Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
Sigh. Halloween 5 is not the worst, but it is bad. I fear it suffers from the same thing I disliked in Friday the 13th Part VII with Tina and to some extent A Nightmare on Elm Street with Alice. The insertion into the story of super special powers the Final Girl has. And yes, I know the bad guys (Michael, Jason, and Freddy) are supernatural villains but the Final Girl shouldn’t. She needs to overcome them with her own smarts and strength. These special powers, in my opinion, rob them of their own strengths and can only win because of their powers. I don’t know. Maybe it’s how the story is told, but I just don’t like this type of theme in some of the movies.
Photo Credit: Magnum Pictures Inc.
Released: Oct 13, 1989
Runtime: 96 mins
Director: Dominique Othenin-Girard
Writer: John Carpenter, Debra Hill, Michael Jacobs
Actors: Donald Pleasence, Danielle Harris, Ellie Cornell
PLOT
It’s been a year after the killings in Halloween 4, and Michael Myers returns to Haddonfield to try and kill his now-mute niece.
MY THOUGHTS
In Halloween 5 we get a lot more kills. Though several we don’t actually see. Primarily at the end at the police station when the Man in Black goes in to bust out Michael. We don’t see the kills but we see the aftermath. Besides the final scene in the police station, most deaths are stabbings or slashing with the exception of one poor cop getting hanged. And we’re supposed to believe that Dr. Loomis dies as well due to a heart attack. The only death I question is Tina’s death. It looks like she is only stabbed in the shoulder. We don’t see her get stabbed anymore so how did she die? I don’t have a “favorite” death. Just a quick note: yes there is the death of a dog. You don’t see Max die but towards the end of the movie you do see his body. You’ve been warned!
Acting is decent as usual. Ellie Cornell who plays Rachel did a good job (despite so little screen time). I actually liked her character in this movie more than I did in Halloween 4. Danielle Harris did a great job playing poor little Jamie. I found I really liked Tina (Wendy Foxworth) and wished she would have lived (though I still think she should still be alive). The actress made her entertaining and someone you can root for.
Donald Pleasence as Dr. Loomis. Wow. I’ve noticed with each Halloween movie he is in, the character of Dr. Loomis seems to be more aggressive and more unhinged. Literally using Jamie as bait, and then when the Sheriff tells him to take her to the police station, instead he locks them in the house. And at one point literally holding Jamie and telling Michael if he wants her he can have her. She’s just a little girl! Using her as bait like that is just morally wrong. And it leads to more people getting killed as well as Jamie being traumatized! Quite the character development for Dr. Loomis.
It’s been about a year since Jamie stabbed her foster mother. She is now in a children’s home for what we assume are for troubled kids. And she has become mute. Nobody but Dr. Loomis realizes that Jamie has a psychic link with Michael Myers, able to see what he is doing while he’s doing it. Rachel has come home from college to see Jamie and her family.
Soon Jamie starts having visions of what Michael is doing, and Dr. Loomis quickly jumps on this. When Michael is at Rachel’s house Jamie has a sort of seizure where the doctors are trying to save her but Dr. Loomis stops them because he wants to know what she is seeing.
After Jamie sees Rachel and Tina’s boyfriend Michael are killed, Jamie and a fellow kid sneak out of the home they are living at and go to the party Tina is at with her friends. Not until several people are killed does Tina realize what is going on and runs into Jamie. They run off but Michael catches up with them, only to kill (?) Tina before Dr. Loomis and the police find Jamie.
This is when Dr. Loomis sets up his grand scheme. He plans on luring Michael to his old home using Jamie as his bait. When Jamie realizes her friend is in danger at the children’s home, all but two cops leave the house. This is what Dr. Loomis realizes it would happen. Michael wouldn’t show up with all of the cops around. So Dr. Loomis traps the three of them in the house while Michael kills a cop outside.
Michael kills both cops and incapacitates Dr. Loomis and we get a long chase scene of him trying to get to Jamie. Dr. Loomis finds Jamie and he grabs a hold of her, trying to lure Michael to a specific room to trap Michael.
Finally Dr. Loomis shoots Michael up with a bunch of darts and beats him with a board. He falls down and this is when Dr. Loomis has a heart attack and falls down on Michael. The cops arrive and they take Michael to jail. We see a man in black walk in. There’s an explosion and lots of gun fire.
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Overall, I didn’t really care too much for this movie. There’s more kills but nothing too imaginative. They introduce the whole Man in Black plot line but we really don’t get any information and we only see part of him a couple of times. We see that he has a thorn tattoo on him just like Michael has a thorn tattoo on his hand.
Another issue I have is Michael’s mask. Don’t know if it’s the eyes or what, but this has to be (out of the first five Halloween movies) the worst mask. Something seems off about it. Not digging it at all. And finally, what is up with the bumbling cop music towards the beginning of the movie, when the two cops show up at Rachel’s house? It was just too over the top corny.
If you can’t tell, I'm not a fan of this movie. If you’re a completionist, yes watch this. It’s not the worst movie ever but I’m not a fan of the whole psychic connection and Dr. Loomis’ character development.
And now for your Forever Final Girl Exclusive…Did you know?:
After filming for two weeks, Donald Pleasence gave his much bigger trailer to Danielle Harris once he left the set. Harris's mother had been complaining about the small size of her daughter's trailer and Pleasence decided that she should have his.
Lowest grossing film in the entire series, according to Box Office Mojo.
The scene where Michael Myers drives a car while wearing a different kind of mask was initially scripted to have him wear a Ronald Reagan mask. However, the idea of a Reagan mask was soon rejected in order to keep the film devoid of any political subtexts.
Donald Pleasence had disagreements with Akkad and Othenin-Girard citing that Jamie should have been portrayed as "all evil" after stabbing her stepmother, Akkad disagreed thinking that fans wanted to see more of The Shape. In an interview, Danielle Harris explained what she thought of the idea: "The way Halloween 4 ended I thought I was going to be the Killer, I thought it would have been fun to come back as the Killer or Michael's sidekick. Scary, but fun".
Don Shanks was also injured when he was filming the scene where the shape crashes Mike's Camaro into the tree, Dominique Othenin-Girard forgot to yell "Cut!" And fire was beginning to emerge from the car, Shanks, who was not wearing flame retardant clothing, claims that he was told not to leave the totaled automobile until the director said "cut" and decided to stay inside the vehicle for about a minute because the director had not done so. (Shanks puts this down to Othenin-Girard being sidetracked by seeing stunts take place during his first major directing job, it turns out, he was so shocked by the realism of the wreck that he had forgotten to shout "cut",) finally stunt coordinator Don Pike told Othenin-Girard to yell "Cut!"., and did so just in time for Shanks to leave the wreckage.
Donald Pleasence was very vocal about his dissatisfaction with the story and with the way director Dominique Othenin - Girard was trying to get him to play Dr Loomis as totally heavy and overbearing. Pleasence also felt that the success and the shock ending of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers was not being capitalized on.
The Jamie Lloyd character has a striking parallel to the Tommy Jarvis character from the Friday the 13th series. Both characters appeared in the fourth, fifth and sixth films of their respective series. They were both about the same age in their first appearance. They both become institutionalized and develop homicidal tendencies themselves after the killer.
The last film in the series to feature a pumpkin in the opening credits until Halloween (2018).
The film's first screenplay, which was written by Shem Bitterman, featured Jamie Lloyd and Michael Myers as dual antagonists, with a now-teenage Jamie going on a killing spree of her own, Myers attempting to kill her because she was unwittingly interfering with his own spree, and Rachel being caught in the middle. Executive producer Moustapha Akkad disliked the screenplay, feeling it felt more like a parody of the Halloween series than an actual entry in it, and also because he had already promised Danielle Harris that she would be allowed to return as Jamie, and did not think that the 12-year-old Harris would be credible as a serial killer. As a result, the screenplay was rewritten essentially from scratch by Michael Jacobs and director Dominique Othenin-Girard, though Bitterman remained credited for contractual reasons.
Don Shanks is the only person of Native American ancestry to portray Michael.
Moustapha Akkad has said that one of his biggest regrets about the film was killing off the character of Rachel Carruthers. In retrospect, he would've kept her alive, but she was killed in an attempt to show that no one, not even Rachel, was safe from Michael.
Rachel was originally supposed to be stabbed in the throat with scissors but the actress, Ellie Cornell, felt it was too gruesome an end for her character, so it was changed.
In the laundry chute scene, Jamie was originally stabbed in the leg but the shot was cut from the film because the MPAA deemed it "too disturbing." Danielle Harris kept the prosthetic leg used for the cutscene for several years until she gave it to a cousin, who lost it.
In the scene where Michael is ambushed by Dr. Loomis and beaten with a 2x4, Don Shanks was really hit with the plank. He later admitted in an interview that one of the blows broke his nose.
Following the filming of the scene where Donald Pleasence accidentally hit and broke the nose of Don Shanks, special effects had to cut out the nose of the mask and add on a paper thin nose cut off of another H5 mask. The edges of the nose appliance can be seen clearly in some scenes.
Have you seen the other Halloween movies? Check out my other reviews here: Halloween Franchise.
Let’s get into the rankings:
Kills/Blood/Gore: 4/5
Sex/Nudity: 0/5
Scare factor: 2.5/5
Enjoyment factor: 2.5/5
My Rank: 2.25/5
IMDB: 5/10
Rotten Tomatoes: critics: 1.2/10 audience: 3.6/10
Letterboxd: 2.2/5