HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!!

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Not expecting anything much from the fifth installment in the franchise, I snuggled up and got as comfy as I could get in my new electric chair to watch Halloween 5: Revenge of Michael Myers. From the get go the girl in the clown suit on the cover reminded me of the painful memories brought on by the last terrible movie. I figured this one can’t be any worse.

The mentally scarred youngster from the previous film returns and happens to be the only thing that holds Halloween 5 together. The actress, Danielle Harris, was the cutest little girl and did an excellent job expressing panic for her age. The rest of the movie can bite me; I’m already over it. How can a little kid out act everyone else in a professional production? The other characters include a happy-go-lucky (annoying) teen girl, two cops straight out of a slapstick comedy, and good ol’ Dr. Loomis. Except I can’t really say he is good anymore because Donald Pleasence’s schtick has only gotten worse with time. You can practically hear him screaming through from under the character’s skin, “I’m not done yet, Hollywood! You can’t kill me! I can still act! Look, I can be even crazier than ever before!”

It’s like after Halloween II the franchise got stuck in a time loop. Every film repeats the last with little to differentiate from what has previously been shown. Michael Myers comes back on Halloween night and starts killing people. Dr. Loomis screams in a policeman’s face like a lunatic. A girl is stalked until the doctor shows up and ends The Shape’s spree, killing or capturing him. Then, just as the terror seems to be over and everyone calms down, Myers escapes. Halloween 5 ends with one foot already in the door of its sequel and that is usually never a good thing.

Michael Myers is, to me, the most iconic entity in the entirety of the horror genre. His story is a great one, but one that could never have been stretched into 3+ movies. It’s too simple of a formula to create anything meaningful after a trilogy. Even then, pulling his story around three films might be too impossible. If they stuck with the original plan of making every entry in the Halloween series a completely separate story with all new characters it might have been for the best. I loved Halloween III: Season of the Witch because of its bravery to switch gears. Although it’s a shame to think, Myers is a legend who unfortunately would have been better off dying a long time a go.

2 slasher series killing themselves out of 5

★★☆☆☆