Halloween 5: The Revenge of the Michael Myers (1989)

Director: Dominique Othernin-Gerard

Cast: Donald Pleasance, Danielle Harris, Ellie Cornell, Beau Starr

Have I Seen it Before: When I wrote a story a few years bak about a boy terrified that the VHS boxes in the horror section of a rental store are out to get him, my memory of first eyeing this movie’s poster in a Homeland’s video rental department* that inspired it.

Did I Like It: Now, if only the film had lived up to that moment of undefined anxiety completely divorced from any context. Any virtues of Halloween 4: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1988) are washed away (literally, there’s a raging rapid and some waterfalls) in this film’s opening minutes.

Pleasance goes from camp hero to camp lunatic in this one, sadly paving the way for the work Malcolm McDowell will do in another fifteen years. Harris continues to equate herself well.

But every Halloween film that tries to immediately follow after the (sometimes mild) successes of their predecessors end up with even more problems in the end equation. If the concept of the Man in Black and the Thorn cult would have landed anywhere comprehensible, then at least the series might have landed in a campy mythological place. Here, things aren’t the worst yet, but they are grim portents of sequels and reboots to come.

Also, the mask is still unrelenting trash. I’d rather wear a real Silver Shamrock mask. I could write a whole book about these masks, but I don’t want that kind of evil in my life.

But that’s all fine, because at this point the film series would really have to have run out of steam, and there aren’t going to be any more Halloween movies to come.

If only.

*Long, long ago, grocery stores often had their own video rental stores in them. It was a wild time. Kids, ask your parents all about it.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

Director: Dwight H. Little

Cast: Donald Pleasance, Ellie Cornell, Danielle Harris, Michael Pataki

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: Let’s get this out of the way first thing. I hate, and I do mean hate, the fucking mask Myers (George P. Wilbur) wears in both this and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989). It looks like the attempt of some fly-by-night costume manufacturer (Silver Shamrock, anyone?) to create a Shape mask when they didn’t have the rights to do so. It’s the MS Paint version of the mask we have come to know and fear and sometimes inappropriately love. To be absolutely fair, it actually does make some sense that the mask has changed from Halloween II (1981) to now, as the original would be a couple of streaks of burnt rubber by now, but I just can’t stand the sight of the thing. If the original mask was reworked from a Captain Kirk mask, then this was reworked from a mask of Blandy McBlandface, The Least Frightening Boy In The Whole World(tm). I have been kinder to some of the absolute worst movies in the series if they at least didn’t try to give us a mask that looks as bad as this one.

What’s more? I’m fairly sure the producers and filmmakers hate their own mask as well. Every poster for both this film and its successor have the visage of Myers as he appears in the original. They know what we want to see. Why do they not just give it to us all the time, especially in a series that isn’t exactly known for sticking to brave new territory?

After all of that, do we want to talk any more about the film? Donald Pleasance keeps things ramped up to their preposterous best. We really can’t expect any more out of him. Danielle Harris plays a convincing daughter of Jamie Lee Curtis, and a new heroine (or villain?) for the series, all while doing so at young age of 10.

The supposedly twist ending is undercut both by the knowledge that the next movie will retcon it into oblivion, and that every moment of the preceding ending telegraphs the punch.

But aside from that, it—as pretty much every course correction in the series—does breathe some new life into the series.

If only they could keep that going with subsequent films…

…and fix that goddamn mask, while you’re at it.