philosoraptor42 | Halloween Franchise Review Series - Part 5: Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

Blooming eck, these titles are getting interchangeable. Perhaps the best part of this film is the sequence at the beginning where they completely redo the final since of Michael in the previous movie. Michael crawls away and manages to survive even though, according to this new interepretation of events, we are supposed to believe that the police tried to ensure that Michael was dead with the use of a grenade. Michael crawls to safety and, it turns out, is still on the loose.

But the film the picks up a year later, Jamie is now being treated by Loomis in a psychiatric ward and it's really sad to see this because I'd always presumed that Loomis was a good psychiatrist who was unfortunate enough to be given an untreatable patient. But here he's clearly the worst psychiatrist ever. While he's right to think that Jamie has some kind of supernatural psychic connection with Myers, his methods of getting her to share what she knows are pathetic. He just comes off as a bully, not a sensible doctor-figure at all.

Living in a psychiatric institute because of a violent knife attack on her own mother doesn't seem to make her less endearing to those around her. One of her older sister's friends, Tina, is now extremely close with her for some unfathomable reason. Still Tina is being set up as a fairly 'loose' girl, so while she feels (unbelieveably) obligated to spend time with Jamie, she also really wants to go out with her boyfriend and other friends. This is actually a pretty reasonable request (and much moreso than the suggestion that she go to her friend's younger sister's play) and so I'm not sure why the script felt the need to put the 'slut' label on her. I suppose it's because of the whole 'sex leads to death' theme established in horror movies by this stage.

There's a scene where Tina doesn't realise that the man in the car with her (wearing her boyfriend's mask) is actually Myers and not her boyfriend at all, is a brief effectively creepy moment. But as was the case in the last Halloween sequel, everything is too rushed for us to really feel any tension.

At a Halloween party Tina goes to there are two comic relief policemen who are teased by Tina's friends pretending to attack one another in Michael Myers masks. (Seriously, why are those things still being sold? The guy was only terrorising the town the previous year!) At the party there is also a sex scene in a barn which is remarkably realistic. It's doesn't show the sex as being stupidly short like in the original Halloween, but it also doesn't feel like the two young lovers are especially capable either. It was quite a nice portrayal, if a complete side-track from the main story. Oh, and randomly there are kittens in the barn. Why not, eh?

Eventually the young Jamie has joined her sister's friend Tina at the party because she believes Tina is in danger from Michael Myers. Why Michael would be after Tina is a little strange. Perhaps it is because he knows she is connected to Jamie's sister and so he is going after her in order to lure Jamie out. Once Myers has found Jamie though, we can finally get the big Myers rampage we've been waiting for. It's not brilliant, but when they end up back at the Myers house (of course), there's quite a cool scene with Jamie trying to hide from Michael in the laundry chute. But in the end this final section is inconsistent. One minute Myers is desperately stabbing at Jamie, the next he's showing her his face under the mask, then Loomis is pretending to let Myers kill Jamie before trying to beat him to death with a plank of wood. It's a set of bits with no clear consistent plotline tying them together.

We do not even have a satisfying ending here either, since Michael is captured by the police and then immediately broken out of police custody with use of explosives. This all being related to a random figure in weird boots who has been hanging around for the whole film.

With "Halloween 5" the Halloween franchise has finally reached the same mind-numbing level of the lowest quality Friday 13th sequels. The internal logic is hard to swallow, the characters are hard to relate to and there is nothing particularly thrilling about the whole thing. And I wish I could say that this was the bottom of the barrel, but I've actually already seen part 6....

D-