Review #88: Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #5- Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

Full disclosure: Most of the movies I'll be watching this month (including the four I've reviewed so far) I'll be watching while I'm at work, and so I can't necessarily give 100% of my attention. I pay more attention than you might expect, but there's always the chance I might miss some details here and there.

I mention this because although I watched it at home (and thus paid more attention than usual), today's movie in particular had some VERY confusing moments, which led to me having to go back and re-watch certain parts because I was sure I missed something. In some cases, I did- in others, I didn't, and it was just the result of poor writing.

For example, my first time through I somehow completely missed the title card that showed that this movie was taking place a year after the previous one- which left me VERY confused, as the characters kept making references to time passing despite it seeming like it was the following day. Now obviously that was my mistake, but even a year later, so much of this movie just doesn't make sense. Another point of confusion- who was Tina in relation to any of the other characters, and why did Myers target her? I must have missed the reason (I tried looking for it, as well as how Loomis intuited that Tina was the target, when to my knowledge the two hadn't shared a single scene) and it was very confusing. Rachel made sense as a target, but she got killed VERY early in the film, and not a single person acknowledged it the entire movie! Jamie found her corpse at one point but she was just notably absent for the entire rest of the movie and nobody seemed concerned.

I'll just get this right out there: Every main character in this series IS AN IDIOT, and it makes no sense whatsoever that all of this keeps happening to the same people. I'll talk more about Laurie Strode in a little bit, but this is how the series so far has set itself up:

1. Michael Myers, a six-year-old boy, kills his older sister on Halloween. His younger sister is put up for adoption in the same town, and ends up living in a home just down the street from the (now run-down and abandoned) house she previously lived in. That's... weird, but okay.

2. Fifteen years later, when the anniversary of his previous murder comes around, Michael Myers comes back to that town to kill more people, Laurie Strode included.

3. Like eight years later Laurie dies, and her eight-year-old daughter Jamie is also put up for adoption... in that same town, and similarly ends up living not far from the (still standing and still abandoned) house where her uncle murdered her aunt, and where he tried to murder her mother.

4. Michael Myers escapes again, also on the anniversary of his prior murders, and goes back to the same town to murder some more. He is wounded but escapes capture, and then decides to wait an entire year to commit more murders, AGAIN on Halloween.

5. Jamie is STILL living in that same town- even though she has herself been moved to what is essentially a mental hospital- even though she, her mother, her aunt, and lots of other people have been murdered there. She lives not far from the (still standing, still abandoned, though now completely-different-looking) Myers house.

Literally all it would take to escape this cycle of evading murder is to move. Move ANYWHERE. As I said yesterday, you don't even have to move- just go out of town when Halloween comes around! That's all it would take! It's one thing when Jason Voorhees keeps murdering people when Friday the 13th comes around (even ignoring the movies where that's not when it takes place) because those aren't the same characters- Jason just shows up and kills whoever is there. But in Halloween it's the SAME CHARACTERS, who insist on staying in the SAME TOWN, on the SAME DAY. Seriously, just go out for a drive and stay in a motel for the night. That's it! It's especially ridiculous how the previous movie ended with the police from the next town over intending to take Jamie to a safe place outside of Haddonfield- everyone knows she's going to be a target, so why not just, you know, do that again?

But the point I was trying to come around to is that it's so bizarre how cavalier the people of Haddonfield are regarding Michael Myers. This is a literal, physical person who has committed literal, physical murders in their town (as recently as last year even) and the stores still sell boiler suits and white masks? And teens still wear them and pretend to be Myers, even when actual cops are pointing actual guns at them? Even if they're okay making a joke in poor taste they should still drop the act the instant a cop has their weapon drawn. That's like charging at a cop with a knife and saying  "It was just a prank bro".

But a big topic I wanted to talk about is what I complained about yesterday: The familial relationship between Laurie/Jamie and Michael. I mentioned earlier that the film has new character Tina become Myers' target for the middle portion of the film, very similar to how Laurie was a target in the first film. To my knowledge, Tina has no connection to the Myers family- she was just... there, so she became a target. The fact that this happened so easily and without remark proves that this series NEVER needed to be about Laurie, at all, and making her a Myers accomplished absolutely nothing. There's no reason why Laurie needed to be more than just a random passerby- because THAT'S what Myers does: He picks a person and obsesses over them. There's no need for rhyme or reason, it just happens.

Anyway, this movie did a lot of stuff that I thought was really stupid. It introduces a supernatural element (the psychic link between Jamie and Myers, possibly some other stuff with the mysterious booted figure) and I'll have to see what the heck gets done with that, but it also shows the first time where Myers was actually able to be reasoned with- Loomis almost talked him down in the Myers home. Remember how they've spent four movies so far describing him as "Pure Evil(TM)"? I'm not seeing any more credibility to that. This movie also (almost) shows Myers without a mask, but considering his utter lack of visible burns or facial disfigurement, it makes me wonder why his face was bandaged up at the beginning of Part IV.

This movie also had some legitimately clever bits- I loved when the girl in the barn took the pitchfork out of her boyfriend's back to fight Myers with (not that it worked, but it was cool), and the chain net trap that Loomis set up was actually incredibly smart and effective. I just wish the ending wasn't such a stupid, sequel-bait cop-out.

Overall Rating: 3/10 Big Cookie Women

My Biggest Unanswered Question: What's going to happen to the Haddonfield police department after their entire staff of officers and clerks were murdered, TWO YEARS in a row?