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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 13th 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.

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