online friendship with a guy named Deckard, not Deckard, Deckard,

who, unbeknownst to Sarah, is just a freshman lying about his name and age.

Great.

Deckard does have a Resident Evil 2 poster

in his room though, so at least there's that.

It's really out of focus, but I've seen this movie a

hundred times for some reason, and I know my Resident Evil.

Watch the history of Resident Evil, a decade of decay right after this video ends.

Link in description.

So all of these idiots go into the Myers house for the Danger Tainment Show,

and Deckard is watching live from a party he's at with his friend.

There's creepy shit all over the house.

Chain harnesses, a high chair with gnarly straps on it, spooky drawings.

It's all a little strange.

It feels off.

It soon revealed that Freddy and Nora, the creators of Danger Tainment,

staged it all.

These are props.

They wanted to give the audience something to be scared about, so they filled this

long abandoned house with fake limbs and planted drawings.

This is discovered when two of the characters sneak off into a hidden

basement to have sex, and a wall gives way.

They initially freak out until they realize it was gimmick to begin with.

Only one of them spots another hidden passage, and this one is real.

Michael Myers has been living underneath his old house in the sewer for 25 years.

He's been eating shit rats and he sleeps with a raggedy

and doll in which he has shoved nails into the eye sockets.

Have we not learned by now that clarifying details about Michael's backstory cannot

be done without it completely ruining the mystique?

Look, I don't need to know where he lives.

I don't need to know what he eats.

I certainly don't need to know that he sleeps

on a shitty cot with a little fucking doll.

And he's so emo that he's shoved nails into the doll's eye sockets.

I don't need this.

But yeah, being that this is Michael's room, he's mad that this girl came barging

in, so he impales her on a bent fence post.

The rest of the film surrounds Michael stalking and doing away with all these

one-note morons in pretty entertaining fashion.

I'll give it that.

And I'd be an asshole to not put over the scene where Busta rhymes, I mean Freddy.

Dressed as Michael Myers in an attempt to scare the

people on his show, runs into the real Michael Myers.

The problem is, Freddy thinks this is one of his crew stealing his gimmick.

So rather than being scared, he cuts a promo on Michael.

You go ruin the whole of that.

I dare that you shit ain't working on doing something.

This is dumb as fuck.

It's one of those how has this series come to this moment, but it is funny.

See, this is the so bad it's good thing I was talking about.

Let's throw a few more things at you in the so bad it's good department.

At one point Rudy gets knifed into the door.

We see the blade of the butcher knife enter

his chest and exit the other side of the door.

Do you know how long this fucking knife would have to be for

it to go into his chest and pass out the back of the door?

This isn't a goddamn broadsword.

So how is this possible?

Sometimes there's static on the webcam feeds and when it glitches out,

we see flashes of Michael Myers face.

This doesn't make any sense at all.

I don't even think I have to explain why it doesn't make any sense.

Almost every time the shape is on screen, we get a

close up of his face and we can hear a rattlesnake.

What the hell is that?

Why a rattlesnake?

Rewind to the beginning, Laurie catches Michael in that trap on the roof.

How the fuck did she make this trap?

It's got a remote controlled motorized poly mechanism.

You're telling me she built this thing up here?

Is she MacGyver?

Shit, is that too dated?

Does anyone even know who MacGyver is anymore?

Okay, back to what we were, but still continuing with the so bad it's good,

because that's practically the entire film.

It comes down to only Freddy and Sarah left alive.

Michael is stalking them, but they're able to evade.

How?

Oh, well, through Sarah's palm pilot, of course.

Deckard, who is watching live, is telling her where Michael is,

as he's got all the feeds pulled up on the screen.

Why doesn't Sarah just call the goddamn police?

She's got a phone in her hands!

Who knows?

Anyway, the final confrontation sees Sarah fighting Michael with a shitty chainsaw,

and Freddy literally beating the absolute shit

out of Michael with the use of his kung fu.

Yep.

Freddy screams and howls like Bruce Lee and delivers jumping spinning hook kicks,

and Michael just stands there and takes it.

I swear to Christ, Michael lets Freddy hit him like ten times in this movie.

He eventually tosses Freddy across the room.

It looks bad for our surviving duo, and hold on.

Freddy shocks Michael in the dick and balls with

a live wire, and Michael Myers screams in pain.

Yes, that is the first time we have ever heard Michael Myers voice.

And it's because he got shocked in the dick and balls with a live wire.

I hate this movie.

Sarah and Freddy escape the blaze, and Michael's corpse is hauled away to the

morgue, where it's revealed in the most shit-hole, useless, uninspired,

thoughtless, wasteful, stupid-nothing ending that he is still alive.

He really wasn't, though, in a way, because this second timeline, the one that

retconned out four, five, and six, meets its

end right here on the back of Resurrection.

How did it come to this?

How is the sequel to the first great Halloween film, and what must have been

ten years, fucked up so badly, so quickly?

We've already covered Mustafood's tampering with

the franchise that ruined the finality of H2O.

No need to retread that ground.

But honestly, we had Rick Rosenthal back as the director here.

This is the guy that directed Halloween too!

On that alone, it sounds like Resurrection could have been pretty cool, right?

But it's not.

It sucks.

It doesn't even feel like a Halloween film for

one, and I'll give you one guess as to why that is.

If your answer was, because it wasn't a Halloween film, they added Michael Myers

and the Halloween license to an already existing idea, well, you win again.

I'm serious.

Halloween Resurrection's script was written by Larry Brand, who has confirmed

that he'd been wanting to write something inspired by the 1898 H.G.

Wells classic War of the Worlds, which was infamously broadcast over the

radio waves by Orson Welles in 1938, causing mass hysteria from listeners who

believe the alien invasion story to be real.

Brand looked at War of the Worlds as a fake story that listeners thought was real.

And had an idea for a story where the real events were perceived by an audience to be

fake, which occurs here, as the viewers of the Danger Tainment webcast comment on the

shapes actual murders as having great special effects.

Brand had kicked this thing around, and when he was put in front of Mustafa

Akad, he tossed out the idea and just dropped Michael Myers into the middle of

the whole thing, which Akad obviously loved.

Brand's script was fucked with a ton by both Akad and Dimension Films,

as you might imagine.

He wanted the movie to be titled Michael Myers dot com, which is...

I mean, I think it's horrendous.

But on the flip side, his original ending is way better than the trash we were given.

After the fire fades, EMTs and cops and firemen are at the scene, and Michael's

charred body eerily sits up, just like the old days.

Only instead of getting up and walking away, he would crumble to ash,

fading into nothing but a memory.

Obviously, this wasn't filmed.

Why?

Because it's an inarguable death.

You can't come back from that.

So there's no way in hell Akad was gonna let that get through.

How would he continue to sequelize the franchise if his cash cow were killed?

And listen, Larry Brand knew Resurrection wasn't good.

In an interview with Taking Shape from Script to Scream, which is a fantastic

book about the Halloween series that I've been using for a ton of my research,

Brand said, look, this may sound weird coming from the guy who wrote Halloween

Resurrection, but I do have standards when I write.

That is hilarious.

And seriously, Taking Shape is great, and there's an Amazon link in the

description of this video if you're interested in

supporting the authors through buying their book.

They've done an excellent job with it, and even as a

lifelong fan, I've learned a ton through reading it.

Highly recommended.

But back to business, yeah.

Rick Rosenthal, Halloween 2's director, became

the first person to ever return to the franchise.

And Halloween 2 is great in my book, but this one sucks.

And it's not just the story that clearly had Michael Myers added last second,

it's not just the hollow and lifeless characters, but the film itself.

How in the name of my ass did they reuse the

exact same scream six times inside of 20 minutes?

Did they think no one would notice this?

How is it that we see this guy reacting to the footage on screen, only for him to

then enter the room for the first time and ask

what everyone is watching just minutes later?

With as large a team as a big film like this has, how does a glaring mistake like

this make it into the final cut without being rearranged?

Several different cameras were used to shoot resurrection and they're swapped in

and out interchangeably, despite producing

completely different looking visual aesthetics.

One of the main sticking points fans have with

Halloween resurrection is Buster Rimes character Freddy.

The general consensus seems to be, and I agree with this by the way,

that the Freddy character is awesome.

He's hilarious.

He's full of his own shit, he's entertaining as hell, but he doesn't

really seem to fit in with the Halloween franchise.

And he certainly shouldn't be hitting Michael Myers with

jumping spinning kicks that would make Edson Barbosa blush.

It boils down to this, and some of you are probably mad at me that I didn't talk

about LL Cool J and Halloween H2O, but it was by design.

I knew I was going to talk about him here, and I didn't want to be redundant.

Halloween H2O was blessed with a side character named Ronnie, an erotic fiction

writer who works as a security guard in order to pay his bills.

He's played by the one and only LL Cool J, who absolutely nails it.

He's funny, you want him to survive, and luckily, he does.

He even learns from his trauma, vowing to make his next book an erotic thriller.

Ronnie is great.

Well, the studio wanted Ronnie to come back for Halloween Resurrection,

but they decided they couldn't afford LL Cool J, who had continued to work in both

music and film, crushing it on both fronts.

So with LL Cool J out of the picture, we've still got a studio wanting to appeal

to the African-American audience, so they've inserted buster rhymes.

And those are their words, by the way, not mine.

Writer Larry Brandt told taking shape co-author Dustin McNeil that there's a

very real thing in horror films where the audience likes

to see characters who look like themselves getting killed.

He stated, that's why it's always young people getting killed in slasher movies,

because young people go see slasher movies.

If we set it in an old folks home, no one would go see it.

So I understand why they would want an ethnically diverse cast.

The Freddy role wasn't originally written the way buster rhymes played it.

Buster rhymes was given free reign to completely change his dialogue,

from ad-libbing lines on the spot to completely

changing the original wording of what was on the page.

And you know what?

Audiences fucking loved it.

I mentioned earlier that I think Freddy is hilarious, and I'm not alone.

In the original cut of the film, Freddy dies.

He doesn't make it out alive.

In test screening surveys, the crowds made it clear.

They liked Freddy, and they wanted more of him, and the studio listened.

Much of what we see from buster rhymes was added in after the film was finished,

and obviously they rewrote the ending, which sees Freddy heroically carrying our

original main character over his shoulder to

safety, busting out one-liners as he does so.

And that's where my problem lies.

If buster rhymes was doing Bruce Lee moods and cracking

jokes on another horror villain, it would work way better.

The problem isn't buster rhymes.

The problem is that they have him doing this over-the-top shit in a franchise

that, across its 24 years of existence, has

never done anything remotely close to this.

Jason went toe-to-toe with that boxer on a rooftop, and Jason takes Manhattan,

right?

Freddy Krueger has been fighting wizards and hot punk rock

chicks and doing comic book battles for over a decade.

But Michael Myers doesn't find himself playing these sort of silly games,

and these one-liners and comedic situations just feel horribly out of place.

In part 3 of the history of Halloween, I shared with you that my podcast co-host,

the artist formerly known as Mike Charles, considers Michael Myers shedding tears in

Halloween 5 to be the worst bit of character assassination he's ever witnessed.

For me though, I can't forgive this.

No one should be standing in front of Michael Myers, hitting him with jumpkicks,

using kung-fu to blast him out a window, and actually winning the fight,

only to continually assault the shape verbally as he glides away.

That's a sin that should be punishable by law.

I don't care if it's buster rhymes or Anderson Silva.

Nobody should be getting the better of Michael Myers in a fistfight.

It's stupid.

Laurie gets the better of him in H2O because,

number one, she's armed to the fucking teeth.

And number two, every time she gets one over on him, it's an ambush.

It's a sucker shot, a sneak attack.

Buster rhymes charges up his special move and then lands it without an issue.

I can't fucking talk about this anymore.

Like I said though, Halloween Resurrection is so

bad that it falls into the guilty pleasure slot.

I'll always have a soft spot for Freddy and his bullshit, and here's why.

It's because Halloween Resurrection was the first

film of the franchise that I ever saw in theaters.

I was 11 years old and I went to the AMC in Crestwood,

Illinois with my buddy Bathroom Money Tim Ears.

Now if you're asking yourself, how did an 11 and 12

year old kid get in to see Halloween Resurrection?

It's rated R.

Well, Tim's mom brought us.

So that the capitations, the boobs, all the blood, the swearing, it was fine.

We had parental guidance.

What a fucking joke.

When it comes down to it, this eighth installment in the franchise was half baked.

No, it wasn't half baked.

This was maybe quarter baked at best.

A story unrelated to Michael Myers shoehorning the villain

in at the last second to cash in at the box office.

Worthless characters will never see or hear from again.

Seriously, Sarah and Deckard don't even have a resolution at the end.

It's literally just a text that says, you're alive.

Fucking whoopee.

And yet another ending that resolves and finishes absolutely nothing.

Right when the college kids get to the house, one of them immediately opts out of

putting in any effort to uncovering the secrets of Michael Myers.

You don't have to do anything.

Aren't we supposed to be looking for answers?

Alright, the devil made him do it.

I'm done.

If this isn't a commentary on how the studio, Mustafa Akad, Rick Rosenthal,

Larry Brand, and everyone else involved in this piece of shit

felt about the state of the franchise, I don't know what is.

Halloween Resurrection drew less than half of H2O's box office

gross, pulling in just $37 million against a $15 million budget.

Critics burn this thing alive across the board, and I've never met anyone in my

life who enjoys this film for any other reason than, yeah, it sucks.

I love it though.

After taking a colossal step forward with 1998's Halloween H2O, Halloween

Resurrection goes and completely ruins everything

all over again, this time beyond repair.

Not only did they kill off their star and Laurie Strode, but they failed to make

even one new star across this entire eighth installment,

leaving Halloween completely dead in the water.

I mentioned that the second timeline ends here, and oh boy did it end on a flat note.

What was to come was not another retcon or a shakeup, no.

Halloween was truly fucked.

Flatlined.

And once again in danger of slipping into the direct-to-video market, all until a

new writer and director was hired to wipe the slate clean and start fresh.

It was time for Halloween to be rebooted, but that's a story for next time.

Thank you so much for watching this, the history

of Halloween Part 4 retcons and resurrections.

These two films are the epitome of one step forward and two steps back,

are they not?

Next time up we're gonna wrap things up real nice with the history of Halloween

Part 5 from reboot to reborn, premiering October 14th, 2021.

Yes indeed, that is one day prior to the release of the brand new film,

Halloween Kills.

I'm gonna have you at the edge of your seat

ready to take in the next chapter in Halloween.

Goddamn, it's almost like I planned it this way all along.

If you loved this video and want to support the channel, feel free to head

over to patreon.com slash 616 Entertainment.

I'm a one-man crew.

I write these videos, I research these videos, I shoot

these videos, I edit these videos, I do it all myself.

And if you want to support a one-man crew, patreon.com

slash 616 Entertainment is the place to do so.

You don't have to, but if you decide to, won't piss me off.

Either way though, I love ya, and I will see you next time.

Jesus Christ.

I sprayed so much fog in this room.

It won't even turn on now.

Halloween H2O seemed to finally provide closure to the

20-plus year history of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode.

When another half-hazard, half-ass, dim-witted sequels released just four

years later, fans felt like they'd been lied to.

And the majority decided they'd been shit on for the last time.

Halloween Resurrection couldn't achieve half of H2O's success, and now,

Halloween was drifting out to sea.

Rutterless, aimless, and honestly, pointless.

Mustafo Akkad and the powers that be were so strapped for ideas that they listed a

poll on HalloweenMovies.com, literally asking fans what they should do next.

There was even an idea to continue on without

Michael Myers, but it doesn't end there.

Writer-director Dave Parker pitched an idea called Halloween, which would have

pit Michael Myers against Pinhead from the Hellraiser films.

Halloween was going to explain why Michael

Myers does what he does, why he is what he is.

Spoiler, because little six-year-old Michael opened up the infamous puzzle box,

allowing the Lord of the Dead.

Yes, we're still pronouncing it like that.

To inhabit his body, which of course Pinhead would then be upset about or something.

No thanks.

In the years after the release of Halloween Resurrection, writers were hired

and fired, scripts came and went, and this series of videos I'm making is

already approaching the four hour mark, so why don't we stop beating around the

bush and just get to the point, right?

We all know where we're headed.

We are now stepping out of the original timeline and into... Well, hold on.

The original timeline, I guess, kind of ended with Halloween 6,

seeing as though H2O retconned out the Thor and Trilogy, and the continuity now

was one to H2O, so we are now stepping out of the second timeline and into...

Hold on.

Does Halloween 3 count as its own timeline because

it's completely unrelated to the other films?

I mean, it is called Halloween 3.

You know what?

Let's put all this to rest on October 22nd, 2021.

Explaining the timelines, a Halloween special, will

lay it all out in full detail once and for all.

Okay, good.

That's settled.

Now back to business.

We are now stepping out of everything we knew before and into the Land of the Reboot.

What's up, Dan Dan?

My name is Ian, and I want to say thank you for tuning in to the big finale.

The history of Halloween Part 5, from reboot to reborn.

Now we all know Halloween kills comes out tomorrow, and I know you all want to be

perfectly 100% set and ready for the next big installment, and I've got you covered.

We've been through the ups and downs, from the

top of the line down to the so bad it's good.

Hell, we've even been through the so bad it's best left forgotten.

As fans of the series, we'd all made countless memories with these movies.

But in 2007, it was time to let it all go.

All of it.

Halloween was moving on.

The studio was heading in a brand new direction with a brand new director.

And writer, as a matter of fact.

Let's get to it.

This is the history of Halloween Part 5, from reboot to reborn.

Some of you watching this video may hear the name Rob Zombie and think of his music.

Bangers like Dragula, Living Dead Girl, Super

Beast, and more stand the test of time in my book.

The dude's music has a raw and unpolished feel that very

few acts across the decades have been able to recreate.

Others may hear Rob Zombie and have visions of his work and film.

His debut feature, House of a Thousand Corpses,

is like peering into a kaleidoscope of awful.

And I don't mean the film itself is awful.

I mean, the film throws a barrage of horrible images

at you for nearly its entire 89 minute run time.

It's an endurance of insanity.

The Devil's Rejects, Zombie's follow-up project, was

more focused and even more deranged in some ways.

Whether you're a fan of his work or not comes down to

a matter of taste and what your specific tastes are.

What's undeniable, though, what comes in as stone-cold,

indisputable fact is that Rob Zombie knows what the hell he's about.

Across the board, the guy's work has a look and feel that he

breaks his back to achieve and takes complete ownership of.

His art comes without compromise, which Universal Pictures learned very well

when he was initially pitching House of a Thousand Corpses.

Zombie reportedly made it abundantly clear that his vision was not mainstream,

that it was gritty, it was nasty, it was weird.

It was so weird that Universal decided to walk away

from the project after viewing the completed film.

No joke.

Obviously, his style caught the attention of the Weinstein company who approached

Zombie to take the reigns of Halloween in 2006.

Here's how it went down in Zombie's own words.

I got the thing, oh, you know, the Weinstein company wants you to go have

a meeting with them, Bob Weinstein, he's in LA, yada yada yada.

So I go in to meet him and he's just like, Halloween, what do you think?

It's a great fucking movie.

I mean, I didn't know what he was getting at.

He's like, we own the rights and we want to do something with him.

We don't know what to do.

Because they didn't know if they wanted to make another

sequel or just call it Halloween, but not have Michael Myers.

There was no preconceived idea and it was my idea to basically try to reboot it,

start over, do people playing all the same roles and do that.

I feel it's important to note that he didn't go

out of his way to get his hands on Halloween.

The opportunity was presented to him.

Rob Zombie felt that with eight entries into the franchise, with several timelines

and retcons already in place, the formula itself wasn't only

exhausted, but Michael Myers himself was no longer scary.

We'd seen him too many times.

He'd been involved in too many crazy situations.

He'd been killed too many times for any of us to take him seriously anymore,

which, I mean, that's kind of hard to argue.

He's been burned.

He's been shot.

He's been arrested.

He's been beaten with pipes.

He's been decapitated, but not actually decapitated.

He was burned again.

Come on.

It's all been done.

Zombie felt that starting from scratch, erasing everything and wiping the slate

clean, was the only way to truly reclaim the luster that the shape had lost.

Jumping off from square one would allow him to tell a brand new story,

to create a brand new vision, freeing from the confines of over 25 years of lore.

We've got a lot of ground to cover here, and I think

the best way to start is to run through the film itself.

When compared to the 1978 original, this new film is one half prequel,

one half remake, which in and of itself is a strange

decision, but that's the route he chose to go.

I must warn you, in order to gain any enjoyment from this film whatsoever,

you have to check your preconceived notions of what Halloween is at the door.

Rob Zombie's Halloween, for the most part, is just that.

Fundamental truths must be forgotten, but would once be

considered storytelling sins are now the official lay of the land.

You've been warned.

We'll circle back and cover the production

side of things after we get through the story.

And once that's done, I have to get the hell out of

here, because this is not looking so good for me.

The year is... well, we don't know what year it is.

Ugh, this is bullshit.

We all know it was Halloween night to 1963 that Michael Myers stabbed his sister.

Rob Zombie doesn't know anything about Halloween.

I told you.

Forget what you know.

Let it go.

All of it.

You got it?

Good.

It's Halloween.

A young boy in a clown mask is caring for his pet rat, while

his dysfunctional family gathers for breakfast downstairs.

The only untainted soul across the entire opening scene seems to be Angel,

or Boo, as her brother calls her.

Oh, he killed the rat, by the way, so you can lump

this little guy in with the dysfunction already.

Let's not bury the lead.

This young boy is Michael Myers.

And this is his home life.

When I tell you that every single character in this movie is a degenerate,

I'm not exaggerating in the slightest.

Meet stepfather Ronnie.

And sister Judith.

Mother Deborah.

Jesus, what is it with you in this goddamn school?

I cannot keep coming down here like this.

School bully Wesley.

Your sister.

I heard they had to pump the cum out of her stomach.

Skip ahead a few years later, and even our new Laurie Strode is performing sexual

acts on a bagel and moaning in front of her own mother.

Honestly, everyone seems to exist on this

heightened, exaggerated, trashy level of existence.

I myself can be as crude and crass as anyone, but I never

pretended to have sex with my breakfast in front of my parents.

Anyway, yeah, life's a mess in the Myers house.

It's a mess at school as well.

When two jerks ridicule young Michael over the fact that his mom is a stripper,

a fight breaks out, which leads to Mrs. Myers having

to meet with the principal and Dr. Sam Loomis.

So Michael got in a fight, right?

What's the big deal?

Well, the fight was one thing.

The dead cat he was carrying around in his book bag, his trophies

of pets that he'd seemingly killed and photographed himself.

Yeah, that's another thing entirely.

Now, if you're 10-year-old Michael Myers, you've got two options.

Option number one is to explain yourself.

Option number two is to run into the woods and brutally

murder the kid that made fun of your mom with a big old stick.

Guess which option he sprang for?

Back home later that night, his sister skips out on taking him trick-or-treating,

even though she promised she would.

Stepdad Ronnie throws gay slurs in his direction for no reason whatsoever.

Now, if you're young Michael Myers, you're once again faced with two options.

Number one, deal with it.

Some day you're going to be old enough to leave this

life behind and make your own way through the world.

Number two, kill everyone in the house.

Only baby Boo seems to make it out of the massacre alive,

as Michael seems to have quite an affinity for her.

When his mother gets home from work and finds the madness beyond the front door,

all hell breaks loose.

Over the next two years, young Michael goes on trial and is ordered to live out

an unspecified sentence in a mental health facility,

which includes daily appointments with Dr. Sam Loomis.

Zero forward progress is made as the boy seemingly fails

to recall what happened on that faithful Halloween night.

He hides his face behind handmade masks, which Dr. Loomis

believes provide him sanctuary from the real world around him.

Though in Michael's own words...

Take it off.

It hurts my alcliness.

Over time, his communication slows before coming to a complete and total halt.

Negating even the thought of forward progress

and instead regressing into utter silence.

When left only with the nurse to keep an eye on him, Michael strikes again.

Stabbing the woman in the throat and watching her

bleed out on the floor with a cold dead stare.

This is where Debra Myers, for the first time,

met the monster that lived within her son.

Even through everything that had happened, she never stopped loving him.

She never stopped visiting.

She never stopped trying.

She wanted to believe that her son was still in there, but on this day,

she came face to face with the truth.

With Baby Boo crying in the background and home movies of Michael playing on the

projector screen, Debra Myers put a gun in her mouth and gave up the fight.

Good God, man.

This is dark.

This is about as dark as things can get, right?

From here, we're about to jump 15 years into the future.

But just because time has gone by, doesn't mean the world has gotten any less ugly.

Michael Myers, now in his mid-20s, is fucking gigantic.

Standing nearly seven feet tall, he towers

over literally every other person around him.

This was a creative choice by writer-director Rob Zombie, obviously.

And I feel like the reception is 50-50.

Some find this Michael scarier than ever, as how the hell could you not be scared of

someone this large, who could do whatever they wanted to you at any given time.

Others find it preposterous and unnecessary.

That what made Michael scary in the first place

is that he could be anyone under that mask.

You make up your own mind.

I'm not going to tell you what to think.

This day is significant because it's the last

time Dr. Loomis is ever going to visit Michael.

He's not dying.

He's not going to blow up on the way out of the building.

No, he's just... there's nothing left here.

It's been 15 years of nothing.

Loomis' marriage fell apart.

His social life has completely stalled out, all because of

his obsession with rehabilitating this troubled young man.

It wasn't a total loss, though.

I mean, he kicks off his book tour the second he drops the Myers case.

What's his book about?

It's about Michael.

So while he wasn't able to get through to this poor kid,

he was able to pocket a couple of shekels off his likeness.

It's a bit of a trashy give and take, to say the least.

What happens next depends on whatever version

of this film you have in your collection.

Or maybe whenever you saw this movie for the first time.

I saw this one in theaters, so upon first viewing, Michael broke out of the

sanitarium that night after he got to jump on a couple of guards who were

ill-equipped to handle that sort of threat.

If you own this film on Blu-ray or DVD, odds are, you own the director's cut.

It's the much easier version to find these days and... good God.

It's a lot more graphic.

In the director's cut, Michael doesn't murder the guards who were transporting him.

He wasn't being transported at all.

Two sanitarium staff members instead decide that

tonight would be a good night to tell Michael Myers.

Why?

I don't know.

I told you everyone in this movie is a shit person.

So, there we are.

Watching this one being graphically, and I mean graphically.

Look, I can't show this on YouTube, but I find it actually disgusting and

completely unnecessary to use this as a throwaway

plot device, so we're just gonna fast forward.

Michael kills these guys, which is great.

You never used to hear that.

Outside it may be Halloween 5.

But yeah, here we are, applauding as adult

Michael claims the lives of his first victims.

Before walking out the front door, though, he does come face to face with

Ismael Cruz, a janitor who had looked after

him from the day he stepped foot in the asylum.

Obviously, Michael will spare Ismael's life, right?

Wrong.

He brutalizes this poor man, prolonging his suffering by holding him under water,

before caving his head in with a television he ripped off the wall.

Nobody is safe.

Ismael had been his buddy for 15 years, and he

was killed worse than anyone else in the building.

We are now nearly an hour into this film, and Michael

Myers is still walking around looking like this.

When in Sam Hell is he gonna get the blue suit and white mask?

Right now, as a matter of fact.

After picking a fight with and killing a literally shitting Joe Grizzly,

played by the one and only Ken Fory.

We can put a check mark next to the blue suit.

Yes, I'm aware it's more brown and Rob Zombie's movies.

The point is this, it's the signature look, okay?

The next day, oh shit.

It's Halloween once again.

Laurie Strode is sent by her dad to make a drop at the abandoned Myers house,

where she's met by Tommy Doyle, the little boy she'll be babysitting later tonight.

Inside the house is Michael Myers, who breaks through the floorboards to

regain his original mask, which has now been

weathered and damaged merely by the passage of time.

If this is starting to feel like you've seen it before, it's because we've now

completely exited the prequel portion of this film.

Parts of Rob Zombie's Halloween are now going to be

carbon copies of the 1978 John Carpenter original.

I told you to check your preconceived notions of Halloween at the door when

tuning into this reboot, but I understand if that's hard for you to do.

It's hard for me to do.

How can we not compare the two when parts of

it are practically shot for shot this same?

To this day, I find this to be an odd choice.

Halfway through its two-hour runtime up to this point, nearly every single second of

this movie has come straight from the mind of Rob Zombie.

To reach the midpoint and decide we're not going to continue treading new ground,

and instead tell nearly the exact same story we saw nearly 30 years ago,

I don't really get it.

But it's all here.

Lori spots Michael watching her out the window.

Loomis warns everybody of the storm that's coming.

Get back in there and get back on that telephone.

Who broke out of here last night?

The shape watches Lori, Anna, and Linda walk home from school.

Loomis and the cemetery groundskeeper discover

that Judith Myers' gravestone has been stolen.

Michael sticks Bob to the wall and murders Linda while wearing the ghost costume.

Only this time, the actress playing Linda shows full frontal nudity, and her dead

naked body is carried in a close-up for an uncomfortable amount of time.

That's another thing I have to point out here as we go through.

Rob Zombie's Halloween is a lot less... uh, nice to its female characters.

It made me actresses by proxy, I don't know.

Why are all these women so bitchy and nasty?

Why are they all naked?

Why do we see them bloody, begging for their lives, crying,

topless, and helpless for such long periods of time?

I didn't notice just how different the handling of the women was here in the

remake back when I was 17, but at nearly 31 now and more in touch with the

realities of the world, I certainly see it now.

Women are inherently more vulnerable than men.

You know, most men don't have to walk down the street at night with the knowledge in

the back of their mind that, at any given moment, any member of the opposite sex

could overpower them at the drop of the hat.

So the fear is already there.

Does it really make it more scary to not only kill the female character,

but belittle and embarrass them by doing it while they're naked for all to see?

I don't like it.

It rubs me the wrong way.

Bob's dick isn't flopping around during his struggle.

Joe Grizzly doesn't cry and beg for his life.

He actually challenges Michael and holds his own for a few seconds.

Annie is topless for literal minutes compared to her boyfriend who,

even while having sex, doesn't even take his shirt off.

I'm not trying to make a big deal out of this.

It is what it is.

I'm just saying.

The women in this film were handled in a

completely different manner than the men were.

And if you don't understand why it's fucked up to only do this to the women in

the movie and you're about to type up a comment about how I'm an SJW or something,

save your remaining brain cells because I'm not going to read it.

I wish the best for you and everybody who knows you.

But back to business.

Yeah.

Bob and Linda, dead.

Lori's parents.

Dead.

Annie's boyfriend.

Dead.

Annie.

Almost dead.

Lori's hanging with the kids while Loomis and Sheriff Brackett are heading into town.

It's during this car ride that Sheriff Brackett tells Dr. Loomis that on

Halloween night, 17 years ago, he was the first to

arrive at the scene when Debra Myers killed herself.

In an attempt to save this poor innocent baby from a life of stigma and darkness,

he took the baby himself and dropped her off at an emergency room.

His report on the scene of the crime made no mention

of Baby Boo, completely erasing her from existence.

Baby Boo was later adopted by a loving family, the Strode family, which placed

her right back in Haddonfield, the very place the

Sheriff had tried to save her from all those years ago.

Neither the Strode nor anyone else other than Sheriff Brackett, and now,

Michael Myers, is aware of her true identity.

That's why Michael has come home.

Boo is the only person in the world he's got left.

Lori finds Annie and her boyfriend not doing so well,

and that's when she sees Michael for the first time.

Michael knows who Lori is.

That's his sister, little baby Boo.

But Lori, she has no clue who this nearly seven-foot monster

holding a knife that he just used to butcher her friends is.

She just knows that she's got to get the hell out of here.

The chase is on, people are killed along the way, the kids get out of dodge,

Sheriff Brackett finds his daughter barely clinging to life, and oh shit,

Michael got her.

He doesn't kill her though.

No, he brings her to a secret place, a place

he has decorated to look like a family reunion.

Linda's corpse acts as a stand-in for Judith on the

ground, the headstone from Mama Deborah overhead.

Little Michael and baby Boo all together once again.

He kneels down and presents his little sister with

a photograph of the two of them from better times.

He even drops his knife and removes his mask,

indicating to his sister that he is not a threat.

But she doesn't understand.

How could she?

She doesn't know that's her in the photos of baby.

She doesn't know that the monster in front of her is that young boy.

Why would anyone connect those dots?

I mean, as far as we know, Lori isn't even aware that she's adopted.

So, of course this doesn't make any sense to her.

So, she does what anyone would do.

She seizes the moment and stabs this big bastard before trying to escape.

She winds up cornered and that's when Dr. Loomis swoops in, delivering several

gunshots to his former patients back before leading Lori to safety.

It's worth noting here that Loomis didn't shoot Michael in the head.

He didn't even empty his gun the way Pleasance Loomis did.

Our new Loomis begged and pleaded with Michael

to stand down before pulling the trigger.

He still didn't want to hurt him and only did so when

it was clear that he had no choice in the matter.

It seems like it's all over, but it's not.

Michael's back up and he takes Lori into the house.

Once again, Loomis pleads with Michael.

He blames himself.

He offers himself up in place of Lori and it doesn't go well.

Michael crushes his head and now it's time for another chase.

We've had our foot on the gas for a while here

and we're just about to the point of exhaustion.

After several minutes of carnage, Michael

spears Lori through a wall and off a balcony.

Lori is the first to wake up and she does so with Dr. Loomis's gun in her hand.

Having completely snapped, she sits in a mounted position on this monster,

pulling the trigger over and over to no avail.

Michael springs to life and grabs at his sister's hand, who pulls the trigger one

more time, finally finding the last bullet in the revolver.

A blood-soaked Lori strode screams bloody murder.

The sirens close in and home movies of Michael

and baby Boo carry us into the credits.

There it is.

Love it or hate it.

There it is.

Rob Zombie's Halloween.

Some of you have been commenting from the very start of this series that you

couldn't wait for me to get here because these are

your favorite installments across the entire franchise.

Others have been waiting for the exact opposite reason.

You hate these movies and you couldn't wait for me to bury them.

Where do I fall on Rob Zombie's first Halloween film?

I hope I don't disappoint anybody, but I don't love or hate this movie.

It's far from my favorite, but it's definitely

better than Stinker's like five or resurrection.

Is it a bad movie?

No, I don't think so.

I've seen bad movies and I don't think this one

falls quite into that negative of a category.

The other question is, do I like this movie?

No, not really.

I think the dialogue is a glaring issue.

I find most of the characters are speaking the exact same voice and speaking with the

exact same cadence, which usually comes back to either the

writer or director, and in this case, it's the same person.

Let's take a second to shine a light on the good and the

bad, to try and give this one as fair a shake as possible.

We'll start with the good.

If you're a gore hound, this movie's got you covered.

You're gonna get lots and lots of blood in this picture.

That's for certain.

Obviously, if you come into this already a fan of Rob Zombie, you're gonna pop for

his regular casting choices like Ken Fory, Sid

Haig, William Forsyth, Sherry Moon Zombie, and more.

But it's not just the usual zombie suspects

that general horror fans will be happy to see.

We've got Jamie Lloyd actress Danielle Harris, this time playing Annie Brackett.

Her dad, Sheriff Brackett, is played by the

legendary Brad Doref, aka The Voice of Chucky.

The Gemini Killer from The Exorcist 3, all three Lord of the Rings films, seriously.

Brad Doref is an under-celebrated actor.

The guy is great.

Malcolm McDowell of A Clockwork Orange fame, or maybe recognize him better as

President John Henry Eden from Fallout 3, or

Matallo from Superman The Animated Series, whatever.

He's another big timer.

There are too many to name, so we'll draw the line on the cast right there.

There are several excellent shots here in Rob Zombie's Halloween that I can't ignore.

I absolutely love the image of Loomis giving

his speech on the first stop of his book tour.

He's just visited Michael for the last time, seemingly in an attempt to close

that chapter of his life, and look at him now.

Even if they're no longer in contact, this boy is now looming over the Doctor,

casting a larger shadow than ever before.

Before Michael killed everyone in the house 17ish years ago, he was watching the

thing from another world on the television.

Now, in present day, with little Lindsey Wallace right in front of him,

vulnerable and unaware of his presence, Michael doesn't attack.

If you watch his mannerisms and eyeline, you'll notice

that Michael isn't paying attention to Lindsey at all.

He's watching the movie with her, finally getting

to see how the thing from another world ends.

One more cool moment, why not?

At the end of the film, when Laurie is trying to blow Michael's brains out,

he grabs at her hand.

It's not exactly clear what his intentions are.

Is Michael unsuccessfully trying to thwart her attack?

Or maybe?

Just maybe?

Is he steadying her hand?

Maybe he's trying to make sure she gets the job done, so

that he can finally check out of this life and fade away.

Even Rob Zombie has confirmed that this moment is up

for debate, and I myself find it to be very intriguing.

Now the bad.

The dialogue largely sucks, and is crude for the sake of being crude.

Some of the acting in general will make you stop and wonder how on earth they

wound up using that specific take for a certain line.

Mom, Judith is wasting all my time.

I do not enjoy calling you down here.

It sure seems like you fucking do.

It's amazing that even with as gross as this film is, this

is a super toned down version of what was initially scripted.

If Rob Zombie had his way, Michael wasn't going

to be washing blood off a scalpel in the bathroom.

He was instead going to be having a good time with

himself over the corpse of his now dead pet rat.

If he had his way, Michael didn't just stab and slash at Judith.

He instead was scripted too, and again, I'm wording this as nicely as possible.

He was going to forcibly insert the bloody baseball bat into his sister.

Yeah.

These are the moments where it's actually really great to

have someone on set who's able to step in and just say, No.

I audibly laughed in the theatre when young Michael dons

the classic mask for the first time, and I wasn't alone.

Rob Zombie made a point to add significance to the mask by connecting it

to the night he went on his rampage at home, rather than

it being a random mask Michael stole from a hardware store.

But that little body topped with such a large-headed mask is hilariously stupid

looking, and does not serve the scare that was intended.

I didn't need to see a mentally ill patient get gang-riffed by staff members,

especially when it served no purpose to the story whatsoever, and all in all,

this movie's just too goddamn long.

Rob Zombie wanted to do two movies, a reboot prequel, and then a remake of the

original, but the Weinstein's didn't go for it, and he

had to smash his two visions into one, and it shows.

Rob Zombie's Halloween was by far the longest entry into the franchise at the

time, and even today, in 2021, is still the longest film in the series.

There's a feeling out there that Rob Zombie doesn't get Michael Myers.

He doesn't understand Halloween.

You know, I sympathize with this argument because I know how I feel about how Zack

Snyder hands a Superman, which is another conversation for another time.

But if you really look at Halloween 2007, and you listen to what Rob Zombie was

saying leading up to its release, I don't

think the issue is that he didn't understand.

I think what most people take issue with is the fact that Rob Zombie purposely made

decisions to make this unlike any Halloween movie you've ever seen before.

Oh, you love that Michael Myers has no clear drive or motive.

Let's turn that on its head.

Let's lay out a clear motive in painstaking detail.

You love that Michael is seemingly a normal man, and raptured by evil incarnate.

Throw it out the window.

Now he's 6'10, and he'll tear a house down with his bare hands to get at you.

Michael's a silent killer, and you never

really know what's going on behind those eyes.

Hey, how about he surrenders himself to his sister, presents a photo of the two of

them together, takes his mask off, and shows her a morse,

possibly even an ability to put these vile acts to an end.

How about he talks to her?

Yeah, in the original script, Michael actually kneels down in front of Laurie

and says, Boo, I get the idea that Laurie would take it as

this big scary man saying Boo, like he's trying to scare her.

When in actuality, it's Michael breaking his silence and calling his sister by name.

It's an interesting idea.

It really is.

But it was cut.

If you don't like it, that's your prerogative.

But I at least hope you don't like it for what it is, rather than what it isn't.

I always try and share a personal story with you

guys, and this installment will be no different.

Danny Trejo is a legend, right?

We all know that.

We all get that.

His character here in Rob Zombie's Halloween, Ismael Cruz, he's the best.

He's a good man with a good heart.

It's painful to see him get killed.

It really is.

But a long-lasting story sprang from this scene.

While pleading for Michael to stop, Ismael says, I was good to you, Mikey.

I was good to you, Mikey.

My good friend, Bathroom Money, Timmy Wars, and

I have never and will never forget this line.

But then there's an appropriate reason to use it or not.

We might even create one just for the sake of saying it.

But whenever we're together, you're gonna hear this line.

I was good to you, Mikey.

I don't know, man.

It's just one of those things that sticks with you.

When it all comes down to it, love it or hate it, Rob Zombie's Halloween was a

major hit, grossing over 80 million dollars at the box office.

If you're keeping score, this was the new

box office king across the entire franchise.

Now is 1978 money the same as 2007 money?

No.

If you adjust for inflation, the number changes.

But I'm just telling you about the total box office gross is a round figure,

damn it.

If you want to do the math, do it yourself.

The point is this.

The movie was a big time success.

I mean, financially it was.

Critics buried it pretty hard.

None more so than John Carpenter himself, who disliked Michael's physical size,

the in-depth backstory given to the killer, and seemingly, Rob Zombie himself.

Carpenter questioned why that piece of shit lied

about him and their interactions with each other.

Goodness gracious.

The fanbase to this day, more than 15 years after the release of Rob Zombie's

first Halloween film, are still split down the middle.

Some love it, some hate it.

Some, like me, don't really care one way or the other.

This is not a part of my personal canon, so

this may as well have not even happened for me.

You'd think that the money rolling in the way it did would have been a sure fire

guarantee that Rob Zombie would have come back for his sequel.

That he would have been dying to continue paving a

new path for one of horror's greatest franchises ever.

You'd think that.

But that's not the case.

The fact of the matter is that Rob Zombie would have rather

done nothing at all than return for another Halloween film.

Zombie has stated over the years that he felt incredibly stifled by the Weinstein's

and their constant tampering with production, so he was out.

Find somebody else to do your next Halloween, you bunch of dorks.

That's the zombie way.

Well, that's what happened.

A new duo was brought in to write and direct

a sequel, taking place in the zombie verse.

Is that what we're gonna call it?

It all seemed well and good until Old Mr. Zombie, totally

by chance, was shown a script for what was to come.

He absolutely hated it.

And it was in that moment that he basically said, you know what, fuck it.

This is my world.

I pushed this boulder down the mountain.

I might as well be the one to describe its destructive journey down to the bottom,

right?

He'd gotten away from the film world.

He worked on a ton of music.

He got his head clear.

Yeah, this was it.

The time was right.

Rob Zombie was officially back for Halloween, too.

One of the key factors in zombie taking the reins once again was producer Malika

Cod's instructions to do whatever the hell he wanted to do creatively.

The gloves were off.

The established rules of Halloween may as well have been written an expo marker on a

dry erase board because them shits were free

and clear to be wiped out at any given moment.

And yeah, maybe you caught that.

I said Malika Cod, not Mustafa Akad.

Malika Cod is Mustafa's son, and he'd been involved with Halloween productions at his

father's side for over 20 years at this point.

Mustafa Akad, an OG on the Halloween front, was tragically killed in 2005

alongside his daughter Rima Alakad in an al-Qaeda suicide bombing.

It's really awful how many times we've had to do this across the history of

Halloween, but raise your glass, stand hands.

I haven't always agreed with his decisions, and I maintain that several of

Halloween's worst missteps were 100% his fault.

But creative decisions for the big screen and

the real loss of human life are worlds apart.

RIP, big man.

Thanks for getting this crazy franchise off the ground in the first place.

Malika Cod wasn't as strict as his father, obviously.

And through Rob Zombie's Halloween 2, it shows.

But more on Halloween 2's story in a second.

Let's set the scene a little more before we dive in.

Production of 2007's Halloween was a pain in the ass according to Rob Zombie,

who claimed that an endless barrage of studio notes were coming his way on a

daily basis, most of which weren't even worth reading.

With his head cleared and ready to get to work on this sequel, now was the time.

Now this thing's gonna run like a well-oiled machine, right?

Nope, not a chance.

Zombie stated in the audio commentary for the movie that an entire day's worth of

work was completely lost when the cans of

film were accidentally x-rayed at the airport.

The weather was a nightmare the entire time.

Honestly, how fucking often does it snow in Atlanta, Georgia?

The role of young Michael Myers was played by Dave Farrick in

2007, and I'm probably botching his last name when I'm sorry.

Why did he have to be recast?

Was it because he's a bad actor?

Was it because Rob Zombie didn't like him?

Was it because of some other reason?

No, none of those.

He's a great actor.

Seems like a good guy.

He just grew.

The size and the age didn't line up anymore, so it was like fuck, we need a new kid.

Let's dive into this story.

Here we go.

There's an on-screen explanation of the white

horse motif, which... what the hell does that mean?

What white horse?

Oh, I guess Michael's mom gave him a white horse toy back

in the mental health facility days and they bonded over it.

Weird that we didn't know about that before, seeing as though it's present in

Michael's every waking thought and is a huge part of why he's doing what he's doing.

It's almost like the white horse thing didn't exist at all in the first movie,

or this movie, until right before they started shooting.

If you didn't sense the sarcasm there, I'll spell it out for you.

This angle was added so late into production that it almost didn't even make the cut.

But here it is, the crux of Michael's entire journey, and it came together

literally because Rob Zombie saw a white horse while out on a drive and was like,

man, that's pretty cool.

Mm-hmm.

Moving on.

Much like the 1981 film of the same name, Halloween

2 picks up right where the previous film ended.

Well, sort of, in this case.

We saw Laurie in a mounted position on Michael, covered

in blood as the sirens blasted and the cops rolled in.

Here in Halloween 2, I guess the cops never showed up?

Laurie's wandering down the street alone in its share of

bracket who catches up to her, assuring her that it's all over.

She's rushed to the hospital and they're working on

pretty much putting her back together in gruesome fashion.

Michael's body is loaded into an ambulance and taken away

by two EMTs who joke about how hot Linda's dead body was.

Yeah, seven minutes in and we've got two hillbillies discussing necrophilia.

This is indeed a Rob Zombie film.

Michael busts out and kills them and then he drives the ambulance himself, right?

No.

They hit a cow, which kills the driver instantly.

It's only then that Michael wakes up and dispatches the other EMT before walking

away into the night to meet up with the ghost of his mother and the white horse.

Man, back to that cow for a second.

That goddamn cow woke up Michael Myers.

What have you done with your life?

There's a 20 minute chase scene here where Michael arrives at the hospital and kills

everyone, chasing Laurie up and down the halls

before finally delivering the death blow.

No, it was all a dream.

Yeah, 20 minutes of heart pounding action and none of it really happened.

I hate that shit.

It's two years after that horrible night.

Laurie now lives with Sheriff and Annie Brackett and she's a rock and roller.

Her bathroom is covered with 666 and pentagrams.

She has a Charles Manson poster in her room.

She works at a record store that simply oozes Rob Zombie's

favorite bands like Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper, I swear.

This movie is so overdosed in rock music, it's like watching Bam Marjara's haggard.

If Bam gets shit for injecting him and CKY

into everything, Zombie is fair game as well.

Why does every Rob Zombie movie feature characters with this long, twisty hairstyle?

Wait, why does everyone in this movie look like Rob Zombie?

Laurie is straight up dressed like him from head to toe, I swear to God.

Michael Myers himself walked right off the set of a Rob Zombie music video.

And don't get me started on the scene where

Laurie is screaming obscenities at the camera.

A shot that is copied and pasted from the Dracula video.

It's too much, man.

It's too much.

Break time, guys.

Quick break.

I fucking hate this movie.

I hate this movie.

I gave Rob Zombie's first film a fair shake.

I was totally honest.

There's some really cool shit there and I put it all over to the moon.

But I fucking hate this movie.

From the white horse nonsense that was added in at the very last second and

totally didn't exist in the first movie, so it

doesn't really make any sense that it exists here.

To this meandering plot of he's coming, she's fucked up.

He's coming, she's fucked up.

Ad nauseam.

There are characters and locations that we spend

so much time with here that don't matter at all.

But that's just my opinion.

I have kept a very clear line across this entire story

of what is my opinion and what is the fact of production.

I just had to get that out there.

Now let's get back to the story.

Annie and Laurie's relationship is in tatters because Laurie can't deal with her

trauma, and she sees the brackets as reminders of her pain.

Dr. Loomis is now a snobby, ass-holian, misogynistic celebrity author who goes as

far as telling his assistant that when he

wants her opinion, he'll beat it out of her.

Classy.

What's Michael been up to these last two years?

Well, I'm glad you asked.

He's homeless.

He's a drifter who eats out of people's trash.

He's somehow found a hoodie that fits a seven-foot, 300-plus-pound man.

I've made it clear several times that I personally don't

need to know what Michael does when he's not stalking Laurie.

Resurrection had the bed and the doll shit.

Halloween 5 had the Hermit's house.

I don't need to know this.

Leave it alone.

But hold on.

I want you to meet H2M4.

That's my code name for him.

Hobo Hoodie Mountain Man Michael Myers.

When he's not killing Hillbillies in the fields, he's having

visions of the pumpkin goblins who are eating Laurie for dinner.

What the fuck?

Clearly adult Michael's mental maturity capped when he was in the asylum,

as indicated by young Michael being present

in these visions and speaking on his behalf.

Eventually, H2M4 happens upon the rabbit in red,

the strip club where his mother used to work.

We spend 10 minutes here with these jabronis before Michael kills them all in

gruesome fashion where, if you were wondering, yes, both of the men stand up

to Michael and actually strike him first, despite the fact that

he's the size of Kevin Nash because men don't take no shit.

Meanwhile, the lone female character winds up, what else?

Brutalized.

But only after running around naked and

screaming for help for a lengthy period of time.

Classic Rob Zombie.

You gotta love it.

But enough meandering.

Something important happens here.

In his quest for continued fame and fortune, Loomis releases another book

where he divulges the secret that Sheriff

Brackett told him in confidence back in 2007.

Laurie Strode is actually Angel Myers, Michael's sister.

Laurie finds out about it and it's not a pretty sight.

To deal with her troubles, she goes to a rock and roll Halloween party, of course.

This fucking band plays like three songs and the singer gets minutes of screen time

to tell shitty jokes that don't even get over with the crowd in the movie.

This is another 10 minute chunk, by the way.

10 minutes of this.

Laurie is having the same visions Michael is, by the way.

She's seeing her mother in the white horse.

What else is going on?

Oh, Loomis appears on Chris Hardwick's talk show with Weird Al.

Alright.

What's Annie up to?

Oh, Michael kills her.

Eegh.

Hasn't she had it bad enough already?

Laurie's other friend gets got while trying to call a cops too.

Okay, this is on now, huh?

Michael gives chase by breaking through the door of Ultimate Angst, and Sheriff

Brackett shows up on the scene to discover his daughter in a pool of blood once again.

And this time, she doesn't make it.

I've stated my opinion on this film, but I'm fair.

And it's time to give credit where credit is due.

Brad Dorif acts his fucking ass off right here, as you might expect.

You buy the pain he's feeling.

You feel it yourself.

Simply because of how good he is.

Real home movie footage of Daniel Harris is cut in here to really drive home the

pain of a father who has lost his little baby girl.

And motherfucker, it's tough.

The highlight of the film, by far.

Laurie is picked up by a man blasting some good old rock and roll, but fuck you,

Michael says no, bashes the jabronian flips the car down a hill.

The reunited Myers clan carry her to a barn in the middle of nowhere for the big

moment, and this is where Laurie has a full-on conversation with her mom's ghost.

Before Michael can follow through with his mother's orders to take them all home,

a helicopter appears overhead.

Sheriff Brackett and the boys have the place totally surrounded.

Dr. Loomis, humiliated by the talk show appearance, has the quickest and most

unearned change of heart in Halloween history, as he arrives at the scene

telling Sheriff Brackett, and crashing the

Myers party, how do you know where they work?

It doesn't matter.

How do you get there so fast?

It doesn't matter.

It just, it doesn't matter.

Just go with it.

Loomis finds Laurie writhing and squirming, fighting against no one.

There is no little Michael holding her down, which we already know.

Listen, Michael gores him through a wall.

He terraces mask off and looks Loomis in the

eye and says, DIE before stabbing him to death.

Yes, indeed, Michael Myers speaks.

And after not saying a word for almost 20 years,

what a way to blow the roof off the joint, right?

DIE!

I think the murder gets that point across.

Michael really couldn't blow in our minds by

saying you failed me or you left me behind.

You were all I had, but no.

DIE!

After killing Loomis, the cops have seen enough

and they shoot Michael another 8,397 times.

Laurie emerges from the barn, grabs the knife, and just before she can stab the

already dead Dr. Loomis, she is also gunned down.

Her dying visions are of her mother in the

white horse who approached on a long corridor.

She grins madly as we close this chapter on Halloween forever.

That's Rob Zombie's Halloween 2.

That's it.

Michael's dead, Laurie's dead, Dr. Loomis's dead, everybody's dead.

Except Sheriff Brackett.

I mercilessly shit on Dominique Otherninjarard, the director of Halloween 5.

I shit on that guy for days.

And he fucking deserves it.

He was terrible.

I stood up for Rob Zombie when Otherninjarard claimed that zombies stole

80% of Halloween 5 for his Halloween movies.

Carbon Copy Styles stole them.

That's bullshit.

There are similarities, there's no doubt about that, but Carbon Copy stealing is

way over stretching it, and that's just Otherninjarard jerking himself off.

It is a fact, though, that this Halloween 2 has much more in common with Halloween 5

than any of the other films in the franchise.

And Rob Zombie himself, as a director, has much more in common with Dominique

Otherninjarard than any other director in Halloween history.

That might have pissed you off if you're a big fan of this movie, which I get,

but hear me out, and I'll provide the necessary context.

Jamie and Michael's share a telepathic link in Halloween 5.

Laurie and Michael share a telepathic link in Halloween 2.

Michael expresses human emotion in Halloween 5 by

removing his mask in front of Jamie and shutting a tear.

In the zombie verse, Michael shows human emotion in the form of removing his mask

and presenting himself to Laurie, and even speaking to Dr. Loomis.

Dominique Otherninjarard was notorious for shooting scenes on the fly, scenes that

weren't scripted, merely because he saw something that looked cool and wanted to

use it, which caused major headaches on set.

The whole chase with Jamie and the janitor threw the hanging laundry.

There you go.

On the fly.

Rob Zombie?

Shit.

He's even worse.

The white horse is a crucial plot point in Halloween 2.

Meanwhile, it was just some cool shit he saw on the side of the road one day,

and injected it into a completed script.

The pit of bodies at the hospital in the dream sequence wasn't in the script.

Zombie saw the pit and asked, Hey, can we get 25 extras to play dead bodies?

I have an idea.

This is not how these types of films are usually made, and this defining

characteristic of, I don't care what the script says.

Let's do this thing I just thought of is a common thread

across only two directors in Halloween's entire run.

Dominique Otherninjarard and Rob Zombie.

You can do with that information what you will.

I don't really care.

Is Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 as bad as Halloween 5?

Fuck no, it's not as bad as Halloween 5.

Zombie's Halloween 2 is at least entertaining in certain parts.

Visually it's super slick.

The kills are brutal.

Halloween 5 is a boring fucking slog throughout.

I've made it clear that I will never watch Halloween 5 again.

I'm done with it.

And while Zombie's Halloween 2 isn't as bad,

I'm never going to watch this one again either.

The strip club scene, the Halloween concert, I swear there were parts of this

film where I was audibly saying, oh my god, can we fucking move on.

I hate this movie.

But nothing tops Halloween 5 on the shit pile.

Let's make that abundantly clear.

I just don't understand what some of the rationale was here.

So Michael gets killed by getting shot a bunch of times.

Man, never seen that before.

He literally got shot point blank in the head at the end of the last movie.

Why is this the final straw?

Rob Zombie himself has stated that there's really no

way to explain how Michael survived that head shot.

So his rationale was, maybe Lori's a bad shot.

I don't know.

Who cares?

I'm serious about that, by the way.

Direct quote.

The characters in the Zombieverse just don't click from me across the board.

And to best explain why, I'm going to point to Eastbound

and Down, an HBO comedy that is absolutely hilarious.

In the beginning, Danny McBride's character, Kenny Powers, is an asshole.

He's THE asshole.

Everyone else, from his love interest to his co-workers, his brother's family,

his boss, they're all normal people.

They look at how he acts, how he treats people, and they're appalled.

They're appalled because of how off the wall Kenny Powers is.

The dynamic is spot on.

Fast forward to season 3 of Eastbound, and it's out the window.

Jason's a daikas character is basically just another Kenny Powers.

Once even keeled and balanced, April is now just as off the rails and crass as Kenny.

Stevie Janowski has gone further off the deep end than ever before.

When everyone is crazy, there's nobody to rationally react to Kenny Powers.

Nobody can hold up the mirror and say, look at yourself, look at what you're doing.

In the zombie verse, sanitarium staff are horrible ricks.

EMTs openly joke about having sex with the corpse of a teenage girl.

The local stepdad threatens to heal his broken

hand only to break it again on his stepson's face.

When everybody is crazy, there's nobody to rationally react to Michael Myers.

Nobody can hold up the mirror and say, look at yourself, look at what you're

doing, because they're already f***ing a patient at the asylum just for kicks.

It doesn't work for me.

Not in the slightest.

And I chose Eastbound and Down just because it works.

Danny McBride being a co-writer on the new Halloween films is purely coincidental,

which I find funny.

Also unrelated, shout out to Margot Kidder, who

plays Lori's therapist here in Halloween too.

Margot Kidder played Lois Lane opposite

Christopher Reeve's Superman, and she was great.

Rest in peace to another legend.

It's worth noting that Zombies Halloween 2, much like its predecessor, is also

vastly different between theatrical and home video releases.

When I saw this one in theaters, Lori wasn't gunned down.

She wasn't killed at all.

Michael took a sniper rifle bullet, was impaled on farm equipment,

and Lori told him I love you, my friend.

And stabbed him to death.

She then emerged from the barn wearing Michael's mask

only to take it off a second later for some reason.

And we closed with her in the sanitarium having the white horse vision.

And the theatrical cut, Michael kills Loomis by viciously carving him to pieces.

But he never speaks to him.

Those are the main differences between the two.

But Zombie has stated that the director's cut is the real cut.

Lori's surviving through this movie was a force reshoot by the studio, who wanted to

protect their investment for what they assumed would be Halloween 3.

Personal story time, I know you guys love these.

This was the first Halloween film I saw in theaters that, when it was all said and

done, when the lights came back on and I walked out, I didn't like it.

I was what, 18, 19 then?

I didn't even like it then.

I saw this one with my buddy Bathroom Money

Tim Ewers, and he didn't like this one either.

This was a sad day, man.

It's a sad thing to look back on now.

You know, you get older, you don't see your friends as often as you used to.

Maybe you got married and you have kids.

Maybe you moved really far away.

Maybe you've got a crazy job that takes up all of your time.

Things change, you know?

But there are always those things between you that are a constant.

There are things that you can bond over.

Halloween was one of those constants.

And here in 2009, for the first time, I think both of us were left so

disappointed that we were just ready to let it go.

The tide had turned, this new universe had started, this new timeline had kicked off,

and we were along for the ride.

And it just didn't turn out in any way that suited us.

These characters may have been carrying the same names as the ones we grew up with.

The mask may have looked the same, but it didn't feel the same.

This wasn't anything even close to resembling the

Halloween that we recognized, and that really sucked.

I'm not trying to vilify Rob Zombie here.

I respect his decision to reboot the series.

I totally get that it was too far gone to do a straight Halloween 9.

But just because I respect his decision as an artist, doesn't mean it worked for me,

or hit me in any meaningful manner.

But hey, Rob Zombie didn't make Halloween for a kid who grew up loving it.

A kid who wanted more.

A kid who wanted this crazy story to never stop unfolding.

He made Halloween for himself.

He made Halloween as an artist who looked at a convoluted and

broken franchise and said, I'm gonna do it all differently.

I'm gonna try to do it my way, otherwise, why am I even here?

Can I fault him for that?

No, not really.

But I'd be lying to myself and all of you if I pretended that

these two films mean anything to me and the grand scheme.

When it all comes down to it, the fanbase was

then and is still now divided by these two films.

Love them or hate them.

They exist.

I don't really care which side of the fence you fall on.

You're totally entitled to your opinion.

If Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 is your favorite in the whole series, hey, that's great.

We all have different tastes.

No one is right or wrong.

Rob Zombie is spoken at length about some of

the backlash his installments have garnered.

And this direct quote is coming from an interview Zombie gave to Scream magazine.

He stated, the fans will say whatever they will

say, but they don't know how this industry works.

They say Rob Zombie destroyed the Halloween franchise.

No, I pulled the franchise out of the direct-to-video world, my friend.

That is where it was headed when I came on board.

Is he right?

100%.

He's right.

Halloween had been in danger of falling into irrelevancy several times.

There's no question about it.

There's an argument to be made that without Rob Zombie's contributions,

Halloween would have faded into laughable direct-to-video obscurity.

And we never would have gotten the films we're getting today.

But let's wrap this before we jump into those.

Hold on.

Critics hated Halloween 2.

Many fans hate Halloween 2.

In the dollars and cents department, it pulled in $39 million at the box

office, which just barely puts it ahead of the much-maligned Halloween resurrection.

Rob Zombie was contacted for a third installment and promptly declined.

Over the next nine years, the Halloween franchise

would go through several stages of flux.

At one point, a third film in the Zombieverse

was coming together under the name Halloween 3D.

They remember 3D.

Obviously, it never came to be.

This cycle of announcing projects, delaying them, canceling them,

almost shooting them and canceling them, will continue all the

way up until a brand new entry finally hit the series in 2018.

Simply titled Halloween, this film would act as a

direct sequel to the 1978 John Carpenter original.

And holy shit, are you ready for this?

John Carpenter's back.

Not as director, no.

But composer, creative consultant, and executive producer, which is fantastic.

Nick Castle, the original shape, even dons the mask for a scene or two.

And Jamie Lee fucking Curtis returns as Laurie Strode.

Halloween was back, no bullshit.

No thorn curse, fake beheading, no danger-tainment, no Rob Zombie,

Hillbilly Spookow shit, none of it.

This is Halloween.

It's scary, it's mysterious.

Michael and Laurie aren't even brother and sister anymore.

Remember how John Carpenter hated Halloween too

and regretted making them siblings for decades?

Fuck it, it's out of here, we're done with it.

Michael Myers is back, and he's going on a killing

spree because that's what Michael Myers does.

What's his motive?

Fuck a motive.

This is what he does.

Is Laurie Strode gonna lay down and take it?

Hell no, she's not.

She's been waiting for his goofy spooky ass

to fuck around and find out for 40 years.

And spoiler, Halloween 2018 is good.

It's not perfect, but it's good.

And after all the bullshit we've been through, good is right as rain for me.

That old school excitement, that breathtaking ass clenching chill you get

when Michael Myers appears on screen, it's back.

The dread of knowing he can be absolutely anywhere

is alive and well, and holy shit does that feel good.

This leads us to present day, and if you're watching this on the day it

dropped, October 14th, 2021, Halloween kills comes out tomorrow.

And I know we're all way too excited for the

next installment in this ridiculous franchise.

Across the last six months, or about four and a half hours, if you're binging these

videos right now, I just brought you up to speed on everything

you need to know about Halloween, over 40 years of history.

Now, the next step is on you.

Turn out the lights, grab a copy of Halloween 2018, and really feel it.

Drop your cynicism.

Don't pick everything apart.

Get lost in the world of Halloween.

Remember what it felt like to suit up in your favorite costume, to roam the streets

of the neighborhood, going door to door, trick or treating

until only the moon overhead illuminated your path.

Visualize the moment upon returning home where you dumped all of your candy out

onto the floor and took inventory of the night's treasures.

If your nights were anything like mine, your dad would pop in and snag a few of

his favorites, and there wasn't a damn thing you could do about it.

You'd put up a fight as a joke, but deep down, you were happy to share.

Halloween can mean any number of things to any number of people.

When I started writing these videos, when I first set off on making this

retrospective, Halloween conjured up images of a man in a white mask.

It conjured up images of that big knife, catching

a glint off the street light from across the way.

But now, at the end of all this, I realize

Halloween is way more than just a series of films.

Halloween is Laurie Strode, Halloween is Dr. Loomis, Halloween is Michael Myers,

sure.

But all of those things together are woven into my childhood.

The fucking memories of dressing up and mimicking different scenes, doing

impressions of the characters, drawing pictures of that immortal mask,

watching these movies during sleepovers way

past the point that we should have been asleep.

They may as well be stitched together in the

back of my mind with black and orange thread.

Writing and creating these retrospectives,

making videos of all kinds for this channel.

This is what I love to do.

This is all I ever wanted to do.

And the first movie I ever made when I was 12 years old was a Halloween movie.

It was like three minutes long and it sucked.

It was Bobby Morris's camera and Tim Ewer's mask.

Bobby's little brother Johnny was hiding under a blanket with a boom box to play

the Halloween theme when Michael entered the shot.

That's Halloween.

I'm not happy all the time.

But I do my best to make sure the people that I care about are smiling.

I'm not proud of myself 24-7, but I try and take

inventory on what I have achieved from time to time.

I'm not perfect by any means, but I'm certainly doing what I was meant to do in

creating shit like this and sharing my stories with you guys.

And there's no way in hell I'd be who I am without Halloween.

This whole history of has been a love letter to one of

the most influential pieces of my childhood's puzzle.

And I certainly hope I've done the series proud.

Next year, this whole world comes to a close.

October 2022, Halloween ends promises to deliver a finality

to Halloween unlike anything we've ever seen before.

And the sheer thought of finality has my mind racing

with how the hell they intend to pull that off.

I know only one thing for certain.

I can't wait to see how it all plays out.

Dan Nance, thank you so much for watching the history of Halloween.

This has been an incredible amount of work that I can't

possibly do justice through words, but it's all been worth it.

There were stories here that I've wanted to

tell for a long time, and now I've told them.

They're out there.

They're gone.

It's a weird feeling.

But the stories don't stop there.

Once kills and ends are out, yeah, I'll spoil it right now.

The history of Halloween Part 6 is definitely happening.

Full in-depth retrospective treatments for all three of these modern films.

The only way to do it properly was to do all three of them together.

You understand.

But I'm not disappearing from horror coverage

altogether, just waiting for that video to be timely.

No, sir.

You've got a brand new Halloween video coming your way next week.

There are so many stones to turn over, so many other franchises to dive into.

Our work is just getting started.

I took a major chance going from focusing solely on wrestling and video game

content, and veering into the world of horror films.

It was a big risk, but you guys have made it

loud and clear that I did the right thing.

And I thank you so much for that.

I hope you stick around to find out what's coming up next, and if you want to support

this one-man crew, I mean, I write these videos, I shoot

these videos, I edit these videos, I do all this shit myself.

If you want to help make things like this possible, head over to patreon.

com slash 616 Entertainment and sign up at any level you choose.

You don't have to, but if you decide to, certainly doesn't piss me off.

Until next time, I love you, and I will see you soon.