[HorrorScience] Halloween 4 (1988)

After the experiment that was done with halloween 3 We had to wait 6 years until the fourth part of this franchise was released, largely due to the poor economic performance of that third part compared to the first two. halloween 3 tried to mark the path that the creators of this saga wanted and that was release one film a year that is independent of the previous one, under the same name of the franchise but with different characters, a different story, and based especially on stories that have something to do with the celebration of Halloween and even its origins, Samhain. However, the image of Michael Myers, the protagonist of the first two films, had become so strong that the public associated this saga directly with that character, and that is why a lot of criticism rained down on that third film with a story in which Myers had nothing to do with, and where He is even shown in a certain scene as a fictional character.

Six years later someone decided it was time to profit from this franchise again, and this time they would give the public what they wanted: Michael Myers has to appear on the scene again. This fourth film also, and so that there is no doubt about it, was called Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers.

The story begins on October 30, 1988, the day before Halloween. The day is sunny and apparently very calm, and we see some houses already decorated for the holiday. At night, however, it is raining heavily, and an ambulance is heading to a hospital where, upon arrival, a doctor and a nurse inform one of the guards at the entrance that they have come to pick up and transfer a patient to the Smith Grove hospital. The woman complains about having arrived late because of the storm and the guard offers to accompany them through the facilities.

While accompanying them, the guard tells them that the patient they are coming to look for is dangerous, that a decade ago he murdered more than 16 people, and that his own doctor shot him 6 times and then set him on fire causing both to almost be charred to death. In this way, the scriptwriter does not need anything more than that brief sequence to be able to continue the story that had supposedly ended in Halloween II, pretending that Michael Myers did not really die and neither did his doctor, Dr. Sam Loomis, a classic of the saga.

Upon reaching the patient, the guard leaves and they introduce themselves to Dr. Hoffman, medical administrator of the hospital where Myers is hospitalized. The guard had already told them that he was glad that they were finally taking Myers away from there, and apparently Dr. Hoffman is also glad to get this patient off his back, because while the guard's problem with Myers is that he is a little afraid of him, Hoffman's problem is that for some reason he hates everything that happened in the past and has a certain hatred towards Loomis, whom he hopes that now that Myers is transferred somewhere else he will retire or, in his own words, die.

Myers is then loaded into the ambulance and while he is being transferred the nurse asks if Hoffman mentioned if Myers had any living relatives, to which the doctor answers yes, his niece who lives in his town, although she is a girl and therefore cannot be his guardian, so Michael is property of the state. As soon as he hears this information, Michael attacks and kills the doctor, thus beginning his mission again, which as we saw in the first two films, is to eliminate all the members of his family, murdering almost any other person who crosses his path.

In the next scene we see a little girl looking out through a window of her house, and we immediately assume that this girl is precisely Michael's niece whose existence we have just learned. We soon find out that her name is Jamie, and that she is being cared for by a family that has adopted her as their daughter, highlighting the character of Rachel, who acts as her older sister and cares for her and loves her very much, worrying because the girl has not slept for 4 nights as she suffers from the loss of her mother, who apparently died in an accident 11 months ago and is none other than Laurie Strode, the protagonist of the first two films, and sister of Michael Myers. While the girl was looking out the window we can see that the ambulance that was transporting Michael is outside, but after starting a brief conversation with Rachel, Jamie looks outside again and the ambulance is no longer there.

Jamie enters his room, the window is open, he approaches the closet from where he takes a box that he has stored there and inside it is a photo of his mother, Laurie, which he looks at for a moment. Then she puts it away, approaches her bed and kneels next to it ready to pray. The flash of light produced by lightning allows us to see through the reflection in a mirror that Myers is there. The closet door opens slowly. Jamie walks over to the closet, finds a doll on the floor, picks it up, and closes the door. When he returns to his bed the door opens again, and suddenly Myers grabs one of his feet from under the bed. Jamie manages to free herself, but apparently Michael is everywhere because he is also in the closet, and in the hallway right in front of her bedroom door, waiting for her. The girl screams, and her adoptive parents run over, discovering the girl stuck in the closet, having a nervous breakdown and tightly hugging the box where she has kept some memories and the photo of her mother. Clearly everything was a nightmare or hallucination of a premonitory nature.

The next day, October 31, 1988, Jamie's adoptive parents prepare to go out and so does Rachel, but her mother is on the phone with the person who would take care of Jamie that night who informs her that she will not be able to come since she has hurt herself skating, so the mother asks Rachel to take care of her adoptive sister that night, causing an argument between the two since Rachel was planning to go out with a boy named Brady, who apparently would propose to her that same night.

For his part, Loomis goes to Hoffman's office, and complains to him that he has not been informed about Myers' transfer. Hoffman argues that Myers was a patient and a federal prisoner, and therefore subject to federal law, but Loomis says that this is not just any patient, that they are talking about the reincarnated devil himself. Hoffman then tells Loomis that he is tired of his sermons, that he has been coming with the same thing for 10 years, and then Loomis asks him if he knows what day it is, what date that day is, and tells him that every day he looks in the mirror and remembers what happened, and that he doesn't want anyone else to have to go through that again. Hoffman ends the conversation by telling him that he thinks he's the one who needs a psychiatrist (instead of Myers), and the phone rings. When he answers the call he then finds out that there has been an accident with the ambulance that was transporting the body, so Loomis smiles sarcastically and quickly leaves the scene.

Both doctors arrive at the area where the ambulance is, and the sheriff informs them that it was supposedly an accident, that they went off the road because of the storm and fell down an embankment. Loomis asks how many people were traveling, to which Hoffman answers 4 in addition to Myers. He then asks how many bodies they found, and the sheriff answers that it is difficult to know because they were destroyed. Loomis then approaches the ambulance, which is upside down, semi-submerged in a river bed and with blood stains on the back doors and one of the sides. He looks inside, destroyed and also stained with blood, and then says, “It's gone. It has been here, but it is gone.

Loomis decides to go immediately to Haddonfield, which is about 4 hours away, and from that moment Loomis' classic chase towards Myers begins, just as we saw in the first two films, in which Sam always seems to be on Myers' heels while he dedicates himself to increasing his number of victims more and more.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers It is an acceptable film and marks the return of Myers to this saga from which he never left again. Despite the return of the murderer loved by all fans of this franchise, there is a noticeable drop in its general quality, both in script and direction, having important errors in terms of scenes with various errors, and a story that leaves various loose ends, especially when introducing a totally unnecessary character such as Michael's niece, Jamie, who to make matters worse is the protagonist. The absence of John Carpenter and Debra Hill for this sequel is very noticeable. Still, it fulfills its purpose as a film of the subgenre slasher, and entertains while recovering even a little of the essence of the first two films.

Some curious facts:

• In the original script Jamie's name was Britanny, but it was changed as a tribute to Jamie Lee Curtis (who plays Laurie Strode).
• The scene where Jamie is looking out the window while it's raining, and sees the ambulance outside, although he later sees it again and the ambulance is gone, was different in the original script and was changed for unknown reasons. The original scene had Jamie looking out the window at the rain, and then when engaging in conversation with Rachel he would no longer look outside, where we would see the ambulance arrive and stop.
• Cannon Films, which had recently finished filming The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) contacted John Carpenter and Debra Hill in 1986 to acquire the rights to halloween and create a new film in the saga, which would be number 4. Carpenter wrote the script together with Dennis Etchison (who had written novelizations of Halloween II and Halloween III), and Cannon ultimately did not like the deal they had with Carpenter and Hill, and rejected the project. This project ended up in the hands of producer Moustapha Akkad, who said that he did not like the script at all because it was "very cerebral" and that Myers should return to the scene as a cold-blooded killer. It all ended with Carpenter withdrawing from the project and selling all the rights to Akkad, who commissioned a new script and since Carpenter was not involved, he also had to find a new director.
• Two masks were used for Myers in the film. This wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the fact that one had dark brown hair and the other had blonde curls, which is quite noticeable in some scenes.
• Loomis' burns and scars change all the time during the film, demonstrating a major failure of the makeup team, unable to reproduce the same type of makeup for different scenes.