Halloween 5: The "Late Period Friday the 13th"-ification of Halloween

When my older sister wanted to play Barbies growing up, I sometimes ruined the experience by playing with the Michael Myers doll I got probably from Spencer’s around the time of H20. Anyway, for some reasons farms often featured into situations with Michael I played out, purely because of hazy memories of watching Halloween 5.

Despite being filmed so close to Halloween 4, this is a very different movie, much for the worse. While 4 with its flaws still very much maintained a lot of the mood and pacing of a Halloween film, this one feels a lot more influenced by the later Friday the 13^th sequels and other low rent 80s horror with its heavy reliance on the physic links with Michael and its broad cartoonish characters and incompetent comic relief cop duo. These aren’t really characters, they exist just as slasher fodder to be mowed down, which as a slasher fan I guess I can’t really complain about cause like I own almost all the Friday films, but the Halloween series always held itself a certain level above that.

(spoilers to follow)

Speaking of being influenced by late slasher sequels, they take the Nightmare 4 route of killing off the previous film’s adult lead within the first like half hour of the movie, and every character has basically one personality trait, even including Jamie who they abandoned any kind of idea of character developed hinted at by the last film and just make her a mute physic for half of the film who gets terrorized by Donald Pleasance in what are objectively hilarious scenes that are some of my favorite moments of the film.

The direction is just bland and not particularly noteworthy in any way in which the prior 3 Myers films had, they literally use clown sound effects when they introduce the comic relief as if the performances didn’t phone in their purpose well enough, the kills aren’t particularly imaginative nor very entertainingly bloody. Even Donald, who has been the highlight of most films, just seems more drunk and exhausted than he does crazed and it is a pity to be sure.

I don’t want to pretend that I don’t like this movie, I do, I wouldn’t be doing this series if I didn’t like at least some of the lesser Halloween movies too either through nostalgia, irony, or even just appreciating a bad slasher. I love little Danielle Harris, even sad Donald Pleasance is good Donald Pleasance. But being as critically objective as I can be, it is among the weakest films of the original series, and a comparatively slog after watching 1, 2 and 4 earlier in this week.

Comments

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 ...

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 ...

Titanic (1997) - A Tale of Two Movies, One Painful and One Great

The first time I saw Titanic I was just a little kid, and I bawled my eyes out and then once I dried up I begged to see it again so we sat through that extremely long movie twice in two days. Our VHS copy was well worn by the time we upgraded to DVD, we watched it regularly as a family in the late 90s and early 00s. It is probably a quite vital piece of media when it comes to my love and respect and awe of grandiose filmmaking even though these days I maybe only watch it every 5 years or so. So since my parents got Paramount+ through their cable and it was the only film on there that spoke to me when I was first glancing through their library, I figured why not see how it holds up? Honestly, every time I do revisit the film I spend like the first two hours being painfully reminded why it is so rare that I do. I grew up with a mom and older sister, a very female oriented household, so trust me when I say I’ve heard my fair share of really painfully written and delivered romantic ...

Blue Ridge Ben

Search This Blog