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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.

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