Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

According to the opening act of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, the title character was in fact not killed in 1978, as depicted in Halloween II, but rather has been in a coma for the last ten years. I can suspend disbelief with the best of them, but even I have my limits. You see, I recall the end of Halloween II; between Jamie Lee Curtis shooting Michael Myers squarely in each eye and Donald Pleasance causing an explosion that engulfed Michael in an inferno, it seemed pretty clear, at least to me, that the job had been done pretty thoroughly and it was all over. How in the hell could anyone come out of all that alive? Even if by some miracle Michael survived being set ablaze, how to explain surviving two bullets through the eyes, now stuck in the skull, presumably embedded in very important sections of brain matter?

Here’s a scene to illustrate my point – the opening, as it turns out. While being transferred from one maximum-security medical facility to another, a supine, very bandaged, and always facially-obscured Michael Myers (George P. Wilbur) overhears one of the nurses say that his sister Laurie Strode, played by Curtis in the first two films, has died in a car accident and left behind a seven-year-old daughter; this not only awakens Michael but seems to infuse his very being with super strength. How else to explain why he can effortlessly break free of his gurney straps and brutally kill everyone in the ambulance with his bare hands, even after ten years of completely immobile muscles? And the fact that, despite being shot in both eyes, he apparently can see just fine? In John Carpenter’s original Halloween, Pleasance described Michael as evil incarnate, and indeed, he seemed more of an unexplained malevolent force than a psychopathic killer. But Halloween II unwisely rewrote the rules. And now, sadly, Michael Myers has to be judged as if he were bound to pesky things like logistics, plausibility, and the physical limitations of the human body.

Anyway, after escaping the wrecked ambulance, finding an auto shop, impaling a mechanic, and stealing the dead man’s gray uniform, Michael returns to his now-infamous hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois and goes on a hunt for his young niece Jamie (Danielle Harris), an insomniac who has been taken in and adopted by a foster family. He returns on, you guessed it, Halloween, clearly his favorite holiday. And after somehow finding and stealing from a drugstore the exact same white mask he wore ten years ago (a surprising product choice; I should think everyone in Haddonfield would be too scared of it to want it in stock), he once again goes on a killing spree. And true to the more gratuitous Halloween II, the film eschews the subtle revelations and gruesome possibilities of the original in favor of bloodier, more graphic death scenes, made with the obvious intent of satisfying the very teenage audiences that find that kind of thing entertaining.

There’s really no need, actually no further way, to delve any deeper into the plot – which, to be fair, can also be said of the original film, a brilliant exercise in frightening audiences. But with Halloween 4, there isn’t that sense of creating truly scary cinema. It seems to only be about peddling cliches and typecasts that are currently popular. We have, for example, the usual grab bag of slasher-film caricatures, including the horny teenagers that die brutally elaborate deaths – but not before sneaking off somewhere isolated to have sex. The only side character of any actual note is Jamie’s teenage sister Rachel; it’s not that she’s an especially compelling character, but rather that actress Ellie Cornell plays her as best as she can, one could even argue with more effort than necessary. Regarding Harris, she’s a fresh-faced and engaging young actress with a convincing emotional range. As convincing as it can be in this kind of film, at any rate.

Director Dwight H. Little makes a lot of mistakes, but his biggest and most egregious was allowing Pleasance’s Dr. Sam Loomis character to return so unpleasantly reinterpreted. He was hardly conventional when first appearing in Carpenter’s film; he maintained even then that Michael was pure evil, and he proved quite annoying to the Haddonfield police, which he chastised for not taking his warnings more seriously. Still, he seemed to be coming from a place of wanting to protect innocent people. Now, he’s completely unhinged, not at all caring about anyone’s safety but merely obsessed with Michael, as Ahab was obsessed with Moby Dick. Incidentally, how is it that Loomis came away from that 1978 explosion – which, remember, he caused – with nothing more than a limp and some scarring on his face and arm? Maybe Michael’s indistructability rubs off when in close proximity.

I wasn’t a fan of 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch, mostly for the sheer stupidity of its plot, but also because it told a completely different story that featured none of the characters from the first two films. The only thing it had going for it was that, though it failed, it at least attempted to be original. The same can be said of Carpenter’s 1978 film – only in that case, it succeeded. The great failure of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is that any potential notion of originality was obviously the first thing the filmmakers threw out the window; the Halloween series is now as unimaginative and repetitive as the Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street films, the studios churning out sequel after sequel to make money for more sequels. I don’t begrudge anyone a little extra financial security, but at some point, quality needs to count over quantity.