The Halloween Films Ranked: #7 ‘Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers’ (1988)

#7 in my ranking of the Halloween franchise.

Just in case you had the misapprehension that the owners of the Halloween franchise would make the terrible mistake of not slavishly following the rules of slashers that had come to dominate the horror world in the 80s, we assure you that Michael Myers is definitely back. It’s in the title. We swear. Mostly just putting on those slasher duds more comfortably than John Carpenter tried to do through his writing on II, 4 works better because it doesn’t try to strike this balance between Carpenter tension and blood and guts exploitative nonsense.

Michael Myers somehow survived the massive explosion at the end of II, and so did Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance). When Michael is transferred from his current holding, hearing that he has a living niece, he suddenly overcomes the extreme atrophy of his muscles to become a walking killing machine once more. The point of these kind of films is the creative destruction of cannon fodder at the hands of a killing machine while a sympathetic lead manages to survive, all while trying to leave open some venue for the killing machine to come back in a sequel. They’re not deep efforts, and the excuses of getting Myers from tied to a bed for ten years to putting on the Shatner mask (or one pretty close, I guess) doesn’t matter that much.

The sympathetic character at the center is split between Myers’ niece, Jamie (Danielle Harris), and her foster sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell). Ellie has a nascent relationship with a boy at school, Brady (Sasha Jenson), and she has to navigate taking care of her little foster sister with her promised date on Halloween. Being a slasher, we need teenagers worthy of brutal murder, so Brady decides to cheat on Rachel with Kelly (Kathleen Kinmont), the daughter of the sheriff, Ben (Beau Starr). So, we have our sympathetic character and some meat for the grinder.

And the movie largely goes through the motions of the slasher genre at this point. Myers shows up. No one will listen to the guy who knows what’s going on because he sounds like a crazy person. Any help is too late. Meat must be sacrificed to the slasher.

The film does try some interesting things throughout, though, making it slightly, ever so slightly, more than a typical slasher. The central element is around Jamie who is consumed by visions of Michael in his Shatner mask, even though she’s purportedly never seen him in real life. There are implications that she will continue his evil streak either through some familial line or perhaps something more ethereal and metaphysical. I mean, it gets forgotten for very long stretches, but it is there. There’s also an effort by some good-ole-boys in Haddonfield banding together to go out and hunt for Myers, especially after Myers destroys the sheriff’s office. They end up a lynch mob who accidentally kill an innocent (innocents who are running around town after curfew while pretending to be Myers, that is), which ends up going nowhere. It’s the opening of a start of an idea, but it gets dropped in favor of some slasher action.

And the slasher action isn’t terrible. The whole point is to kill people in interesting ways, and there are some decent kills, like using a double-barreled shotgun as an impaling device, and the tension is decent. This ain’t high art, but it functions decently enough.

With the moving on of Carpenter, the creative control as director was handed over to Dwight H. Little. The classical compositions that Carpenter himself lensed with Dean Cundey as DP are gone, as well as the 2.35:1 ratio, replaced by the taller 1.85:1 ratio and a more standard look. However, that’s not to say that it’s generally ugly. It’s got that late-80s, flat look generally, but there are moments, especially in the third act, that look really good, like a sequence in the elementary school and the sudden appearance of mist on the road. It’s not a bad looking film. It doesn’t look as good as something like Friday the 13^th Part VI: Jason Lives, but it’s pretty consistently decent and gets looking pretty good by the end.

So…it’s not good. It doesn’t do enough interesting with what it has, forgetting most of it for long stretches, while its slasher thrillers are kind of basic. It’s not drudgery like II, but it doesn’t have nearly the right kind of entertainment to make it genuinely fun.

It’s very Meh.

Originally published here