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

"I'm never sensible if I can help it!"

-Tina Williams

One year after the events of Halloween 4, Michael Myers (Don Shanks) is back to kills his niece, Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris), who has been rendered mute after her traumatic experience in the previous film.  As Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and Sheriff Ben Meeker (Beau Starr) do all they can to protect Jamie, a mysterious Man in Black (Also played by Don Shanks) arrives in Haddonfield with his own sinister intentions.

What Works:

This section will be very short as, spoilers, this movie is terrible!  But, as in the previous films, Donald Pleasence and Danielle Harris both do a great job.  Pleasence is given some terrible dialogue, but he manages to sell it every time and I will never get tired of him yelling crazy stuff and being mean to children.

Even with her character being mute for half of the movie, which was a terrible decision, Danielle Harris still gives a wonderful performance.  I feel so bad for this character as nothing ever goes right for her.  Tragedy after tragedy befalls Jamie and the only emotion beside annoyance I ever feel in this film is for this character.  I also like the sequence where she is trapped in the laundry chute.  It's the only creative sequence in the film.

What Sucks:

We'll start with what this movie does wrong out the gate.  It fails to capitalize on the excellent cliffhanger from Halloween 4.  Instead of having Jamie as the new killer, we just have mute Jamie for some reason.  They almost completely ignore the cliffhanger and just gives us a incredibly stupid rehash of things we've seen before.

This movie reveals that Michael escaped the mine shaft he was knocked down and rescued by an old hermit (Harper Roisman), who takes care of Michael while he is in a coma for a solid year.  What?  What are the logistics of this?  Is this really the best we could do?  It makes no sense in any way, shape, or form and may be some of the laziest writing I have ever seen in a movie.

Halloween 5 then decides to kill off our final girl from the previous film, Rachel (Ellie Cornell).  This isn't intrinsically a bad things, it's a classic slasher staple to kill off previously surviving characters in the next movie, but it's overall a lame death.  And in Rachel's place, we are left with Tina (Wendy Kaplan), who is just awful.  She's obnoxious and annoying and I felt no positive emotions for her character.  She and the other teenage characters were just terrible and bring this movie down immensely, especially because their death scenes are dragged out for way too long and become tedious to sit through.

Speaking of terrible characters, let's talk about the doofus police officers played by Frank Como and David Ursin.  Again, dumb cops are not intrinsically bad characters, but these guys are introduced to us with clown music playing over them.  What?  Why?  This is an R-rated slasher film, why is there slapstick-comedy music in here? And none of the cops we have seen in this series up to this point have been total buffoons, why are we starting down this path now?

Finally, this movie, like the 4th film, ends with a cliffhanger, only this one is terrible.  It ends with the Man in Black opening fire on the police station and killing all of the cops.  This scene is filmed terribly and we see almost none of it.  This could have been a cool scene if they had actually filmed it.  Somehow the Man in Black kidnaps Michael and apparently Jamie, but that happens after the credits roll.  Again, the logistics of this don't make any sense and this ending is not only stupid, but completely fails in its execution.  Plus, Sheriff Meeker is killed off-screen.  You don't kill off a main character off-screen.

Verdict:

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers is by far the worst of the first 5 Halloween movies and one of the worst of the entire series.  Donald Pleasence and Danielle Harris are great, but the plot makes little to no sense, the characters are terrible, everything is dragged out for far too long, and the ending is just the worst.

 2/10: Awful