Ten years ago, Michael Myers terrorized Haddonfield, amassing a staggering bodycount before Dr. Loomis managed to stop him. Comatose for a decade, Michael has awoken at last, returning to Haddonfield to haunt yet another Halloween. This year, Michael has his sights set on young Jamie Lloyd, his neice and daughter of Laurie Strode. Loomis races to stop his eternal nemesis, but it seems as if Myers is more inhumanly powerful than ever before.

As we all know, John Carpenter’s original vision for the Halloween franchise was for it to be an anthology series with each film themed around the holiday, which is why Halloween III was what it was. Well, Halloween III didn’t sit well with many fans of the series, nor was series producer Moustapha Akkad very fond of it. Carpenter and Akkad butted heads and at the end of the day, Akkad walked away with the rights to the series. And so, in 1988, for the tenth anniversary of the original Halloween, Akkad gave fans what they’d been dying for, the return of Michael Myers.

Halloween 4, Halloween 5 and Curse of Michael Myers represent a story arc in the series many fans refer to as the Thorn Trilogy. That name is a bit misleading, as the Cult of Thorn aspect won’t enter the picture until the tail end of Halloween 5 and won’t really be expanded upon until Curse of Michael Myers. Honestly, I’d say that the Jamie Lloyd Trilogy is a more suitable moniker, as these next three movies all focus around the character of Jamie and her relationship with Michael.

These three films would send the series down a path that would eventually get so cluttered with continuity and bad ideas that they’d finally be striken from the record, with Halloween H20 ignoring them completely. The Jamie Lloyd arc has its fans and it has its haters, some protested the removal of these films from canon while others cheered the decision on. Personally, I have some conflicting feelings toward this arc of the series, but those mostly have to do with the path it went down toward the end. So far as The Return of Michael Myers is concerned, I think it happens to be one of the best installments in the entire franchise.

If Halloween 4 succeeded at anything, it would have to be that it managed a fairly “epic” atmosphere, at least in regards to Michael’s big comeback. He’d been absent from movie theaters for seven years and absent from the fictional town of Haddonfield for ten. So seeing both him and Dr. Loomis back in action was pretty exciting. Granted, it took four writers and a rather noticeable smudging of continuity to bring him and Loomis back from the dead, but I’d say the ends justified the means in this case. Sure, there’s no way Loomis could have survived that explosion, Michael got both his eyes shot out of his skull and we even saw his corpse burning to cinders, but who cares? 

From the very beginning, Director Dwight H. Little crafts a fittingly creepy atmosphere, what with all the seemingly harmless Halloween decorations supplying a hauntingly sinister sense of dread, a kind of subtle terror you don’t typically see in slasher films. He employs several camera tricks, from modern handicam techniques to older Hitchcock-inspired gimmicks, all of which keep the film looking exciting, rarely succumbing to a “dull moment”. A lot of directors tend to churn these films out in a by-the-numbers manner, scarcely ever using their brains, much less their imaginations. So it’s refreshing to see a director from this era of horror actually putting forth the effort to make his look unique.

I’d say the worst thing about the film would have to be Michael’s mask. It looks postively ridiculous, a very poor facsimile of the creepy original. The white coloring is glossy, the hair looks preposterous and it lacks the darker, worn details of the original. The mask fails to look spooky and instead has all the horror of a cheap knock-off you can get at any supermarket. There’s even a scene at the elementary school where, for a brief instant, the mask has inexplicably blonde hair. How that happened, I can’t even hazzard a guess.

The cast is a mix of good and bad. Jamie is a wonderful character and Danielle Harris is certainly one of the most impressive child actresses I’ve seen. When she’s huddled up, crying, fearing her own life, you genuinely feel a twinge of sympathy for her. Her foster sister, Rachel (Ellie Cornell), is a bit on the bland side, I’m afraid, coming across as any other generic teenage heroine from a horror film. On the brightside, you have Donald Pleasence back as Loomis and that’s always a treat. He’s shown with burn scars all over his hands and face, a result from being blown up in Halloween II. These make his insane ramblings about true evil and whatnot even more amusing than usual. When it comes to the Halloween franchise, Loomis is as essential a character as Michael Myers.

The three films that comprise Jamie’s story arc are of violently fluctuating quality, each becoming progressively stranger and more difficult to digest. However, that’s a problem which only the following two films really suffer from. So far as Return of Michael Myers is concerned, it’s actually an excellent installment. I’d certainly consider it in the top three, perhaps even edging out Halloween II in terms of quality.

1. diannaslist liked this
2. ephemeralmusings liked this
3. pepperinsomefun reblogged this from cinematicwasteland
4. cinematicwasteland posted this