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Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
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Movie Review by Jarrod
October 31st, 2007
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(A spoiler occurs in the second paragraph, if you have never seen this before, so I will wanr you beforehand).
'Halloween 4' ignores the ending of Halloween 2, when Michael and Dr. Loomis are consumed by a blazing inferno, after blowing up an entire wing of a hospital. They survived, of course, but are terribly scarred, Loomis wears a glove to disguise his disfigured hand, and he walks with a cane, but I guess living through an explosion can cripple you. Michael, this time, pursues his niece, Jamie (Danielle Harris), the daughter of Laurie Strode. She lives with foster parents and has a big sister named Rachel (Ellie Cornell), who has to babysit her on Halloween, something she is initially not very happy with, since this interrupts the date she had planned with her boyfriend Grady. Loomis chases Michael once again to Haddonfield, and works with the local police to protect Jamie and Rachel, but if fire and bullets cannot kill Michael, what other options do you have? Cops with shotguns don't seem to do much good, at least until the end.
Danielle Harris is cute and perky, and she has a rather amazing pair of lungs, which get a workout. Pleasance is yet again the best thing about the movie, the determined, indefatigable Loomis, even maimed, is still a force to be reckoned with, proving to be as resilient as Michael. There is a group of rednecks, who pile into a pickup truck and hunt Michael down, in a rather silly quest for vigilante justice, one that proves absolutely futile. You still have a high body count, quite a bit of gore, not to mention a very disappointing pseudo sex scene and partial nudity, but amidst all of this, there are some effectively scary moments, sudden appearances by Michael, and a sense of dread as Jamie runs for her life and a child in mortal danger is always unsettling. There is even a rather brilliant twist thrown in right at the very end, once Michael has been dispatched, in which his murderous impulses seemed to have passed to Jamie, who stands at the top of the stairs with a pair of blood-stained scissors, wearing essentially the same costume Michael wore when he killed his sister Judith.
Does it run in the Myers family? Michael could have been more menacing, but he does well as an unstoppable force of nature, much like Jason, who at least is undead. Why is it so hard to destroy Michael? Such a question really means very little in the grand scheme of things. By the way, Jamie just sort of exists here, and since she is an orphan, it means of course that Laurie is dead, when she was alive at the end of Halloween II. Who is Jamie's father? Again, later sequels would seek to explain this, if anyone really cares. For what it is worth, I think it is the Lance Guest character from Halloween II, Jimmy the paramedic.
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 | Andy
Oct 31, 2007 7:45 PM
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| See, this is where the Halloween series lost me, at least with Michael Myers. The series took on a "Jason" persona too much, and those movies, while popular, were horrible. They went aways from the Carpenter style of build up and made the actual kill the story, so to speak. |
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