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

They didn’t hang about in getting Halloween 5 released; it was out within a year of 4.

You can’t kill Michael Myers & the 5th in the series opens with us seeing how he has survived the mass shooting at the end of the 4th movie. Michael survived it by crawling to a nearby river, washing up near some old hermits hut. Before Michael can do what he always does he collapses. Over the next year the hermit looks after Michael (who knows why), deals with his wounds & nurses him back to health.

One night Michael wakes up, grabs his mask & thanks the hermit by killing him. Are you surprised? Off he goes to Haddonfield to finish what he started in the last movie…kill his niece Jamie & everyone who gets in her way.

I’m still not sure why…

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers starts off badly…by showing us what happened to him at the end of the 4th movie it pretty much confirmed that he is indestructible, this is not a good thing.

Jamie is now in a children’s psychiatric ward & can’t speak because of the trauma of what happened in the last movie. It’s a weird one ‘cause it seems like we’re expected to feel sympathy towards her with no explanation for what took place at the end of the 4th movie.

Ok….huge 4th movie spoilers up ahead.

At the end of the Halloween 4 Jamie put on a clown mask, took a pair of scissors & killed her step mother just like Michael did all those years ago. It was such a cool ending backed up by the sound of Donald Pleasance screaming “Nooooo”.

This incident seems to have been forgotten by everyone in Halloween 5 & it is only referenced once by Dr. Loomis later in the movie who puts the blame on her psychic link with Michael Myers.

This link is now even stronger & Jamie can see what Michael is doing at times as well. She sees Michael killing the hermit at the beginning that puts her into an almost catatonic state (has to be said Jamie is an unbelievable actor for a child, so good to watch).

Dr. Loomis (still played by the wonderful Donald Pleasance) is in charge of looking after Jamie. He suspects that Michael is still alive & wants to use Jamie to find him. The movie takes a massive mis-step by then killing off Rachel at the hands of Myers. This then pushes her friend Tina to the fore-front as the main lead besides Jamie. Where-as Rachel was interesting & had history with Michael, Tina doesn’t & is a basic one-dimensional character.

As rubbish as she is, her friends are worse, they spend so much of the movie playing tricks on each other, all the while dressed up as Michael Myers. At one point in the movie the same ‘I’m pretending to Myers but not really’ shtick is played out several times in a row. It is neither funny nor convincing. This Michael Myers is huge; it really shouldn’t be hard to tell the difference.

The mask is as creepy as always & an improvement over the mask used in the last movie with one exception, it doesn’t look like it fits properly!

Like most Halloween movies past the first 2, Halloween 5 is neither scary nor suspenseful. If you’re watching these movies hoping for some scares, look elsewhere. Gore fans might enjoy some of the deaths as they are varied. Hooks to the face, pitchforks to the back…it’s all brutal stuff but once again Michael seems incapable of killing a little girl.

Jamie suffers more this time then she has before including a tense & exciting sequence in a rubbish chute but he just doesn’t seem to try with her! He even gets behind the wheel of a car several times & she can still outrun him…it’s laughable. Still you end up rooting for her survival in the end.

She also gets the impressive job of unmasking Myers near the end, it’s dark but you briefly get to see his face. It’s a cool moment but let down by the fact his eyes are undamaged (they were shot out in Halloween 2) & he has no visible damage considering what has happened to him over the years.

Donald Pleasance’s Dr. Loomis gets to be a bit more hands on in this movie & there is a great beat down of Michael that left me smiling. You can feel 4 films worth of rage coming out of Loomis & it is almost hypocritical of him to go to such lengths to kill Michael.

The Halloween series isn’t exactly a thinking man’s film, they tend to be straight-forward slasher movies starring an indestructible killer with little motivation. The most thought needed was trying to work out who was left in the Myers bloodline!

Halloween 5 changes this format though with a confusing plot development that affects the entire series. The first clue is at the start when Michael wakes up & we see a strange tattoo on his wrist.

Later a strange man in black is seen getting off a bus & throughout the movie he constantly reappears & is seen in the background. Signs similar to the one on Michael’s wrist are spotted around his house as well. Clearly it is supposed to mean something.

However an explanation is never given as the man in black busts Michael out of prison at the end of the movie pretty much destroying an entire police station. It’s as random as it sounds…

A movie of moments, there are some great ones in Halloween 5 bookended by a lot of average ones. It’s probably the least scariest one of the series to date but it also has some of the more violent deaths. The man in black/tattoo plot point left me confused & I shouldn’t have to watch the 6th to understand this.