The Halloween Films Ranked: #10 ‘Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers’ (1989)

#10 in my ranking of the Halloween franchise.

Hey, remember how Halloween 4 ended with an interesting moment where a little girl was going to become the next Michael Myers? Well, that’s too far for Moustapha Akkad, it seems, so everything gets pulled back because having a little girl become a slasher villain was a bit too much. Which is, to be fair, understandable if you’re going to refuse any sort of significant time jump, looking forward only a year so that your little girl actress was going to be the main character of the next film. What do you do then? Continue to ape the Friday the 13^th franchise, poorly, it seems. Not that the Friday movies were masterpieces.

So, it’s been a year since Michael Myers fell down a…well? in a cemetery after being shot dozens of times by the police of Haddonfield. He recovers at the hand of some forested bum whom he murders a year later because…Michael Myers, I guess. Anyway, Jamie (Danielle Harris) has become a mute after the events of the previous film, staying at the Haddonfield Children’s Clinic and overseen by Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) and visited frequently by her foster (well, they now say step) sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell). Everyone’s hoping that Jamie will get over her night terrors and start speaking soon, including Rachel’s friend Tina (Wendy Kaplan).

Now, this is where the weird combination of Halloween lore, Friday the 13^th mimicry, and some kind of innate desire to maintain the original film’s sense of dread come clashing together in a horrible car crash of inanity. Michael sets out from his hideaway in the forest, heading straight for Rachel’s house. Why? Well, the subtitle of the film (which doesn’t actually appear in the film) says that this is Michael’s revenge. But he’s also got this thing from the previous film where he needs to kill his family members (it’s in both II and 4, for their own, separate reasons). He then spends the next very large bulk of the film pursuing Tina and her friends out of town, to a party at a farmhouse, even though none of these people were involved in the events of the previous film. So, he wants revenge on people who weren’t there, ignores the little girl who is his sister before getting super focused on her in the finale, and goes out of his way to murder people he’s never seen before. He’s more Jason than whatever Michael is supposed to be at this point, and I don’t think anyone knew.

So, the point of the slasher genre is creative and fun kills, and these are surprisingly tame. Stabs with scissors, an impalement with a pitchfork, and a swing of a scythe are pretty much it, and they’re mostly off-screen. Also, there are these long stretches in between the kills that aren’t built on tension but on following stupid characters for stupid reasons while Michael doesn’t act like Michael.

This is a franchise in desperate need of an identity. What started as something sort of original quickly fell behind the trends of the slasher genre and never caught up. There’s something more pure about how Friday the 13^th and its mostly terrible sequels approach the material, having fewer pretensions about anything and never feeling like they are actively working against what came before, a trait that these Halloween sequels largely cannot match.

So, the finale ends at the Myers home, still abandoned and condemned decades after the original Myers murder of his sister, a dilapidated house in the middle of tony suburbia, and it’s built entirely on Loomis using Jamie as bait because he’s suddenly deeply invested in getting her after ignoring her for…the rest of the film. It also requires Loomis deciding that backup against Michael Myers is completely unnecessary for some reason, even though Loomis, every time he meets a cop, tells them that they’re not taking Michael seriously enough.

This is a script written by someone either kind of stupid or just at a loss for how to accomplish all of the competing ideas that the producers and studio are throwing in his direction.

If there’s one good thing in the film, it’s probably that the director, Dominique Othenin-Girard, provides a nice, naturalistic feel to the female relationships in the beginning mostly, it seems, by just letting Kaplan, in particular, be herself.

I mean, this isn’t the worst thing in the world. The kills have some very modest value. Kaplan is actually fun to watch, and most of the film hinges on her. It looks decent (TV movie from the 90s quality, to be honest). But, it makes no sense, it mostly just kind of dull, and further descends into this quagmire of dueling interests and influences. This is a franchise that has completely gone off the rails.

Originally published here