Michael Myers Returns...With A Vengeance

The Horror Genre Is Dead

I have seen a lot of horror movies in my fourteen years of living and have watched countless trilogies, series’, and sagas and have found some that I enjoy to watch and some that I despise to even think of. One of the sagas that I love-just-can’t-help-to-diss are the Halloween movies. Recently I went through all of my boxes of movies digging through my old Nightmare on Elm Street tapes along with my Scream trilogy and while searching through to organize on my shelf, guess what resurfaced? Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. Isn’t that a great thing? It’s a pity though that I can’t find all of my other Halloween tapes though. Through the years, the horror genre went through a metamorphosis. Instead of the cheesy, yet intriguing and interesting horror/slasher films that we used to get, it’s replaced with replicas of past awesome films. Now you have idiotic “works of art” like Valentine, Sleepy Hollow, and Urban Legends instead of real works of art like Prom Night, Terror Train, and one of the best series of all time Child’s Play. When the first The Blair Witch Project movie came out I thought that the horror genre was saved because of how original and terrifying it was, but now a couple years later crappy movies like Jeepers Creepers are still coming out including more Halloween sequels.

Trick Or Treat

In 1978 the first Halloween movie came out under an extremely low budget and actors that weren’t established in the movie business yet. Years later, John Carpenter and Debra Hill’s master formula has been imitated, cut-down, disgraced, and plagiarized in the many Halloween sequels that have followed since the first. Eight movies and counting, the fourth one, the movie that you are reading about now, remains my least favorite of the bunch just for being repetitive and not scary. But the reason also might be because I’ve seen the movie a million times more than I’ve seen the others in the series. The Halloween series is centered on a serial killer named Michael Myers, whom isn’t really a man, but “evil with two legs” (as Donald Pleasance’s character Dr. Loomis vividly tells). When he was a little boy, he brutally stabbed his older sister and was sent to a mental institution for years to come before breaking out and coming after his sister, Laurie Strode, (played by the magnificent Jamie Lee Curtis in the first two and the last two films) in Haddonfield, IL on Halloween night. Years later after being stopped in the second one, being skipped in the third film (if you want to call it that), he makes his triumphant return in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers where he is after small Jamie Lloyd, the daughter of Laurie Strode whom rumor has it died in a car crash years before. Now, in familiar Halloween fashion, Michael Myers disposes of anyone and everyone who gets in the way of his goal to get to Jamie including teens who are having sex and regular working folk who are minding their own business.

The Face Of Fear

No horror villain scares me as much as Michael Myers does. Sure, Chucky (of the Child’s Play movies) is freaky and Freddy (of the Nightmare on Elm Street films) is terrifying, but nothing at all matches up to the amount of fear that comes with the Halloween frontman. He wears a mask with no facial expressions that’s all white and you know that someone’s about to die when John Carpenter’s familiar awesome piano tune that keeps getting done over and over again comes on along with when someone is walking along and you see his white face glowing in the dark. Michael Myers is an interesting character all by himself. Sure, he got sh!t on in the sixth film (Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers) when the script made up a crappy story that Michael was controlled by some nasty cult, but I like to remember him as a dude who’s not right in the head who finds pleasure in doing what he does best: killing people whether it’s with strangulation, stabbing, or regular hammer-through-the-skull tricks. Although the movies never really hint on why Michael Myers has been chasing the last remaining members of his family tree so long, you have to remember that they are slasher films so in regularity: you don’t need to know, it’s just what it is and I’m fine with that. One of the major disappointments of Halloween 4 is that Jamie Lee Curtis is nowhere to be found. In other words, she’s not in the picture at all only showcased in…pictures that little Jamie has in this little box that she keeps in the closet. After the events that went down in Halloween 2, you’d think that the series would have ended, but it kept going on. And in case I forget to tell you, Halloween 3 is not part of the series. Back in the good ole days when people thought the Michael Myers storyline was finished, some people got the “great idea” that they should release different types of movies every Halloween having nothing to do with Michael Myers or Laurie Strode or anything. The movie sucked. ‘Nuff said.

Starry, Starry Night

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers stars Donald Pleasance, one of the coolest actors of all time that was really the backbone of the whole series and kept the series afloat until his death shortly before the sixth movie was released. Although a lot of his lines was explaining to dumb police officers and ridiculously dorky doctors that “Michael Myers isn’t a man…he’s pure evil”. Don Pleasance is an awesome actor to watch onscreen and adds a lot of tension to the series and especially this movie and I have to say that if he wasn’t in Halloween 4 then I wouldn’t recommend anyone to watch it. Next up is the small and meek Danielle Harris whose filmography I don’t even remember, but I could have sworn that she was in the Bette Midler film Beaches. Well, I don’t like child actors, but surprisingly she did a good job although in some parts of the movie it was really hard to watch her because of her fake crying and idiotic PMS attacks. She plays Jamie Lloyd and does a great job at it, but just gets tiring to watch in the movie if she’s in a scene for more than five minutes. She’s like Prozac: you can only take in so much in so many little doses. Ellie Cornell plays a character whose name has slipped out of my mind. She plays the stepsister of Jamie and the single protector of the child and she won’t stop at nothing until Jamie is safe out of the grasp of Michael Myers. She does a mediocre job, but I felt as if she did a little too much flat acting and I have to say that Danielle Harris of all people steals each scene that she’s in with her. Her character is a little familiar…maybe that’s because she’s a reflection of Laurie Strode. Okay, so she’s not shy and she’s certainly not a virgin, but she is innocent and a nice catch, exactly like Jamie Lee Curtis’s character. There’s a couple other memorable characters like the rednecks in the bar that create an angry mob when they hear word that Michael Myers is on the streets. These guys are just amusing to watch since they are such hicks and are laughably stupid in a way, but help out in the long run.

I’m Going To Give It To You Directly

Dwight Little steps into the director’s seat this time around, but robs the picture of scares. What I love about the Halloween movies is the amount of gore and gruesome deaths that are shown, but surprisingly the deaths aren’t even shown. It shows Michael Myers and then the victim and then reverts back to the main character and then the character discovers the bodies and…that’s it. That’s the weakest thing and I do not know why it was like that because it made the picture less frightening and just cheesy (in a bad way). Mike Bracken (AKA Mike_Bracken on the site) doesn’t like the film’s producer Moustapha Akkad because he virtually destroyed the series and wanted to make the Halloween series into a hefty cash hog and to not be in it for the fans of the horror genre or the rest of the series in particular. I have to agree with Mikey. Moustapha is a complete idiot and really has messed up the series to the point of no return (unless John Carpenter comes back on to do another movie like Wes Craven did with the Nightmare on Elm Street movie The New Nightmare). What I’ve noticed is that in all of the Halloween films in the credits it always says something like “Halloween Theme by John Carpenter” and I really don’t know why they do this (since everyone knows this). Carpenter’s awesome piano theme is awesome, but there’s only so many times that I can be reminded that he wrote it. Screenplays in horror movies are never deep or provocative or anything of the sort so I didn’t have high expectations that the movie was going to have an awesome script, but the script for Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is horrific to say the least. The dialogue is just pathetic and is dense to the point of annoyance. The basic storyline the movie is about (two girls locked in a house with Michael Myers trying to get in and eventually succeeding) is all right, but it definitely could have been better.

The Return of Michael Myers

This Halloween season be ready to be scared—and go buy the first Halloween film. If you want to be genuinely scared and freaked out beyond belief definitely go out and buy it because it will give you more than enough of babysitter stalking fun, but if you want to have a movie that is all right to watch, but not for scaring purposes or big entertainment, check out Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers but be warned that you can do a lot more with your rental or purchase money like buying another type of scary movie or paying a hooker to give you an STD. Although I gave it three stars, it’s not worth it to watch unless you are a truly hardcore fan of the original or offshoots. If you are a fan of horror movies in particular then you might enjoy it, but if you are a mainstream movie buff looking for a good time then I wouldn’t advise you to look here since all it offers is cheap thrills and idiotic kills. Michael Myers’ name has been crapped on…yet again.

Jay