Halloween 5: The Revenge Of Michael Myers

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

Runtime: 96 minutes

Directed by: Dominique Othenin-Girard

Starring: Donald Pleasence, Danielle Harris, Wendy Foxworth, Tamra Glynn, Jeffrey Landman

From: Trancas International Films

It made sense to see this so soon after the 4th film. My memories of this being worse than 4 were correct. Read why below in my Letterboxd review:

As I saw the fourth film on Sunday night and they're so closely related, I figured I should give this a spin on Monday night. In the review for the 4th, I mentioned that I once saw that and this on the big screen back in like '07. I remembered 5 being worse than 4 and now I am certain this is true. It is clear in hindsight that they did rush this into production and when you start off a picture without the script fully finished... typically you're asking for trouble.

The film starts up a year after the ending of the last one; little Jamie Lloyd is in a state home due to what happened in the last movie; the creepy ending of that is touched upon, but they don't go that direction, which is something the main actors involved said they disagreed with. Instead, we get the same old same old, for the most part. Sure, Jamie now has some sort of wacky telepathy with her crazy uncle Michael Myers but otherwise it's a standard slasher which happened to not only come out in the twilight of the slasher era.

The movie's not completely worthless. There's some decent acting (especially from Pleasence as the now deranged and obsessed Dr. Loomis and Danielle Harris), a few moments are effective and The Shape is at times creepy like he was in the original film. Yet overall the movie is not good. The plot is more nonsense and while there's such nice unintentional comedy as seeing The Shape unmasked-even if it's always sort of obscured-and realizing he's just an average random dude, the late 80's clothing and music and seeing Myers drive around a bitchin' late 60's Camaro for longer than I had remembered, it's not gleefully stupid like the 4th movie is. And as for those two bumbling cops who have their own circus music-like theme... the less said about them, the better.

The ending, I understand was literally proposed by one of the screenwriters and they went with it even though none of them-including that screenwriter-knew where it would go from there... and we saw what they went with for the 6th movie. While I did not give this movie a high grade, it still has more good than most of the entries in the franchise to follow. I know that with the back half of these films I will experience a world of pain and misery for the most part so I will try to delay in watching those.