Halloween Retrospective: Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

Halloween Retrospective | #5 | Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

Dominique Othenin-Gerard’s Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers is the direct sequel to the previously reviewed Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. I found Halloween 4 to be surprisingly enjoyable, and it’s currently among my favorites in the franchise. Everything good I said about that one? You can throw it all out the window because Halloween 5 is not only the worst film in the franchise so far, it’s one of the worst slasher films I’ve ever seen.

Reportedly, this film was rushed into production after the success of Halloween 4 despite its script not even being finished, and oh my god it shows. Everything about this one is a hack job. The plot is practically non-existent, and several subplots that would have fleshed things out were reportedly cut and left to be expanded upon in the final installment in this mini-trilogy. What we are left with is a half-assed retcon of the cliffhanger at the end of Halloween 4 and a repetition of the same schtick the first few movies relied on without any elaboration.

Jamie, the now nine-year-old survivor and Michael Myers’ niece, has been in a mental hospital since the events of Halloween 4. It’s now been a year and once again Michael has been retconned into surviving an utterly absurd situation. He’s back now, stalking through the town, which seems to not have been affected by the events of the previous year at all. Jamie can sense him coming, and Dr. Loomis is convinced that she and Michael Myers share a psychic link. This is never properly explained and mostly he just mentally torments her throughout the entire movie – when he’s not babbling absolute nonsense to anyone who will listen, that is. Meanwhile, Michael Myers stalks and kills random teenagers, despite the fact that he’s always been extremely focused on one particular target, which is always a member of his family.

Genuinely, this is all there is to the film until the vaguely interesting but far too long final act. On top of that, it’s terribly written, with all returning characters reduced to shallow husks of their former selves and all new characters being boring at best and annoying at worst. Any sort of plot is just an excuse for gratuitously paced stalking and murder scenes that aren’t even the least entertaining on their own. Any even remotely interesting hook is barely used and never explained due to the cut content. In the end, almost nothing has changed and it’s just another case of Michael Myers terrorizing the town and then getting away in the end. And it’s all so, so boring.

If Halloween 4 was setting up anything, it was the idea of collective trauma and the wounds it passes on. Halloween 5 kinda sorta flirts with those ideas but only because there were literally handed to it on a silver platter. It has no vision of its own that wasn’t already planned out for it in advance, it derails much of the interesting set-up of its predecessor, and anything genuinely new it brings to the table is completely wasted. It’s a pointless waste of time and I look forward to never watching it again.