Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Meyers (1989)
HALLOWEEN 5: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MEYERS
WRITERS: Michael Jacobs & Dominique O'thenin-Girard and Shem Bitterman
DIRECTOR: Domonique O’thenin-Girard
STARRING: Donald Pleasence as Loomis
Danielle Harris as Jamie
Ellie Cornell as Rachel
Beau Starr as Meeker
Jeffrey Landman as Billy
Tamara Glynn as Samantha
Jonathan Chapin as Mike
Matthew Walker as Spitz
Wendy Kaplan as Tina
QUICK CUT: Michael Myers returns after disappearing for a year to reunite with his family, and the town worried about his disappearance.
THE MORGUE
Loomis - This guy is coming off the rails, people. He is manic, shouting at everyone, and his desire to take down Michael overrules everything.
Jamie - Traumatised after the last movie, silent for most of this one, and all of it is understandable. She’s still full of life though, and willing to help in any way she can.
Billy - The little boy who loves Jamie, and follows her around like a puppy dog.
Michael Myers - What can I say? He’s the strong silent type.
TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions! Happy Octoberween! And you know what that means...Halloween 5 time! You know the drill, and this picks up right after the end of #4, so let's just dive right into this.
It literally does pick up before the end of the last movie, recapping in a truncated format, the final confrontation with Michael where he is filled with so much lead he should be a pencil.
But we expand beyond that and see him fall down into an old mine shaft, crawl off to a river, and end up at a shack where an old man lives. He tries to kill the man, but ends up collapsing on his floor...and we cut to a year later.
We catch up with little Jamie, staying in a children's hospital, and having nightmares of the end of the movie. I feel ya, kid. This is also more reused footage, yeesh. Fortunately, this is the extent of things, and we don't go full Silent Night Deadly Night 2. *wiggles eyebrows*
The trauma of last Halloween has left its mark on the child though, and she hasn't spoken since, nor can she even scream. I gotta say, and I will surely say this numerous times over the next few thousand words, Danielle Harris does an amazing job. I know adults who couldn't do this as well as she does as a child.
We also see her and Michael are connected, as she sees things through his eyes...well, not exactly, more of an omniscient perspective but *cough*. She watches as her uncle awakens from his year long n...WAIT A SECOND HERE.
Am I truly expected to believe that Mikey just lay there FOR ANY ENTIRE YEAR? until the power of Halloween called him forth from his coma? I know the dude has some mystical bullshit going on but come ON.
Michael then gets the Halloween festivities started by killing the kind soul who looked over him for the past year.
Jamie convulses through her connection with Michael, and the doctors rush her to the ER to try and keep her alive. And OUT OF NOWHERE pops up Doctor Loomis like a squawking jack in the box. Dude is a living jump scare. Seriously, where did he come from??
The girl calms down, and Loomis visits her the next day, as well as her sister Rachel. And then Rachel's friend Tina shows up with the family dog, Max.
Suddenly, a stone is thrown through the window, with a note saying "the evil child must die". This is a potentially interesting plotline...that will proceed to go nowhere.
Rachel and Tina head out after the excitement to get ready for the Halloween party. While Rachel drifts through her house, Michael does his lurking about, which Jamie connects to, and starts doodling her dog on the wall.
Max is barking his head off at Michael, and Loomis calls up to make sure Rachel is okay. The police come over, make sure she's fine, and they find the dog running loose in the neighbourhood. So everyone thinks Loomis and Jamie are worrying over nothing.
Also, while the cops are there, the movie does...really wacky clown music which okay fine, it's a light moment, but it also undercuts so much of the movie in one fell swoop.
Loomis does believe the little girl though, and proceeds to shout at and harangue the poor traumatised child, not helping matters at all. I wonder if Michael had a different therapist, if he would have ended up differently.
Halloween 5: Doctor Loomis Yells at a Child for 90 Minutes
Meanwhile, Rachel resumes getting ready, and Michael is lurking in her closet SOMEHOW without her noticing.
Max starts barking again, as Michael comes out of the closet behind Rachel, and finishes the job he came there for, with a pair of scissors.
Tina comes back around with costumes and snacks, and uses the spare key to enter the house. She assumes Rachel just went off to do some other stuff, because that's not suspicious. She appeases Max by promising to get him some water, all while Michael lurks and watches and waits. Seriously, the best stuff in this movie is the tense waiting as you know Michael is right there.
Suddenly another friend appears, Sammy, to also get ready and party. And still no one suspects anything is amiss. The two girls head off to do more whatever, and hey! Tina never got Max his water! She promised!!
Also, while they're walking and talking, Tina blurts out, "They should ban Halloween in this town" smartest thing ever uttered in this entire series.
Jamie wakes up, sees Michael lurking outside the hospital, and goes running through the hallways, the Shape always at her back. Things start to get a little strange, and spoiler alert, it's a bit of a nightmare. Am I watching a Halloween movie, or Elm Street??
They retrieve her from the basement, so Loomis pays another visit, and Jesus this man is intense. Pleasence is great, but HOLY POTATOES is he chewing the scenery up and abusing this poor girl.
He gets right up in her face, trying to get her to say something, and TORMENTING HER with what Michael is going to do to her family. Whaaaat the FUCK doc.
Meanwhile, a bus pulls into town, so a man dressed all in black, whom we never see above the knees, gets and he's got spurs that got spurs that go jingle jangle jingle.
Loomis pays a visit to the retconned Myers home, and wanders around so we get a feel for the place, calling out to Michael. It's nice to see Pleasence A) dial it back some and 2) giving a solid performance to nobody.
But as he walks through the place, we see he is not alone, as both the Man and Michael are sneaking around watching the doctor.
The girls and their boyfriends continue prepping for the party, including swiping some beer from the store Spitz works at. Mike loads up his car, and that's when the Other Mike shows up and stabs him in the face with a rake.
With that done, and while the kids have their own Halloween party, Real Michael goes and picks up Other Mike's girlfriend Tina for their own party.
Jamie gets another vision of what her uncle is up to as the couple try and drive their way towards her. All while Michael is trying to not kill his passenger. Do it, Michael. Do it. Do it!
Tina makes Michael stop so she can get some smokes, and Jamie tries to communicate what's going on so they can find her before anything bad happens. She finally breaks through and says a few words.
Police bust in as Tina leaves the store, and Mike drives off before they can stop him from his Halloween rounds.
The cops make sure she's okay, take her to Jamie, and she heads back off to her party. Loomis yells at the cops to keep an eye on her, like he yells at everyone else in this movie.
Jamie continues to see Michael stalking Tina, and busts out of the hospital with her friend Billy to go save the day.
While the cops watch the party, the girls come running out screaming, and Michael chasing them but WOMP WOMP it's all a prank and a man nearly gets shot.
The two couples head off to a nearby barn where things are sure to go well, because nothing bad ever happens in barns...and we get treated to a series of pranks and scares and false starts from the kids having fun with each other. It's cute, but I can feel myself getting antsy waiting for Michael.
Oh look, here he comes now, running Spitz through with a pitchfork in the middle of having sex. Sammy screams and runs off, and credit to her for not only being calm and collected enough to remove the pitchfork from her boyfriend to use as a weapon, but rushing right in at the killer.
She fails and gets herself killed, but an a for effort!
The party starts to break up and head elsewhere, as the kids arrive, and how far did they have to run to get here? Meanwhile, Tina goes looking for her friends, and unfortunately finds them and Michael.
I will say, the payoff to the bodies falling on Tina DOES make the earlier prank that it’s mirroring worth the time it took to set up.
However, the movie does fall into a bit of a trap at this point of having a lot of people running around the farm, shouting out names, for a good long while.
Michael chases the two kids and Tina around the farm, in a car! which is something new for the series, and is genuinely harrowing. Mainly because we find out in commentaries they were in GENUINE DANGER.
The Shape focuses in on chasing Jamie, and eventually crashes the car. It explodes, as cars are wont to do in movies, and I guess we're done here!
Mike stalks after the child, until Tina throws herself at the killer, taking the blade intended for Jamie. A very, very wobbly blade.
The cops and ambulances arrive, and Loomis confronts the crying child who just lost another friend, asking her for help to stop Michael. She agrees, probably just go make the yelly doctor GO THE FUCK AWAY. Everyone hides out at the Myers house to end this once and for all for the third time with three movies to go.
Michael lures most of the cops away by stalking Jamie's friend at the hospital so she sees it and warns the cops. Once they clear out though, he returns to his home for the final act. Boy he got their fast.
Loomis and Michael come face to face, and for someone who has spent all these movies talking about how this isn't a person, but Pure Evil, he shockingly tries to talk down the killer.
The cop guarding Jamie tries to have them escape through the window, but Mike busts in and hangs him out to dry.
Jamie runs around trying to hide, and eventually ducks down the laundry chute. Mike heads to the basement to grab her, but the unstoppable killing machine gets stymied...by a latch.
She manages to climb back out at the second floor, and she makes her way to the attic. She lays down in a coffin after finding all her dead friends, which seems to just be asking for it, and when Mike shows up, they have a surprisingly tender moment.
At least, until she tries to touch Michael's unmasked face, and he freaks out, throwing things around the attic. The girl takes the opportunity to run away some more.
Loomis shows up, grabs the girl, and uses her like a mouse dangled before a snake, probably giving her another ten years worth of therapy right then and there.
They lure Michael to a room, and drop a chain net on top of him, weighing him down, as Loomis shoots him with a gun. When that still doesn't stop Michael, he beats the Shape with a board. Stupid corpse! Stop! Scaring! Jamie!!
He may be shouting die die die! but Loomis stops just short of killing him, if he even can be killed, and the cops put him in jail.
A situation which lasts for all of five minutes, as the Man in Black wanders through, slaughters the cops, and releases Michael in preparation for the next movie.
This one single slaughter has almost as many deaths as the entire rest of the movie, and it happens off screen, possibly perpetrated by someone NOT your main killer. Way to go! What a way to wrap things up.
TRISK ASSESSMENT
Video: Looks rock solid
Audio: Same for sound!
Sound Bite: “They ought to ban Halloween in this town!”
Body Count: Pretty impressive, but points are lost because so many happen off screen by a man we don’t really know.
1 - At approximately 8:30 and Michael snaps the neck of the kind soul who took care of him all year.
2 - Rachel gets stabbed with some scissors.
3 - Mikey gets stabbed by Michael in the face.
4 - Spitz gets pitchforked
5 - Then Sammy gets sycthed in the neck.
6 - Tina finds the dead cop in the car.
7 - And you can see the other sitting next to him.
8 - Michael bashes the face in of a cop over the radio
9 - And quickly hangs another cop out for decorations
10 - Random dead cop from the man in the silver toed boots.
11- And two
12 - And three
13 - And four
14 - And five
15 - And six
16 - And seven
17 - And eight
Best Corpse: Mmm, I am partial to Michael getting the rake in the face. I love that it doesn’t just happen on camera, but (pardon the pun) in your face.
Blood Type - C+: Some good blood throughout, but really only what is necessary.
Sex Appeal: A pretty tame sex scene, by horror movie standards, no boobs, but some bare male chest, so there’s that!
Drink Up! Every time you can spot Michael lurking in the background.
Movie Review: I know this movie gets slagged on a lot, and to be fair, it is NOT as good as earlier entries in the series, but I enjoyed it. It has a solid enough story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and most things serve to get the story to that end. BUT there are a few flaws that really bug me. Pushing the comedic level of the cops really hurts it. The movie has some downright absurd moments, like Michael’s year long nap, hiding in almost plan sight, the infamous fast moving super villain from point to point, and the half formed ideas that will presumably be developed in #6, with like the man in black. Too much set up for future ideas that are just annoying here, harm a pretty decent, if occasionally absurd, movie. Three out of five silver toed boots.
Entertainment Value: I like the movie as much as I do, because I’m entertained. As frustrating as the Man in Black is, I am intrigued what it means and where it’s going (I’ve picked up some bits and pieces, but I GENUINELY have not seen any version of Halloween 6, so I am in an enviable and interesting position), and it’s got some fun kills, decent characters, and the performances by Danielle and Pleasence are great. Yes, Loomis is over the top, and terrifying to children, but no one pulls that off in the right way, as Donald does. There’s even something about Michael’s performance that I enjoy. Four out of five pitchforks.