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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ivan the Terrible, Part 1 (1944) - Uncomfortably Stalinist, Visually Astounding

  I know that I usually start reviews with a personal anecdote of some sort, but this one is kind of a head scratcher. My only real ties in my life to the Soviet Union are just a lifelong, morbid fascination with the Cold War era and rocking a hammer and sickle pin on my backpack as middle schooler into punk rock. However, I do like a lot of Soviet era cartoons which are a special kind of surreal and I really like some film movements of Soviet states on the fringe, and what Soviet films I’ve seen often have very strong and striking visuals. So when I saw that Ivan the Terrible Parts 1 and 2 were on Max, I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to do something different for this blog even if it might be a bit shorter than my typical review. Obviously, the biggest and most valid criticism of the film is how deeply unsubtle it is in most ways, but particularly when it comes to defending and propagating the ideals of Stalinism. As a member of the left, I’m well aware there are factions t...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cabin in the Woods (2012) - Funny, Fun, and a Little Bit Insufferable

  The late 00s and early 10s were a pretty good time to be somebody who loved cult horror films with a sense of humor. You had the likes of Trick r Treat, Drag Me to Hell, and my favorite at the time which was The Cabin in the Woods. Whether it was on pay cable or early streaming, the film became a regular fixture in the years I mostly just spent my time frequently re-watching the same movies and drinking far too much beer. Because of that, I’ve gone some years without watching it very frequently cause I got kind of burnt out on it in my 20s but I had this former Blockbuster rental Bluray copy that cost less than 2 bucks so I figured why not see how well the film holds up? The thing that hasn’t held up so well is how smugly in love with its own dialog and cleverness the film is in a way that immediately signals that Joss Whedon was a writer on it. There’s a certain too cute quality to a lot of Whedon’s projects that have made me not like them as much as other people do, sorry to ...
Post a Comment
Read more