Halloween 6 starts out good. The production values seem polished, the creepiness is on target, and the musical score is appropriate. Really, Halloween 6 should have been a passable, if not particularly original, horror film.

Michael Myers, the crazy slasher, is back. This time he's chasing after Jamie Lloyd (J.C. Brandy), who has just given birth in a sanitarium. Why this baby is so important is never made clear, although we are led to believe it's somehow related to Myers. Only later did I discover in the director's cut that the baby is Myers' child.

Jamie escapes only to be tracked down and killed by Myers, but not before she hides her baby in a bus station outside Haddonfield. One of the few survivors of the encounter with Myers, Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd, forever after known as Phoebe's boyfriend from Friends), finds the baby. Tommy is a strange fellow who is fond of taking snapshots of his neighbor, Kara Lloyd (Marianne Hagan).

Kara lives with her son in the original Myers house, only she doesn't know that, because she's living with John Strode (Bradford English). John is a true jerk, calling Kara's son a bastard and slapping her around. The mother, Debra Strode (Kim Darby) is a mousy, obsequious wimp who does nothing to protect her daughter (?). So of course we know both of them are going to die in horrible ways. Very Stephen King-y.

Meanwhile, Kara's son Danny (Devin Gardner) is hearing a voice encouraging him to kill people. The voice originates from a mysterious druid cult dedicated to a demon named Thorn, who inhabits the body of a child and ritually slaughters his entire family for the betterment of…well, somebody. Their symbol is the "Thorn Rune." It's a neat idea.

The cult pops up intermittently, driving around in black vans and personified by a man in a black trench coat and a broad-rimmed hat. This bad guy's identity is supposed to be a surprise when it's finally revealed, but it's so not.

In actuality, the rune is the Nordic thurisaz rune from the FUTHARK alphabet. It represents the giants and could conceivably represent evil. But it was certainly not a druid rune. The druids used a runic alphabet known as Ogham. And it's debatable whether or not druids sacrificed people, but that's certainly a piece of common druid lore.

So you've got a murderous new age cult who protect the child "possessed by Thorn" who in turns murders his entire family. Voila! The movie provides instant justification for Myers' amazing ability to withstand bullets (he's possessed by a demon, ya see), his knack for returning from the dead, and his obsession with killing his family.

Unfortunately, it's all downhill from there. Kara seems to have an idiotic brother Tim (played by Keith Bogart, who stands idly by while watching Kara get slapped so hard that her nose bleeds) and his ditzy girlfriend, Beth (Mariah O'Brien). These two geniuses have their own subplot that involves throwing a party to celebrate Halloween and throw off the awful stigma of a serial killer in the area. The movie even shows people walking around carrying signs of Michael Myers. Oh, the irony!

As yet another plot point, the venerable Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) teams with Dr. Wynn (Mitch Ryan) and achieve very little besides fretting around dead bodies. But Dr. Wynn is the director of the sanitarium and he holds a dark secret.

In the middle of this confused mess, Tim throws a Halloween block party with a surprise appearance by an extremely irritating D.J., who is mercilessly murdered a few minutes later. Before he dies, the shock jock discovers on live radio that Tim lives in the original Strode home where the killings of the first Halloween movie took place. Worse, John Strode is a real estate agent and knows all about the house's history.

With this tidbit revealed, the D.J. plans to move the party to the Strode house. Hundreds of people are presumably going to go there, but Tim and Beth get there first. Then, forgetting that the entire town will be showing up any minute, they decide to take a shower and make out. And of course, die.

At one point, Danny and Dr. Loomis are captured and then, because the bad guy "wants them to live to see his grand plan" they are knocked unconscious. Of course, it doesn't really feel that way in the film, as it's just one jump cut from them being bonked to both characters standing around talking about how they were drugged up. It's the worst deus ex machina ever.

It's never really clear why Danny hears the voice, presumably to fill Michael Myers' shoes. It's never really clear why Myers wants to kill baby Steven. And Dr. Loomis' significance is questionable, as he contributes nothing of value.

There's a strange showdown of sorts in the sanitarium, where we see shots of baby fetuses. Why? The theory is that the druid cult is breeding children to be killers and maybe Danny is one of them (we never discover who Danny's father is). But that's probably giving this film too much credit.

The cult loses control of Myers, utterly invalidating the whole point of his single-minded killing tactics against members of his family. Apparently, Myers just likes to kill people. He then spends the remainder of the film stalking our protagonists, who fight back by jumping out of dark places and hitting Myers with pipes.

When that doesn't work, they hit him big needles filled with drugs. When that doesn't work, they hit him with pipes again. Occasionally, they use baby Steven as a lure to get Myers to walk into a trap (this happens twice).

What we have here is the afterbirth of the movie-making process. Scripts are cut, scenes are spliced, characters are introduced without full explanation, and they leave just as mysteriously. The movie feels discarded and confused, like nobody cared enough to actually make it work.