10 Movies Totally Ruined By Test Audiences

Poor Michael Myers. Between Rob Zombie, a host of B-movie John Carpenter wannabes, and now David Gordon Green, his legacy has been thrown around worse than the canoodling teens he tosses out of windows.

Of all the cooks spoiling Carpenter’s originally perfect broth, though, one name sticks out. Moustapha Akkad is the producer who decided what Halloween needed was deep lore, not cheap scares. And boy does the franchise’s fifth instalment prove him wrong.

The film could have delved into the dark Celtic mythos driving the character’s evil, a culture rarely explored onscreen even nowadays. However, test audiences hated anything more complex than a simple hack-and-slash, so the new much-maligned cut was born.

Reshoots spawned the worst film in the long-running franchise, not least due to the sudden unexplained absence of fan favourite Dr Loomis, whose actor Donald Pleasance had unfortunately died during post-production. Akkad’s gothic vision for the film has since seen the light of day, but even the more ambitious cut can’t distract from what a hopeless dud this flick was reduced to.