Halloween 4?!
Surely, this is a mistake. Why would you want to devote an entire review to an
unnecessary sequel to a classic horror film? Why not just review the original
one instead? I tell you why, my
incredulous readers, because Halloween has
been written about so many times that there is really nothing more I can say to
it. Halloween
4, on the other hand, is essentially up for grabs, because despite a strong
cult following, it has essentially been overlooked by the critics. It’s also the best of all the Halloween sequels; its gore is kept to a
minimum and the characters are fairly likable. It’s definitely a mixed bag, but
compared to the awful horror sequels that saturated the market in the 80s, it
comes off rather well.
Despite the 4 in the title, it is actually the third film in
the Michael Myers saga; Halloween III:
Season of the Witch had nothing what so ever to do with the character
(except for a brief clip of the first Halloween
playing on the television), instead it revolved around a plot by a Druid
cult to take over the world through the use of Halloween masks and a television
signal, or something to that effect. As you can imagine this didn’t go over so
well with the Halloween fan base and
when Halloween 4 rolled along,
Michael Myers was back, giving free reign to once again terrorize the small
town of Haddonfield. However, the filmmakers couldn’t get Jamie Lee Curtis to
return, so instead they introduced the character of Jamie Lloyd (Danielle
Harris), the daughter of Laurie Strode (Curtis’ character from the first two Halloween films). The filmmakers did manage to Donald Pleasence
to reprise his role as the slightly crazy Dr. Sam Loomis. It must be said that
Dr. Loomis is one of the most resilient heroes in cinema history; not only does
he survive a stab wound, but a fiery explosion as well. At the end of Halloween II, Dr. Loomis sacrifices
himself by blowing up the hospital room him and Michael Myers are trapped in.
Or so it seemed, because he’s very much alive in Halloween 4.
The film does reference the explosion by having burn
scars on Loomis’ face and hands, he also walks with a limp, but otherwise he’s
doing fine. As is Michael Myers, who apparently has the ability to regenerate
his eyes; at the end of Halloween II his
eyes were shot out by Laurie. Continuity has never been the strong suit of any
horror franchise, especially if it gets in the way of making a profit. We
clearly saw Michael Myers blinded and burnt to a crisp at the end of Halloween II, but thanks to the magic of
the movies (and ticket sales) he is alive and in the best shape he’s ever been;
some how he’s managed to bulk up, despite being in a coma for ten years.
1)
The silliness is kept down to a bare minimum; it
exists, but it’s not nearly as prevalent as it is in other horror sequels. The
characters don’t wander down dark alleys, asking, “Who’s there?” At one point,
the heroine Rachel is looking for Jamie and wanders into a junkyard. She’s sees
a shape heading her way and rather than asking useless questions, she instead
runs away. It turns out to be a false alarm as the shape is a prankster dressed
up like Michael Myers. The only head
slapping moment is when Rachel and Jamie are running up a flight of stairs and
Rachel turns around and screams, “Why don’t you leave us alone?” As if somehow Michael will realize the error
of his ways, apologize for being mean, and then go straight on home. On top of
that, Rachel gives away their location.
Other than this blooper, the characters behave in a pretty consistent
manner. There’s (thankfully) no scene in which two random characters decide to
have sex in the least likely of places; Halloween
II has a scene in which a curvaceous nurse and an ambulance driver decide
to get it on in a hot tub inside the hospital. And not surprisingly, they both
meet a rather untimely and fairly grisly end. The nurse gets her face
scalded off. There is a mild sex scene between two
characters, but it occurs inside a well furnished house, and is promptly
interrupted by the arrival of the town sheriff (who is the woman’s father).
It’s played for laughs and only lasts for a few seconds.
2)
An attempt at character development.
The
characters of Rachel and Jamie are far more complex than the genre dictates,
but more importantly they are likable. You genuinely feel for Jamie when she is
getting picked on by school mates, because her uncle is the town Boogeyman.
Rachel genuinely loves her adopted sister Jamie, but kind of resents having to
watch her all the time. Her social life
is constantly put on hold, because the burden of watching Jamie usually falls
on her shoulders. However, as the film progresses it is pretty clear that
Rachel would die for Jamie. She constantly puts her life at risk to protect
Jamie from Michael Myers. Both are
relatable characters and the actresses do a fine job of bringing them to life.
The actress who plays Rachel (Ellie Cornell) has a natural look to her which
gives the film an air of credibility. She’s attractive, but not overwhelming
pretty, unlike the supermodels that tend to dominate most horror films today.
Danielle Harris is extremely good as Jamie, odd considering that she was a
child actress at the time and this was her first major film. The Jamie/Rachel dynamic is the heart of the
story; the film is at its best when it focuses on them.
The character of Sam Loomis is what gives the Halloween films a slight edge over the
other horror franchises made during the same period; he is obsessed with
destroying Michael Myers, but also adopts a very gentle approach when the two
meet face to face. When he meets up with
Michael in a gas station he implores him not to go to Haddonfield and to leave
those people in peace. He also adds, “If you want another victim, take
me!” Of course, his pleas fall on deaf
ears and Michael heads to Haddonfield any ways. It’s interesting to note that
Michael never goes after Dr. Loomis directly. The scene in the gas station is a
great example, Loomis is ripe for the picking, but Michael never approaches
him. The only time Loomis gets attacked is when he stands in Michael’s way. This
is where having a veteran actor like Donald Pleasence pays off, because despite
how silly the story might get, he brings a lot of dramatic weight and dignity
to the role. If a serious actor like
Pleasence thinks the situation is dangerous, then chances are the audience will
too.
In the first film, Pleasence sells the film’s premise with a
memorable monologue:
I met him, fifteen years
ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no
understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil,
right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale,
emotionless face and, the blackest eyes... the devil’s eyes. I spent eight
years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up
because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and
simply... evil.
While Loomis is slightly batty, he is wise enough to know he
can’t take on Michael by himself and alerts the Haddonfield police. Thankfully, the police take his warnings
seriously and send squad cars out to the patrol the area. In most horror films
from that period the law was either incompetent or nonexistent. In the Friday the 13th series, the
law (with the exception of Friday the 13th
Part VI: Jason Lives) was usually nowhere to be seen, except in small
patches. In the first two films, there is a brief scene in which a patrolman
shows up and serves up a warning to the teenagers, which gets promptly
ignored. Other than that, the teenagers
are by themselves and picked off one by one. In Halloween 4, the town sheriff is fairly competent and does the
right things, but even that is not enough to stop Michael Myers. Loomis is essentially the Dr. Van Helsing of
the series - a thorough expert on Michael
Myers and is completely obsessed at stopping him, no matter the costs.
There are other nice touches in Halloween 4 that would I like to comment on, before I get to its
biggest flaw:
1)
The specter of Michael Myers still haunts Haddonfield.
In most horror film sequels, the characters develop a sense of amnesia and seem
to forget all the horrible things that happened to their community years ago.
In Friday the 13th-The Final
Chapter, the heroine’s family has lived near Camp Crystal Lake all their
lives, but yet has never heard of Jason Voorhees. In Halloween
4, Michael Myers is still very much a part of Haddonfield, especially around
Halloween. As a prank, teenagers dress up as Mike Myers to scare one another and
random citizens. The house Michael grew up in still stands and is thought to be
haunted by the locals. Jamie is teased
by her classmates, because her uncle is the town Boogeyman. Even though the
Haddonfield murders happened a decade ago, the town is still very much haunted
by them.
2)
The vigilantes.
Chances are if there was an
escaped killer lurking about your hometown, most people would opt to stay
indoors and lock their doors and windows. However, there would probably be a
small crowd who would arm themselves, take the law into their own hands, and
hunt down the killer. In Halloween 4, local
bar owner Earl gathers up all his redneck buddies and they proceed to hunt down
Michael, hoping to get to him before he can take another life. However, as is
the case with most vigilantes, they cause more trouble than good. Earl and his men are bit on edge, and at one
point their hear rustling come from the bushes and fire away, adopting the whole
“shoot first-ask questions” later mentality. Unfortunately, the man they gun
down is the local town drunk, Ted Hollister, who was urinating behind the
bushes. Earl tries to deflect blame by yelling at one of his men, “You dumb son
of a bitch. You said you saw Myers.” Earl and his lackeys prove to be rather ineffectual
against Michael as well; he sneaks up behind them (while they are standing on
the pack of moving pickup truck) and proceeds to kill them one by one.
The biggest flaw of Halloween 4 is, unfortunately, Michael
Myers himself. In the first Halloween, Michael
Myers was a fairly average sized male who was very slow and methodically in the
way he stalked his victims. In fact, the main reason the first Halloween is so effective is that is
slowly builds to the violence at the film’s end. You know the characters are going to get it,
but you don’t know when. The body count
is relatively low (five total) and the gore is kept to an absolute minimum. The
interesting thing about Michael is that he is, in fact, very much a kid trapped
inside a man’s body. In his excellent
book Cult Movies, Danny Peary writes:
One of the more memorable moments in the first Halloween is after Michael stabs Bob,
the camera lingers on him in a long shot as he stares at Bob in a most curious
manner and slowly tilts his head to the side. By the time of Halloween 4, such nuances got thrown out the window in favor of a
more one dimensional, lumbering giant. The irony is that while most slasher
films took their cue from Halloween, the
Halloween sequels took their cue from
the many rip offs that dominated the 80s.
The Michael Myers in Halloween 4 has
more in common with Jason Voorhees than he does with the Michael Myers seen in
the original film. Between Halloween II and Halloween 4 Michael has somehow bulked up and increased in height,
and completely lacks the grace that defined his characters movements in the
first film. No longer is he a shadow in the background, but rather a super
human brute who dominates the proceedings.
In the original film the bloodshed and the violence was
implied, whereas the sequels the gore factor increased greatly and the violence
started to get ridiculously over the top. For instance, there is a scene in Halloween 4 in which Michael impales a
curvaceous blonde girl with a rifle with very little effort.
In another scene, his hand comes crashing
through a pick up truck window and proceeds to rip off Earl’s head. Granted,
the gore in Halloween 4 isn’t as
gruesome as it is in present horror films, but it’s still there. While many
horror fans applaud the gore scenes, I find them rather redundant and boring;
to me gore diffuses the tension, rather than adds to it. When Michael rips off Earl’s head, it makes
me cry out, “Oh! Come on,” rather than, “OH MY GOD!” If the execution is poor, gore scenes can be
incredibly laughable. In the Lucio Fulci film The Beyond there is a scene in which an idiot is attacked by
tarantulas that proceed to rip his face apart. This sounds disgusting, but
because of Fulci’s inept direction it becomes a laugh riot. For one, despite
walking on a wooden floor, it sounds like the Tarantula’s are walking on potato
chips, and secondly, despite having his face torn apart, the guy doesn’t seem
to be in any pain. At one point he gets his eye ripped off and mere says, “OH
NO!” It’s a scene that lingers on and on, and doesn’t necessarily add to the
overall narrative, though Fulci films rarely make any sense.
The other aspect I can’t stand about the Halloween sequels (not just part 4) is
the idea that Michael Myers hunts down his next blood relative. In Halloween II, it was revealed that Laurie
Strode is Michael Myers’ sister. This
storyline was added to give Michael motivation for going after Laurie, but
otherwise it added nothing to the overall narrative. When Halloween
4 rolled along, the filmmakers couldn’t get Jamie Lee Curtis to reprise her
role as Laurie, so they changed the premise from Michael Myers stalks his
sister to Michael Myers stalks his niece.
I absolutely hate both story lines, because they take the idea of chance
out of the equation. In Halloween, Laurie was a random person
Michael encountered and proceeded to stalk her and her friends; it was a chance
encounter that leads to the death of three teenagers. What makes the film so frightening is the
idea that this could happen to anyone in any town. Laurie just happened to be
at the wrong place at the wrong time and as a result she finds herself fighting
for her life at the film’s end. It is also through chance that Loomis spots the
car Michael stolen, sees children fleeing from a house, and arrives in the nick
of time to save Laurie. However, by
making Michael and Laurie siblings this idea of chance goes tossed out of the
window in favor of the idea that fate is what brought the two together. In Halloween
4, Michael has waited patiently for ten years, so he can escape and stalk
his poor niece. This also presents the
problem of “How does Michael know he has a niece?” and Halloween 4 never really answers that question; in Halloween 5 it is revealed that the two
share a psychic link (when it is convenient for the plot).
*Spoiler*
I especially loathe the twist ending in which Jamie turns
evil and attacks her stepmother with a knife, thus implying that she will take
Michael Myers place. There are many fans that like this ending, because how it
parallels the first Halloween, but
it’s absolutely needless and unoriginal. For one, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter sports a similar
twist ending, in which it is implied that Tommy Jarvis (Corey Feldman) might
have not survived the ordeal of killing Jason with his sanity intact. In Friday the 13th: The New
Beginning this isn’t so much as implied as
it is explicit; we see Tommy wearing Jason’s mask and clutching a knife
as the film’s heroine is oblivious to her soon to be demise. In Halloween 5 this idea of Jamie being
Michael’s heir apparent is completely dropped and instead she spends a good
deal of the film mute and recovering in a hospital. Secondly, it’s seemed to a
common theme amongst horror films of the 80s to end on a rather downbeat note,
just when you thought the killer was defeated, he would come back for one more
scare. It’s a cliché that got rather tiresome as the decade wore on and seeing
a cute girl turn evil is just a bit too much. And Pleasence shouting, “NOOOO!”
in slow motion doesn’t really help matters.
I have love/hate relationship with Halloween 4. I like the characters of Jamie and Rachel, as well a
few other touches by the filmmakers. It’s still a step above the majority of the
slasher films of that decade, and certainly a masterpiece compared to the
dreadful sequels that followed, but unfortunately I find the character of
Michael to be rather lifeless and uninteresting. He’s no longer the Michael
Myers of the first film, but rather a Jason rip off.
Cast: Donald Pleasence (Dr. Loomis), Danielle Harris
(Jamie), Ellie Cornell (Rachel), George P. Wilbur (Michael Myers), Beau Starr
(Sheriff Meeker), Sasha Jensen (Brady), Kathleen Kinmont (Kelly Meeker),
Michael Pataki (Dr. Hoffman), Gene Ross (Earl), Carmen Filpi (Rev. Jackson P.
Sayer).
Director: Dwight H. Little
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