“He’ll never die.”
It’s safe to assume that once a franchise has reached its fifth installment, it’s safe to call it quits. At that point, it’s most likely in the hands of greedy, creatively bankrupt executives who are just trying to bleed dry the cash cow. Sometimes franchises can get a little long in the tooth and still find ways to be fun; for instance, Halloween 4 and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 are both better than they ought to be. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, unfortunately, is as lousy as a film with that clunky nightmare of a title would seem to be. There’s very little to recommend here, and the movie isn’t really worth checking out unless you’re running the series.
The Revenge of Michael Myers starts right where Halloween 4 left off, which isn’t in and of itself a bad idea. Halloween II did the same thing, and one wonders if producer Moustapha Akkad is trying to replicate some of what made John Carpenter and Debra Hill’s contributions to the story so iconic. Make no mistake, at this point in the franchise, these characters are more Akkad’s than anyone else’s. As a result, a lot of Halloween 5 feels like fan fiction, and not particularly good fan fiction. Which is a shame, because against all odds, the opening credits are nicely eerie, and promise a better film than is delivered.
Michael survives the grisly fate he met at the end of Halloween 4, and is taken in by a hermit in the mountains, who presumably nurses him back to health, because Michael is still there a year later. It’s Halloween Eve, and he’s got business to take care of. He promptly kills off his caretaker, which is an impressively dark move for a movie that more than any others wants to humanize the Shape. It’s also of a piece with the near-nihilistic tone of Halloween 4. It’s all more or less downhill from there. Revenge hits what it believes are the expected story beats of a Halloween movie, but without any vigor or zeal.
This time around, Michael is shambling back to Haddonfield to, according to the title, get his revenge. To which I have to ask: revenge for what? This is the same issue I had with A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. You started all this. You don’t get to seek revenge. It doesn’t work that way, not when you’re the aggressor. Michael’s target is his niece, Jamie, played again by Danielle Harris, who was great in the last movie but can’t quite reach the same heights here. To Halloween 5‘s credit, it at least makes a pass at portraying Jamie’s trauma, as she’s now reverted to muteness.
Any goodwill engendered by this, however, is undone by a supporting cast of the least likable characters in any horror movie. Everyone plays their characters as if they’re at the Winter Garden, projecting to the back of the theater. This is exemplified best in Donald Pleasence’s performance as Dr. Loomis. While in the first two Halloween movies Pleasence played Loomis as a harbinger of doom, here he’s mainly a crotchety fussbucket who spends a lot of time yelling at Jamie and guilting her for not doing more to help him find Michael. Oh, right: Jamie has developed a psychic link with Michael, and if you’re wondering if the introduction of a supernatural element into a franchise that has never featured that would help, the answer is “decidedly not.”
It’s just as well that Jamie has a psychic connection to her murderous uncle, because she has maybe the world’s worst support system. There’s Rebecca, dispatched early; Tina, who wants to be both Cyndi Lauper and Cheri Curie but comes woefully short of either; and the aforementioned Dr. Loomis, who seems to just hate Jamie. The only character who approaches likability is Samantha, played by Tamara Glynn is a sweet performance that sticks out amongst all the loathsome characters. Chief among these is Tina’s boyfriend Mikey, played by Jonathan Chapin in a dreadful performance. He’s going for something like a sullen rebel persona – think early Brando in The Wild One, or basically any James Dean role – but he comes off as so surly and abusive that he’s more akin to one of Stephen King’s psychopathic teenage bullies, like It‘s Henry Bowers or Christine‘s Buddy Repperton. It’s a please to watch Mikey take a gardening tool to the face.
Halloween 5 is just rote storytelling with little of the signs of life that Halloween 4 managed to bring to its proceedings (I’m thinking particularly of that movie’s genuinely shocking ending, the repercussions of which this one shies away from). There are attempts to make some sort of comment on the hereditary nature of Michael’s evil, culminating in the film’s best scene, in which Jamie stops Michael in his tracks by simply asking “Uncle?” But the film literally and figuratively does away with this development, as Michael slashes away at her.
Look, I didn’t go into Halloween 5 expecting it to be good. Maybe that’s unfair, but in my defense, that’s how I approached Halloween 4, which, while not “good” in the traditional sense, is at least interesting. So I was perfectly willing to be surprised by The Revenge of Michael Myers, however unlikely I knew that to be. It’s not so much that I wasn’t surprised by this movie; it’s that I was actively bored by it. It takes a lot to make a movie with such an iconic villain into something so tepid and by-the-numbers, but Halloween 5 achieves that. That’s an impressive feat, although not in the way the filmmakers were going for.
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