Halloween 4 ends with Jamie potentially a murderer and Michael Myers gunned down by the police like he's the Small-Town Twerp that ED-209 guns down in RoboCop. When this movie picks up from the previous one, what happened with Jamie is really swept under the carpet, and Michael swam away to safety to be taken care of by a hobo for an entire year. Even though these movies want to be (relatively) "realistic," we've seen Michael grow eyeballs back after having them shot out, so I guess a swim in a creek will heal about 3,247 gunshot wounds. Nothing like a good swim in a dirty creek, the care of a hobo, and a year-long power-nap to heal up them bullet holes.
The movie prefers you forget the bit about Jamie and her foster mother, which is written off as Michael's evil influencing Jamie, and the foster mother apparently recovering (off-screen). See, Jamie now has this almost psychic connection to Michael, barely speaks, and is in the care of a hospital. She gets visions of Uncle Mikey and writes really helpful notes like drawing a mouth to indicate that he's near her sister's house and just passed the dog, rather than writing "Michael is at Rachel's." You've got to hand it to Danielle Harris, though, because she really acts her ass off and makes all of this work even though, once again, the script is letting her down.
The characters are even less memorable than Part 4's, though. It was a pretty stupid decision to kill Rachel off so early -- or at all, really. Harris and Cornell were the only two things to help get you through the last one, and without that bond, there's not much of anyone to care about. I don't know the story of why they kill her off, but it unfortunately makes room for the Tina character. I've always just assumed that Rachel's replaced by Tina because Wendy Kaplan is related to one of the filmmakers and that's the only reason she hijacks the movie and is featured in so much of it despite being obnoxious as crap.
Really, how much coke is Tina on? She won't stop moving (she walks the way Adam West runs as Batman, arms jutting out with elbows locked inward) and she either sing-songs all of her dialogue or extends the last syllable of her line. There's no reason for her to survive as much of the movie as she does -- SHE should have been the one killed 20 minutes in, not Rachel. But, hey, why have someone you might like and care about in this movie, right? (I didn't remember that Tina does end up getting killed in the movie, so I kinda felt bad when she did but not for the reasons the filmmakers think you should feel bad, though. She wasn't a good character or likable or tolerable. You don't care about her, but you care that your dislike for her character essentially got her killed.)
Loomis is a real mess in this one. Pretty unlikable. He's always bullying and yelling at Jamie to help him track Michael, like he's able to do anything if he found him. He more than once uses Jamie as bait. I guess you might be able to chalk it up to Loomis finally just going mad in his quest to find Michael, but he just feels so far gone from how he is in the first movie. Pleasence deserves better than a lot of the sequels give him, even if he always somehow manages to rise above it all.
One thing I'll give this movie is that I do think there are at least a couple of tense scenes. While I think it's odd for Michael to add vehicular manslaughter to his M.O., that scene in the field where he's trying to run over Jamie, Billy and Tina always made me nervous when I was a kid, and the whole laundry-chute scene at the Myers house is nerve-racking. (You have to forgive Jamie for being a kid and thinking that hiding in the laundry-chute was a good idea, because it's one of the worst ideas in horror history. Not so forgivable is a tactic of another character in one of the later sequels, which I'll get to.) Despite the Myers house in this one looking NOTHING like it does in any previous or subsequent movie, I kind of like that final segment set there. Because, damn, how did it not screw Jamie up to be trapped in the attic with Rachel's corpse, and the corpse of her dog, and a coffin Michael made just for her?
Another thing I'll give this movie is that it TRIES to tone down Michael a bit. Sure, he heals from thousands of gunshot wounds received in the previous movie, but Loomis' speeches are more restrained. If Carpenter's intention with the first movie was to just be scary by depicting a mental patient's escape and randomly terrorizing a neighborhood, then I feel like Part 5 tries to paint Michael more as just an almost average sounding killer from the way Loomis talks to him, the talk of Michael being driven by rage that he hopes to extinguish by killing. (Loomis mentions the idea of Jamie being able to help him, which Michael kinda considers, until he's like "Fuck that. Rehabilitation doesn't get sequels. Ask Norman Bates and all of those awful Psycho sequels.") And, whereas bullets couldn't stop him, in this one, some chains, some tranqs and a beating by Loomis with some 4x4s takes Michael down.
Now, here's a problem with the movie. It's starting to set up the whole Thorn cult stuff, with the symbol being on Michael's wrist and the appearance of The Man in Black. I kind of question where these particular writers were thinking of going with that, but I know it only ends up in disappointment with Part 6. How weak is the final scene, though, an incarcerated Michael broken out by The Man in Black, who we only see as a shadow gunning down cops with a tommy-gun, looking like The Blank from Dick Tracy, with Jamie stumbling upon the aftermath, the movie fading out like there's a lost reel? Part 5 was released in 1989 and Part 6 in 1995. That's quite a gap for such a disappointing final scene, and an even more disappointing attempt following it all up and "answering" what happened.
And Michael's mask flat out sucks in this one. He has a five-head, his hair's slicked back, and I don't know why they decided to leave such long neck flaps hanging out the way they did. Equally bad? The music, which sounds like it was performed on a Fisher Price piano.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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