Oh, I can hear the comments now – You put Halloween 5 ahead of blah blah pick anyone of the movies in the list and someone will prefer it to this movie. Well friends of mine anyway and when I compare my 73% score to IMDb’s 5.2/10 and Rotten Tomato’s score of just 13% it does appear that I am flying in the face of opinion. I will remind all that this is just my opinion and I will expect the backlash but it will not change my view that this is definitely not the worst in the Halloween franchise. It was released in 1989 so just managed to squeeze into the classic 80’s horror mould. It was made on a budget of $5m and went on to gross $10m which is a profit in my book.
Set a year after the fourth movie in the franchise and a major spoiler alert for number four in the next sentence so...
** please skip to the next paragraph to avoid spoiler** Having been shot a hundred times and fallen into a mineshaft Michael is still alive and is slowly nursed back to health by some bloke in a cabin.
OK reasonably safe now –
Michael sets about returning to kill his remaining family. Jamie is in Children’s Hospital and refusing to speak after the results of the previous movie. She is in the care of Dr Loomis as her quack he is trying to be nice but many of Jamie’s sisters’ friends are still spooked out by him. Michael then chases/stalks them around the town where he mops up many of the characters created in this movie as well as some of the other from the previous movie as well. This finally pits Loomis and Michael in a battle for survival where the kind and caring Dr Loomis uses Jamie as bait to lure Michael into the fight.
Again and again I have to explain that for many years Halloween was my favourite movie you don’t get a nick name of Myers if you are not obsessed with the movie. Yes, that is a big part of where that name came from. Is this a great movie? Hell NO! To many this isn’t even a good movie but for me it holds a special place in my heart as it continues the story. After admitting the error of Halloween 3 but the error there was the title more than the poor story bad acting and weak special effects. Halloween 4 had a decision to make follow the way of Halloween 3 with a completely clean slate and tell a story all of its own or somehow resurrect a story that not even the director wanted to bother with. They listened to the fans (big companies please take note) and started a new strand of the original story and ran with it. A story that ran through 4, 5 and to a lesser extend 6 and then onto the other movies as well before the most recent Halloween movie which ignored all the others and follows the original movie. This fitted neatly into the movies and for my fondness for Donald Pleasance portrays of the Dr Loomis character one that he started way back from the very first movie he stayed with it when called upon. He didn’t turn his back on the low budget tag in any of the following movies and could really show his fear of a man he watched grow from a boy into a killer. Ok they add all this can’t kill him and telepathy and occults and god knows what else to the story he played it straight and that got my respect. Would I recommend this movie? If you got through the first two advised to miss the third caught up with the fourth movie and still on board then you are not going to be that disappointed with this effort.
Confession time and I am going to go back to my review of The Force Awakens here as the very last scenes of this movie sets up the sixth movie with a cliff-hanger can you wait for the next one? Well we couldn’t and the exciting story that was still there to run with was taken in a different direction in the next almost like the two directors or writers had never met or discussed the ideas. Well that’s my take and why my score 60% higher than rotten tomato’s and be prepared for more of these disagreements as I move closer to my number one movie.
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