Directed by Dominique Othenin-Girard
Starring Donald Pleasence, Danielle Harris, Ellie Cornell (sort of), Beau Starr and Wendy Kaplan
Time for the annual October Halloween franchise review. Every October, I always toss one more of these out, which means that if I'm still doing this blog a few years from now I'm going to have to watch Rob Zombie's shitfests again, but what are you gonna do. For those keeping score, here's the rundown of the series up until this point:
1 - John Carpenter presents a lesson in slow burning terror. Pace, pace, pace, and sheer horror perfection.
2 - Darker and more slashery than the first, not quite as good, but still classic.
3 - Sloppy attempt at going the "anthology" route - no Myers and a haphazard story.
4 - Surprisingly good - Myers is back with a vengeance and plenty of likable characters.
So there you go. Halloween 4 really was a very effective little mini-reboot for the series back in 1988; they tried to turn the series into an anthology with the third film, but people weren't having it and I can't say I blame them because that flick is really hard to get into. Not because "OMG it ain't Myers" - just because the movie really isn't all that good or interesting. Thus, while they went with the familiar formula with the fourth movie, they added just enough new wrinkles to make it seem like something totally fresh. We had a burned and scarred Dr. Loomis, slight interludes of a teen romance subplot, and a pair of excellent girls-next-door in Danielle Harris and Ellie Cornell. It also had an ending that left us with a major cliffhanger and plenty of promise when the next sequel was announced.
And...we got this. The mistakes of Halloween 5 were numerous, so much so that all of the momentum that the series regained was lost and it would sit on the shelf for another six years. So where did it go wrong? Well, play like Mr. Rogers' third-wall neighbor and come along.
As previously mentioned, the last movie had a twist ending that left audiences shell-shocked. After resuming his murderous rampage, Michael Myers is cornered by an angry mob and shot multiple times, falling into a nearby mine. What THAT movie didn't show is that he manages to crawl away from that situation and is found by a hermit, pulled into the guy's house and nursed back to health. How's that for plot convenience? Meanwhile, Jamie Lloyd - Michael's eight-year-old niece and the daughter of Laurie Strode - allegedly goes insane after returning home, stabbing her mother as a shocked Dr. Loomis screams "why??" with voracity that Nancy Kerrigan herself would envy.
And that's where we're at today, kids. A year has passed, meaning that it's October 30th in Haddonfield, Illinois. Michael springs to life and kills the hermit. Yes, folks, he's back and he's pissed. Completely separate from that, Jamie is now in a child psychiatric ward...and she's mute. Now, admittedly, audiences were still invested in Jamie's story, and Danielle Harris was still up to the task of making her part work in spite of the major hindrance that the script places on her. But a large part of what made that fourth movie way better than it had any right to be was Harris' everygirl relatability and charm, something rare in and of itself for a child actor and rarer still for a child actor in a horror film. Taking away her ability to talk until the absolute final moments of the film was a HUGE mistake, and we're already behind the 8-ball.
Which brings me to mistake #2 that the movie never quite recovers from. In the fourth film, Ellie Cornell was fantastic as Jamie's foster sister Rachel. Yeah, her plot line with her philandering boyfriend did occasionally veer into melodrama, but she was a nice, tough, classic "final girl" that we were fully into when she was the only thing standing between Myers and Jamie. This movie *SPOILER ALERT THAT NO ONE CARES ABOUT* gets rid of her in the first trimester with hardly a whimper. Now, Nightmare on Elm Street 4 did a similar thing by getting rid of Kristen Parker early, but that movie had a compelling side character in Alice Johnson to pick up the slack. And this movie...has Tina.
Oh, Tina. Played by Wendy Kaplan, it's kind of hard to describe Tina's character. She's Rachel's best friend and seems to have kind of a surrogate sister thing going on with Jamie. The script also calls for her to be all kinds of quirky, but instead she just comes off as Doug Funnie's sister with none of the redeeming qualities.
Plot wise, it should be pretty clear what we have here. Donald "King of the Universe" Pleasence is once again here as Sam Loomis, chewing up the scenery in his usual powerhouse performance as he keeps vigil waiting for his proverbial white whale to show up. It's one of this movie's saving graces, as the dichotomy between Loomis and Myers is one of those things that is wholly unique to the Halloween franchise. Myers soon shows up in Haddonfield, adding a couple more tallies to the death toll in the aftermath of Rachel's death in the form of Tina's greaser boyfriend and a couple random friends who head away to a shed in the midst of this movie's requisite "costume party" sequence. We've also got a pair of quite literal Keystone Cops whose antics are accompanied by clowny horns. No, folks, not kidding. It's just as compelling as it sounds. And we've got the added mystery of a mysterious man following Myers around, a guy whose entire proof of existence is in the camera shots of his steel-toed shoes.
Now, according to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, this guy was originally supposed to be Michael's brother. For whatever reason, they decided to leave his identity ambiguous, so until the ending sequence his presence is entirely inconsequential. What IS important, however, is that this movie doesn't particularly work as a thriller. We're still into Jamie, but the anciliary characters here are nowhere near as good as they were in the last film, and that hurts in a big way. We get the beginning chapter in the "humanization" of Michael as Loomis begins to suspect that someone else is controlling him, something that really hurts the mystique of the character as he was originally conceived as the Shape of Evil. By the time the finale hits in the Myers house, with the big guy chasing Jamie across three stories (including one admittedly very nifty bit in a heating duct), we're too numbed by everything we've been presented with to care too much.
So yes, folks, this is a mess of a movie. I was always impressed with the big three franchise's ability to churn out sequels in quick succession that seemed polished and professional, but this one has "rush job" written all over it. Even more frustrating is the fact that the weird plot elements introduced here, with all of this outside influence and the idea that Myers isn't acting of his own free will, would come back to severely haunt the writers as the series progressed the next time around. Thus, it's not a surprise to me in the least bit that there were so many different creative directions clashing by the time Halloween 6 went into production.
* 1/2 out of ****. A sad missed opportunity to really kick this series into high gear after a successful jump-start, and the expectedly good performances from Pleasence and Harris aren't nearly enough to save it from the big mistakes.
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