"Halloween" Franchise Rewind Marathon: 'Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers'

Wherein the author's patience with crappy 'Halloween' sequels comes to an end.

By: Josh McCormack

For the next few days I will be taking a quick look back at the long-running "Halloween" franchise leading up to the release of David Gordon Green's latest entry. Since the newest film is wiping the slate clean of all the sequels and remakes, I thought we could turn back the clock and talk about all of the films in reverse order. 

Happy Halloween!

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It's around this point in my marathon where I wonder if this was a good idea. 

Even Rob Zombie's movies held a little bit of morbid curiosity when it came to revisiting them, yet a movie like 'Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers' offers nothing. It's a bad movie in the worst kind of way; it's boringly bad. 

After the previous entry ended with such a fascinating cliffhanger of Michael's little niece, Jamie, being a serial killer herself, 'Halloween 5' basically takes that finale and does nothing with it. In fact, the idea of Michael's evil being hereditary is debunked almost immediately at the start of this movie when we realize that Michael just has a weird telepathic connection with her, which made Jamie kill her stepmother at the end of the last film.

So lame.

'Halloween 5' is also when the series officially became a 'Friday the 13th' film and although I have a soft spot for that franchise, this is not meant to be taken as a compliment.  While the 'Halloween' movies have always been slasher flicks, they always seemed like the more distinguished movies when compared to Jason Vorhees' escapades with likable characters, subdued violence, and heightened suspense. That is not the case here. Each character has the stereotypical trait that winds up getting exploited (although not very well) when they are killed off. 

With pitchforks through the stomach, garden claws through the head and scythes to the neck, 'Halloween 5' is the first needlessly brutal film in the franchise. This is probably because it has nothing else to offer outside of the gore.

From a directing standpoint, 'Halloween 5' feels very cheap. Dominique Othenin-Girard shoots and lights his scenes in such a way that when a character is on a set, it's so obviously a set. This is in definite contrast with Dwight H. Little's rather crisp direction in 'Halloween 4' and in the opening credits when the footage switches from Little's movie to this one, it's incredibly obvious. 

This film also has a weird habit of trying to humanize Michael and falling flat on its face every goddamn time.

In one of the more baffling scenes in the movie, Jamie is actually able to stop Michael when she calls him "uncle". She then asks to see under his mask and we see his face in silhouette as the camera closes up on a tear streaming down his face. But then he snaps out of it, puts his mask back on and begins to try and kill her again. It's dumb and goes nowhere. 

While we're on the subject of Michael in this movie, his mask is the worst it's ever looked too. The decision to give him more of a receding hairline, long neck and Pinocchio-like nose is honestly baffling. 

In the end 'Halloween 5' does set up things that many fans seem to love in the stupid "Thorn trilogy", things that would be touched upon in "Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers". However, it's a boring, uninspired low point for a franchise that was pretty solid up to this point.