Monday, October 8, 2012

October 2012 Edition #8: HALLOWEEN 5: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS






Director: Dominique Othenin-Girard
Screenplay: Michael Jacobs, Dominique Othenin-Girard and Shem Bitterman
Starring: Donald Pleasance, Danielle Harris, Ellie Cornell, Beau Starr, Wendy Foxworth
Release Date: October 13th, 1989


UGH!

That was the thought that kept popping into my head every time I tried to pop this disc in over the years. The result of my since-abandoned obsessive compulsion to own every film in the series and predilection for diving headfirst into the five dollar bin at Walmart, my ownership of HALLOWEEN 5: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS has been puzzling even to myself. I have known for years due to it’s notoriety amongst hardcore horror fans that I was not going to like this movie. I had even tried to sit through several of the flick’s numerous airings on AMC in the last decade, and could never make it past the first few minutes. One of the downsides to doing this blog is that it eats up a majority of the time I’d like to spend viewing some old standby’s. Last night was the first night of the year to truly feel like autumn. There was a brisk chill in the air, the sky was overcast, dead leaves were blowing in the breeze, and by God I wanted to watch John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN! But it was almost ten o’clock, and I had yet to watch a horror flick I hadn’t seen that day, so I had to find the next best thing either in my collection or on Netflix that I hadn’t viewed yet. Well, Netflix was down, and the closest thing I could find was HALLOWEEN 5. Goddamnit. Well, here goes…




After some admittedly stylish and atmospheric opening credits involving the carving of a demonic pumpkin, the movie opens with a brief recap of the climax of HALLOWEEN 4, detailing how Michael somehow managed to survive multiple shotgun blasts, a fall into a deep well, and a stick of dynamite by crawling into a nearby stream and floating to safety. He eventually drifts by the backwoods hut of an old hermit who lives alone with his pet parrot, and very conveniently falls into a year-long coma during which time the hermit inexplicably treats his wounds and keeps him alive, apparently telling no one about the giant dude in a mask who washed ashore and tried to strangle him. This is only the first of the movie’s many, um, inconsistencies.

So a year later and Jamie Lloyd (Harris), the orphaned daughter of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and therefore Michael’s niece, is holed up in a children’s hospital, having apparently gone mute after stabbing her mother Myers-style in the last scene of the previous film, the insinuation being that after Michael’s “death”, the evil that resided in him had passed on to his last surviving relative and would continue to live on through her. It was actually a decent ending, and sort of chilling, but the producers of this entry prove what utter pussies they are by completely redacting that scene so that Jamie only mildly injured her mother and is okay now. There is some vague notion of a psychic link going on between Jamie and her psychotic uncle, as she appears to be able to see what he sees as he kills, but this power functions clumsily at best as a plot device used to move the story from point A to point B with little thought from the filmmakers. At this point in time you could pinpoint with deadly accuracy when I horror franchise was getting desperate for ideas when they fell back on the old “psychic link” cliché. It’s a lazy way to try to add depth to existing characters without trying, and usually results in a lot of embarrassingly misinformed psychobabble. Hell, in 1989 alone FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VIII and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET PART 5 also relied on this dumb-ass storyline, and the mutual box office failure and venomous fan reaction to all three of these flicks played a large part in the swift death of the theatrical horror film for much of the 90’s.




Anyways, Jamie is having psychic flashes of Michael rising up on the morning of October 31st and slaughtering the hermit, and of course Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) is on the scene to psychotically rave about how Michael is pure “Eeeevillll!” and wave his burn-scarred hands in people’s faces for the thousandth time even though obviously nobody is impressed and he’s just embarrassing himself. Seriously, why in the fuck would anybody let this man hang around a mentally troubled twelve year old girl? I don’t care if her uncle is the son of a hundred maniacs (Whoops! Wrong franchise!), if I saw an old man screaming at a little girl that her homicidal uncle was totally going to come stab the shit out of her, I’d have him forcibly placed in a paddy wagon after giving him a swift kick in the ass! I found it incredibly sad watching Donald Pleasance collect his paycheck in this movie. Even in just the one year gap since the previous film, he had gotten much frailer and appearance and cadence of speech, and you can clearly see that he is just going through the motions at this point. The Sam Loomis of John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN was not a raving psychotic, but a rational man who had clearly stared the devil in the eyes and was desperately trying to stop him at all costs. The Dr. Loomis of HALLOWEEN 5 is a pathetic old curmudgeon who consistently wastes the time and the patience of the authorities, and yet is somehow still allowed to order them around with absolutely zero evidence to back his claims up.




To get back to the plot, Michael strolls into town and quickly dispatches Jamie’s stepsister Rachel (Ellie Cornell), effectively removing the only other likeable character in the film. Unfortunately for us, Rachel has a friend named Tina (Foxworth), and never in the history of slasher cinema has a character been more deserving of a swift throat-punching. Seemingly improvising all of her dialogue (at least I hope no one actually wrote this shit), Foxworth is nasally, loud, moronic douche bag who hangs out with a group of even more snazzy douche bags, and these bags of douche are who Michael ends up stalking for the bulk of the film. None of this really makes any sense, as in the previous sequels Michael actually had a goal, which was to kill his sister/niece, and anybody else who ended up dead were just those unfortunate enough to wander into his path. That’s not to say there were no gratuitous kills, but there was a formula, and the filmmakers stuck to it. These characters, as far as Michael knows, have NOTHING to do with Jamie, and in fact he has to go far out of his way to stalk and kill them. It’s stupid, and just goes to show how little director Othenin-Girard understood the basic structure of the series, or even the motivations of his characters.




It all leads up to a sorta tense but mostly not showdown at the old Myers house which, quite egregiously, looks absolutely nothing like the house seen in either HALLOWEEN or HALLOWEEN II. Loomis uses Jamie as bait to lure Michael out of hiding and Michael takes out a few cops. Then Loomis talks to Michael about his feelings, which makes Michael cry (I‘m not fucking kidding!), and drops a chain-link net on his head before beating the dogshit out of him with a ceiling beam, suffering a heart attack and falling over dead on top of him. Michael is placed in a jail cell awaiting transport to a high-security prison, but then a mysterious man in black, whom we only see from the waist down, shows up and guns down the entire police force, springing Michael from jail and setting the stage for another sequel that I haven’t seen and really don’t want to.




HALLOWEEN 5 is an offensively lazy film, filled with despicable characters, that effectively wipes it’s ass with the legacy of the original. On the plus side, it is actually very well-shot, has a fairly atmospheric score that re-purposes John Carpenter’s iconic cues, and Danielle Harris proved she was one of the better child actresses of her era with her turn as Jamie. So while the film is not at all “good” or worth a recommend, I don’t think it deserves to be lumped in with the all-time turkey’s of the genre as it has been. FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VIII in particular I find to be far more offensively awful. I must insist, however, that unless you are a hardcore fan of the HALLOWEEN series, or just a masochistic completist like myself, you would be well served to stay away from this wet fart of a sequel. I’m just glad I finally got this one out of my system.


My Rating: 4.5/10

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