To nobody’s surprise, Michael Myers (this time around Don Shanks) has survived the events of the last movie and – that part is rather surprising - has spent the year until the next Halloween cohabiting with a hermit or something. His niece Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris), on the other hand, following her attack on her adoptive mother at the end of the last movie, is now mute, and has spent the same time in a mental health facility for kids, in part guarded, in part observed as a Michael seismograph by an increasingly crazed Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) who wavers between genuinely nice and caring and ruthless bastard depending on what the script needs in any given scene.
Jamie is useful as a seismograph because her implied mental connection to her uncle from the last film is now a genuine thing that will see her writhing and mumbling a lot until someone puzzles out where the attack she describes happens, and nobody gets saved by it. In theory, Michael is out to kill Jamie but unlike the slasher mastermind he was in the last outing, he’s now drifting pointlessly through town, from time to time killing people connected to Jamie, without actually getting any closer to her through it. Then there’s a mysterious guy who dresses like the Exorcist sneaking through town who is only there to set up the thoroughly stupid ending, and really, nothing much that adds up to a plot happening at all. Loomis has a “plan” to catch Michael, but said plan makes even less sense then the rest of the film.
So yeah, all the goodwill the series won through the very decent fourth entry quickly evaporated in Halloween 5 once it became clear to me that Swiss director Dominique Othenin-Girard really didn’t know what story he wanted to tell, or how to tell it, or even just what the point of any given scene was, with characters changing traits from scene to scene for reasons of plot convenience, and many scenes that look as if they were setting up something that never get any follow-through.
I can’t even gush about Donald Pleasence this time around, even though he and a Danielle Harris who has seriously improved in the short time between the last film and this one, are clearly the best thing Halloween 5 has to offer. Unfortunately, like with anything else in the film, it doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to do with Pleasence, so it’s just wavering, dragging its feet and wasting him.
This is also another slasher sequel that contains a lot of elements that, if treated by talented scriptwriters, or writers who cared, could have made a wonderful movie – the psychic connection between Jamie and Michael, the fear she will turn into him or something very much like him, the toll the eternal hunt for an indestructible enemy has taken on Loomis are all elements that scream for a script that explores concepts like evil or innocence (or the price of trauma) via the nastiness of horror. Unfortunately, Halloween 5 isn’t that film. In fact, I find it difficult to pretend this is much of a film at all. Apart from lacking niceties like plot and character. the film doesn’t even succeed as a delivery machine for killing scenes, mostly because it prefers dragging its feet and boring its audience to anything else, blowing forty minutes of plot up to a hundred.
This is particularly frustrating because the final fifteen minutes or so suggest that Othenin-Girard would well have been able to at least make an effective conventional slasher, for the final confrontation with Michael may make little sense on a logical level but is an excellent example of tense suspense that works a bit like a nightmare.
Too bad there’s the rest of the film to get through before it.
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