Awfully Good Movies: Halloween 5

Awfully Good Movies: Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

October 26th 2022, 11:00am

With David Gordon Green’s supposed franchise finale Halloween Ends proving to be one of the most divisive sequels to John Carpenter’s horror classic to date, Awfully Good Movies is spending the spooky season with the fifth Michael Myers installment from 1989: Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers!

Only one year after Halloween 4 ended with The Shape getting shot down a mining shaft and his niece Jamie slicing up her stepmom, producer Moustapha Akkad rushed another film into production that would answer every burning question that you–BWAHAHA, I’m just kidding, Halloween 5 basically pretends that Jamie Lloyd inheriting her uncle’s evil never happened. Instead, Danielle Harris spends much of the movie mute from trauma inside a children’s hospital where she discovers a psychic bond with her newly reawakened uncle, while Donald Pleasance returning as Dr. Loomis tries to get her to tell him where Michael is going to strike next.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t save Jamie’s sister Rachel from the last film from meeting her end 20 minutes in (spoiler alert?). So the central adult we’ve got to “root” for now is Rachel’s annoying housemate Tina Williams, probably the most ill-fitting comic relief character to hit a sequel since Richard Pryor in Superman III. Will Tina’s valley girl schtick ruin this franchise faster than you can say “trick or treat, motherfucker”? Will the increasingly psychotic Loomis be able to use Jamie’s psychic bond to defeat Michael’s evil for good? And will any of this matter after the franchise reboots its story several hundred times within the next couple of decades?

So many questions, so many underwhelming sequels that’ll fail to answer them. Oh, and one more question: Is it too late to turn this back into an anthology series like John Carpenter wanted to do in the first place? Five more days till Halloween… SILVER SHAMROCK!