[HorrorScience] Halloween 5 (1989)

We have already reached the halfway point of this HorrorScience cycle dedicated to the franchise halloween, so in addition to this fifth part we still need five other occasions to see the masked serial killer Michael Myers, doing his thing during the night of October 31 of some year.

In the case of this fifth film in the saga, whose name is Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, it is about a direct continuation of the previous (Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers), taking place just one year after the events that occurred in the fourth film, which also marked Myers' return to the big screen after the experiment they had decided to do with this franchise starting with the third part did not give the expected result.

The film begins just with the final scene of the previous one, on the night of October 31, 1988, with Michael Myers attacking the two leading actresses and ending badly, being brutally shot by the police, falling into a well and then supposedly dying from an explosion. However, here we see a new scene in which Myers, upon falling into the well, actually falls into a kind of drain that leads to the river. And when the explosion that should have been fatal occurred, he was already going out into the river, throwing himself into the current and letting it carry him to a small dock.

Michael holds on to the dock and climbs out of the water, beginning to walk through the woods. We see that his steps are erratic, since he is very badly injured. An old man who lives nearby in a hut in the company of a parrot hears noises in the forest and decides to go out to see what is happening. He finds nothing, and when he re-enters his house, Myers grabs him by the neck and chokes him for a brief second, falling unconscious a moment later. The old man, seeing that this individual is wounded and bloody, decides to take care of him.

A year later, on Halloween Eve, Jamie, the girl protagonist of the previous film and supposed daughter of Laurie Strode (who was the protagonist of the first two parts and Michael's sister), is admitted to the children's hospital in Haddonfield, Illinois, and has a nightmare in which she attacks a stepmother with a butcher knife and dressed as a clown, as Myers did in his childhood when he murdered his adoptive sister. Suddenly she wakes up screaming, although in reality they are screaming expressions since the girl, since the traumatic experience she suffered in the previous film, has become mute.

A nurse soon comes to calm her down, then leaves the room, and we see that Jamie enters a kind of trance in which she is connected to Myers, who wakes up from his dream in the old man's hut. The girl writes on a blackboard "He's coming for me" and begins to move in the same way that Michael moves, who gets up, approaches the old man from behind, and kills him by breaking his neck. Right after Michael murders the old man, Jamie starts having a nervous breakdown and convulsing, so the nurse comes back in and screams for help.

Quickly, two doctors take the girl to the operating room to perform a tracheostomy since she is drowning and they consider that it is the only way to save her, but when they are about to do so, Dr. Samuel Loomis arrives, already known to fans of the saga since he was Michael Myers' personal psychiatrist and who has already been pursuing him for 4 installments, and yells at the doctor telling him not to do it. The doctor tells him that the girl is dying, that he must do it, but Loomis is convinced that the girl is not dying but recovering. As if Loomis were some kind of magical fortune teller, the girl stops convulsing and the seizure finally passes.

The next day, Jamie is fine and Rachel, her adoptive sister, is taking care of her in the hospital, when suddenly Tina, a friend of Rachel's, arrives along with a dog named Max, who come to visit Jamie and leave her a pink princess costume to wear at night. Everything is joy and laughter until the spoilsport Loomis arrives and with his bad mood causes Tina and Max to decide to leave. Rachel tells Jamie that her mother and father are blowing her kisses, and that she has to leave now but will be back in two days. Suddenly the glass in the bedroom window bursts into pieces and you can hear a car outside speeding away. The window burst because someone threw a rock from that car, and Loomis picks up the rock from the ground, and finds a paper tied to it, which has a message written on it that says "The demonized girl must die«.

Loomis then accompanies Rachel out of the hospital, and she wonders when people are going to understand that Jamie is just a girl and that she is not to blame for anything, to which Loomis replies that these people know that Myers is her uncle, and that he attacked her stepmother, so that's why they fear him, especially on Halloween.

Rachel then walks home with Tina and Max, and when Tina leaves, Max starts barking while looking at some nearby bushes, although Rachel, thinking he is barking at a cat, doesn't pay much attention to him and forces him into the house.

At the hospital, Jamie is in a room with other children who are playing, drawing and painting. In a moment she enter that kind of trance again that we already saw him suffer before, and he takes a black marker and a red marker and approaches one of the blackboards, where he begins to paint a black face with many teeth, resembling a child's caricature of what the face of a barking dog would be like. Loomis is watching closely what is happening. At the same time, at Rachel's house, Max won't stop barking while Rachel is taking a shower, and after a few seconds the phone starts ringing. Rachel gets out of the shower and rushes to answer the call, which turns out to be from Loomis who asks her about the dog and tells her to go check on him. When Rachel goes downstairs to see if anything is wrong with the dog, she finds that the dog is not there and the door that leads to the street is completely open, so Loomis, upon learning this, tells him to quickly leave the house without asking. Loomis' decision was the correct one, since we could see that Myers had already managed to get into the house.

In the next scene we see that Rachel warned a neighbor to call the police, and we witness a rather ridiculous scene in which two police officers leave Rachel's house, where they have found nothing, and take turns talking as if they were a comic duo, which is accompanied by absurd and typical background music. gags also comical, but in this case it is not funny at all. Max appears running down the street, carrying a dead squirrel in his mouth, and Rachel apologizes to the officers for having them come in vain.

Minutes later Rachel is back in her room, preparing to go out partying that night, and when she removes an article of clothing from the closet we see that Myers is hiding there. What a couple of more efficient police officers the previous ones, right? Jamie, for her part, is quite worried and cries. Michael instead decides to come out of the closet, watches Rachel for a few moments while she gets dressed, and goes to another room. What will you do from there? It's obvious that he will kill more people, we all know that, but what is the connection that unites Myers and Jamie? Will something happen to Rachel? Will Loomis finally catch up to Myers in time to stop him?

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers follows the same style as the previous film in this saga, doing something similar to what happened with the first and second films that were direct consequences, continuing one right where the previous one had left off. The performances leave a lot to be desired, except perhaps ironically for the girl, but in general it is a film that is watchable and not boring, although falters in almost every aspect. As you can see, we are in a stage that, since the fourth part, has been in decline. Fans of the saga and of Myers will have to continue waiting for a true return of this murderer, which is similar in quality to what was seen in the first two parts, something that is far from happening here.

Some curiosities:

• The scenes with the two police officers that have that music gag comic background were included as an homage to a scene from The last house on the left (1972) by horror film director Wes Craven.
• Writer Shem Bitterman wrote the first draft of the script, which saw Jamie become a ruthless killer after the events of the fourth film. The producers didn't like the idea and felt that people wanted to continue seeing Myers, so they rejected that idea and hired Michael Jacobs to rewrite that script. Dominique Othenin-Girard then revised the script and added more violent scenes.
• In its first week since its release, the film grossed more than $5 million, but then fell sharply at the box office, ultimately becoming the least successful film in the saga. In a large number of countries it was even released directly on video.