My Shudder Pick of the Month is Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one-hundred-dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
These are perilous times. The world fucking sucks. It’s easy to become hopeless and despairing, and difficult to find reasons for optimism.
That’s why it’s good to have a project. It takes your mind off the inexorable horror of everyday life and gives you something to focus on.
Today, I decided to watch and write about every Halloween film. Every last one. I’m going to be a completist.
I have seen the original Halloween, one of the greatest and most influential horror movies of all time. I’m a big fan of 1983’s Halloween: Season of the Witch, which took the series in a fascinating, unexpected direction by leaving Michael Myers out of the proceedings for a stand-alone story involving an evil toy company, robots, and the most sadistically catchy jingle in film history.
I love Halloween III, but it would have been even better if Joe Dante had directed it as originally planned, rather than departing the project to work on Twilight Zone: The Movie.
John Carpenter apparently had the excellent judgment to want Dante to direct Halloween 4 as well, but that fell apart when he sold his rights to the franchise to an opportunist whose ambitions began and ended with generating boffo box office by giving slasher fans the bloody red meat they craved.
During my time as a film critic for The A.V. Club, I saw and wrote about Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, a post-Scream sequel executive-produced by Kevin Williamson, who also did uncredited work on the screenplay, that brought Jamie Lee Curtis back into the fold after an extended absence, as well as its enjoyably dumbass sequel, Halloween: Resurrection.
Last and least, I wrote about Halloween Ends, the concluding entry in David Gordon Green’s reboot trilogy and an instant classic that introduced fans to a character ten times scarier than Michael Myers: a man named Corey who also enjoys murdering people.
So I decided to make 1988’s Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers my Shudder pick of the month for August. Unfortunately and perplexingly, the only other two Halloween movies on the popular horror streaming service are the original, which I have seen many times, and Halloween 5, which appears to be one of the least interesting and distinctive entries in the series.
Halloween 4 only had one objective: to bring back Michael Myers after a second sequel alienated fans of the series with ambition, artistry, and audacity.
If fright fans wanted more of the hulking mass murderer in a modified William Shatner mask, then Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers was going to give it to them without making audiences think too hard, or at all.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers opens with the scourge of Haddonfield nearly dead. Michael Myers has spent a solid decade in a comatose state following an explosion set by his antagonist, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence).
Jamie Lee Curtis had the good judgment not to want anything to do with Halloween 4, so the filmmakers callously kill her off by having her die in a car accident after giving birth to Jamie (Danielle Harris).
Curtis does not return, but her photograph appears more than once. The employees at the mental hospital for the criminally insane, where Michael Myers has been imprisoned, naturally assume that since the butcher of Haddonfield has been out of action for a solid decade, in a near-death state, he doesn’t pose much of a threat.
Michael Myers is being transferred via ambulance to another mental hospital when the poor soul cursed with babysitting him in the ambulance makes the mistake of mentioning that the serial killer has a niece in his hometown.
Despite being comatose for a decade, Michael Myers perks up and brutally murders the man who delivered that all-important exposition.
You’d think that the murderer’s muscles would atrophy from 10 years of inaction, but Meyers is somehow strong enough to jam a thumb through a man’s skull.
Since there would be no movie otherwise, Michael Myers decides to take a trip back to his hometown of Haddonfield to murder his niece and everyone who gets in his way.
Haddonfield is a small town, so that includes just about everybody.
Back in Michael Myers’ hometown, Jamie leads a tragic existence as an orphan whose uncle is an unstoppable killing machine so powerful and seemingly indestructible that he’s clearly superhuman.
Like all slashers, Michael Myers appears to die repeatedly, only to pop back up like a homicidal Energizer Bunny. That’s because the unkillable killer is a preeminent slasher movie cliche and because Moustapha Akkad, who executive-produced the 1978 original, bought the rights to the series from writer-director John Carpenter and producer-screenwriter Debra Hill, had it written into his contract that Michael Myers could not be killed permanently.
In Haddonfield, Jamie is the subject of cruel bullying from suspiciously knowledgeable tiny terrors who make fun of her for having corpses for parents and the boogeyman for an uncle.
Jamie has a strange psychic connection to her mother’s brother. She’s tormented by visions of him that make it hard to sleep.
Carpenter and Curtis are long gone, but Donald Pleasence, horror royalty even before his career-defining role in Halloween and its many sequels, returns as Dr. Loomis.
We’re told Loomis barely survived the explosion that nearly killed Michael Meyers. When he learns that the ambulance carrying him went kablooie, Dr. Loomis immediately intuits that he needs to beat his least favorite patient to Haddonfield before he can kill his niece.
Usually, if a doctor is continually trying to kill his patient and telling everyone who will listen that they’re pure evil, they’re not being terribly professional, but Dr. Loomis is an exception.
Pleasance is the marquee name here, but he was an old man with better things to do with his time, so he disappears for long stretches, so that the film can focus on younger, less expensive characters like Jamie’s older foster sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell).
Michael Meyers begins killing everyone around Jamie. He hurls an unfortunate electrician into a transformer, which serves multiple purposes. It adds another number to his already impressive kill count and plunges the town into darkness. That makes it easy for him to skulk about unnoticed, killing most of the police force and a hillbilly vigilante squad who do not realize just how outmatched they are by the killingest man in Illinois.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers only comes at the beginning and the end. We open on an appropriately atmospheric, gothic note, on a dark and rainy night, and a prison transfer unlike any other.
We close with Jamie, who touches her Uncle Mikey’s hand after he’s been shot several million times, slowing him down slightly in the process.
Michael Meyers is CLEARLY dead. Forget what I told you about Akkad’s insistence that Myers will never die permanently.
Back at the Carruthers’ home, Jamie’s older foster sister Rachel is running a bath for Jamie when she's interrupted by her younger sister stabbing her.
Dr. Loomis cries out in horror because, being an expert on evil, he knows that murderous insanity is transmitted through touch.
It's the only moment in the movie that I will remember because it's the only time the film entertains an idea more sophisticated than “Michael Myers kills people.”
Akkad reportedly turned down Carpenter’s ideas for a third sequel because they were too cerebral. So they went with a script that had nearly no ideas and not much of a brain.
The image of a sad, haunted little girl in a silky clown costume is striking and iconic, but until her climactic heel turn, Harris isn’t given much to do beyond look traumatized and try to avoid a family reunion of the homicidal variety.
I was thoroughly underwhelmed by Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, but hope springs eternal, so I am curious about Halloween 5 and, particularly, Halloween 6, which looks like the weirdest movie of the series and introduced the world to a deathless charmer we all love: Paul Rudd.
I’m fascinated by the Halloween franchise, in part, because I watched four to seven-hour documentaries about the A Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play, and Friday the 13th franchises for my book, The Fractured Mirror.
There’s something innately fascinating to me about long-running horror franchises, even when the individual movies themselves are very aggressively nothing special, like this spooky season stinker.
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