Skip to main content

Halloween 4 (1988): Who Is Going to Notice if We Use a Halloween Store Mask?

 


After the relative failure of the amazingly underrated Halloween III (which maybe I’ll review around Halloween), there was a big gap in Halloween movies but they came back swinging with The Return of Michael Myers. This one was a favorite of mine as a kid, which I watched many times either via rented VHS or it always playing on cable during the Halloween season, content edited.

As an adult, it probably isn’t in my top 3 if I’m being honest, but it is a genuinely fine Halloween film for the most part. The kills aren’t super explicit, they were shying away from that by the late 80s in horror and here a lot of them just take place off screen entirely, but shoving a shotgun through the stomach is always memorable. The mask is absolute garbage, the worst version of the mask they used in any of the films. They also don’t really let the ostensible female lead of the film have much life out of having a shitty boyfriend and chaperoning Jamie around. The psychic link silliness between Michael and Jamie is pretty dumb and would only get worse.

However, there’s plenty of nice to say about it. The direction is solid, nothing flashy and a bit of a downgrade from the first two but it delivers the essentials you want out of this kind of film and this specific franchise. Despite blowing up, they slapped a limp and some makeup on Donald Pleasance because they realized it just can’t really be a Halloween movie until Dr. Loomis is ranting about evil, and he rants and raves a good bit but less than you would like but still enough that you appreciate them actually lampshading it a bit like his bonding with a crazy apocalypse seeking Christian as a like spirit and a line suggesting he himself is mentally ill (absolutely is). Danielle Harris is one of the least annoying child actors of her era, and they know to use Jamie sparingly when it comes to dialog-forward scenes so you don’t grow so grated that you aren’t rooting for her when she’s in trouble as sometimes happens when they insert kids into movies like these. The use of the mob as a force of well meaning chaos was a clever little twist to the narrative even if they didn’t do as much with it as I would have liked (but less than ya know, David Gordon Green).

It isn’t a perfect movie, every character who isn’t directly related to the narrative of the first two are shallow and two dimensional and it often feels like it is doing an imitation of the style of the first two rather than a real emulation which might have taken a bit more finesse than the future director for Free Willy 2 had to offer, but it is a fun movie that works pretty well for the most part as a late 80s slasher and while they retconned in the next film, had a fantastic twist ending. Recommended with caveats.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Green Mile (1999) - Syrupy Collection of Great Character Actors

  The Green Mile was a film that was in a regular rotation for my mom and stepdad when I was growing up, so I saw it many times in the late 90s and early 00s. My love of Stephen King mostly comes from my dad, who owned the first King book I ever read myself in late elementary school (Skeleton Crew) and numerous others I looked at on his shelf all the time and showed me miniseries like IT and The Stand. However, my mom contributed a little bit too with the likes of Creepshow and some of his other 80s adaptations and of course The Green Mile. So I figured why not revisit it since I own it? My biggest problem with The Green Mile is one I share with its spiritual sibling in The Shawshank Redemption which is that it is just very sentimental and sometimes even downright corny. Movies seemingly designed to make middle aged dads get in touch with their emotions by layering that syrup on thick. There’s a place for that and I understand why people really enjoy it, but it just simply isn’t ...

Cat's Eye (1985) - Kitty Across America

  There are two important facts about me, two important obsessions that haunt me: a love of anthology series and a love of Stephen King adaptations of all shapes and colors. As sometimes I imply on here, I’m a regular collector of physical media from VHS and Laserdiscs to DVDs and Blurays, and a big bulk of my DVD and Bluray collection are horror or other genre anthology TV series and you better bet I own physical copies of a number of anthology films too including both closely associated with King (as part of the same $20 box set): Creepshow and Cat’s Eye. One day I will formally write a review of Creepshow but I’ll spoil my feelings about it by saying it is absolutely one of my favorite horror films of all time to the point that it is almost certainly in my top 20, maybe top 10 favorite films of all time. So the first time I watched Cat’s Eye, which I believe was maybe pre-Covid, I had one of my favorite films ever made to compare it to and it sagged in my estimation as a result...

Scream (1996) - Williamson Dialogue Hasn't Always Aged Well, Though Iconic All the Same

  My mom grew up among the slasher golden era of the 80s, so she adored the genre and many of the 2000+ VHS tapes she had around for a lot of my childhood were various slasher franchises and what we didn’t have by 7 or 8 I was begging my parents to rent for me from Hollywood Video or Movie Starz on a regular basis. So it goes without saying that Scream coming in and revitalizing the entire genre’s popularity for a handful of years was a big deal in our household and I was probably very young the first time I saw it which was likely not long after it came out on tape in probably ‘97, same with the sequels in later years. I then proceeded to watch it so many times across my childhood well into adulthood that practically every line and scene and even delivery are memorized at that point, which made stepping back to write as objective a review as I can somewhat difficult but I found the more of a critical eye I applied to it the more it worked out. As always starting with the negat...