The Shudder Pick of the Month is the Wonderfully Insane Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
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When Jamie Lee Curtis understandably and wisely chose not to appear in the fourth, fifth, and sixth Halloween movies, the producers pragmatically made Donald Pleasence’s Dr. Loomis their hero.
Pleasance was cheaper and had lower standards, but he was also an old man who should be in a wheelchair for life, if not a coma or dead after his nearly fatal run-ins with Michael Myers throughout the series.
If audiences couldn’t have the iconic star of Halloween and, to a lesser extent, Halloween 2, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, Halloween: Resurrection, and David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, then they would grudgingly settle for Pleasance.
Pleasance returns as Loomis in the wonderfully idiotic 1989 stinker Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. In the single stupidest, least believable sequence in a film full of them, Dr. Loomis lures his patient-turned-nemesis to his old home by promising that the niece he’s been trying to brutally murder will be there.
The foolishly fearless doctor tries to reason with the silent, unstoppable mass murderer. He tries to appeal to the decency and sanity of a maniac devoid of decency and sanity.
Dr. Loomis foolishly gets within stabbing distance of the scourge of Haddonfield, at which point he is stabbed and then hurled over a bannister. This should end the alternately lucky and obscenely unlucky life of a senior citizen whose golden years have been devoted to trying unsuccessfully to stop Michael Myers’ holiday-themed killing sprees. Loomis should be long dead, but he proves nearly as indestructible as the mask-clad murderer who consumes his tortured psyche and grim existence.
That somehow does not keep Loomis, who is played by an actor pushing 70, who would die before the release of the next sequel, 1995’s Halloween: The Curse of Mike Myers, from making a spectacular comeback.
Despite the massive stab wounds he endured and the damage from a potentially fatal fall, Dr. Loomis implausibly rises and finds the courage to not only stand and walk but also fight back.
Dr. Loomis knows that the only way to defeat an unstoppable murder machine with a body count in the dozens, if not hundreds, is for a recently stabbed old man to hit him repeatedly with a wooden plank.
Michael Myers had previously been shot repeatedly and stabbed, yet a codger smacking him with wood somehow results in him being incapacitated enough to get arrested.
This literally unbelievable display of strength and resilience takes a lot out of Loomis. He has a stroke and falls on top of Michael Myers.
Dr. Loomis is unique in slasher film history. There’s not an analogous character in any franchise I can think of, including the A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Leprechaun, Child’s Play, and Critters series.
Dr. Loomis serves as an obsessed Van Helsing to Michael Myers’ scowling, silent Count Dracula. Slasher movies are full of Final Girls, but largely devoid of weird old men who pop up in sequel after sequel to fight the purest form of evil.
We know that Dr. Loomis is a force for good because we've seen him take on the ultimate evil in film after film. If you did not know that, however, Dr. Loomis would seem utterly insane, and not in a benign way either.
In Halloween 5, Loomis behaves in such an unhinged fashion that I can easily envision a draft or two of the screenplay where pursuing Michael Myers over the course of a traumatic decade had driven him so mad that he chose to put on the modified William Shatner mask at the franchise’s core and continued his murder spree.
Pleasance spends the first act of the fourth sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 classic terrorizing a little girl in a way that should result in a restraining order, if not jail time.
When we last saw Jamie (Danielle Harris), Laurie Strode’s orphaned daughter, she was stabbing her stepmother under Michael Myers' malevolent influence.
Except for Dr. Loomis, no one seems to think that the little girl’s predilection for ultra-violence is that big a deal.
Oh sure, she's a resident of the Haddonfield Children's Clinic, where she has become mute. That does not keep Dr. Loomis from showing up unexpectedly and screaming at the traumatized tot, "You've got to help me, Jamie. You've got to help me find him. We both know he's alive. But you know where he is! Why? Why are you protecting him? What about your stepmother, Jamie? You love her, don't you? He made you stab her. You can't hide from him. He'll always get to you. Jamie, Jamie, you listen. Today in the cemetery, somebody dug up a coffin. It was the coffin of a nine-year-old girl. What do you think he is going to do with that? Huh? You're nine years old, are you, Jamie?”
They have fun!
When a nurse tells Loomis to leave the sobbing little girl alone, he instead hisses, “Tears won't get you anywhere! Help me to find him. We'll find him together! There's a reason why he has this power over you. Did you ever wonder what it is?”
Loomis stops just short of threatening to stab Jamie himself if she doesn’t help him stop someone everyone thinks is definitely dead after the events of Halloween 4. Pleasance was very unhappy with how he was written and directed here.
Dr. Loomis is a dark, obsessive figure whose life has been defined by his obsessive pursuit of a mass murderer but Pleasance found the character’s wild-eyed, frothing-at-the-mouth nuttiness extreme and embarrassing. He was right.
Halloween 5: The Return of Michael Myers is like Pleasance's performance/character: insane, nonsensical and enjoyable bonkers.
Only Dr. Loomis seems worried that Jamie nearly murdered her stepmother last Halloween. Everyone else seems to see it as the kind of thing that can happen to anyone.
Jamie has a telekinetic bond with Uncle Mikey. She lapses into seizure-like convulesions as a result of his murderous ministrations.
If my uncle was a Halloween-themed mass murderer and I tried to kill my stepmother last Halloween, I would sit the holiday out permanently, but Jamie gets dolled up in a princess costume (despite the movie’s poster showing her in a clown costume she never actually wears, except for flashbacks to the previous film) for the occasion and competes in a costume contest.
Jamie is only as verbal as she needs to be. She begins the film mute, then is able to painfully choke out words before becoming downright chatty by the end of the film.
The li’l scream queen wants to let Loomis know that Michael Myers is alive and picked up her stepsister’s friend Tina at a convenience store with a sign advertising big cookies featuring a woman with chocolate chip cookies over her enormous breasts.
With great effort, Jamie utters awkwardly, “Store”, followed by “All-Nighter”, and “Big.”
When Loomis unhelpfully asks, “What do they sell?” Jamie replies, once again with great effort, “Big Woman.”
I would interpret this to mean that there was danger at a store that sold big women, but Jamie specifies that the outsized lass in question is a “Cookie Woman.”
This psychotic game of charades ends with a cop identifying the store with the big cookie woman as “Dale's Gas Station, 5th in Main.”
Michael Myers spends a fair amount of time driving in Halloween 5. This struck me as unrealistic, but in the novel, it is explained that he learned how to drive by watching Dr. Loomis.
Michael drives to a party where Tina (Wendy), a friend of Jamie and her foster sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell), is partying with her pals Spitz (Matthew Walker) and Sam (Tamara Glynn).
At the Halloween soiree, Spitz and Sam do what teenagers in these movies always do: they behave like idiots, fornicate, then get murdered by a serial killer.
Spitz thinks it’s a hilarious prank to wear a Michael Myers mask to frighten girls. This almost leads to him getting shot repeatedly by a pair of “humorously” incompetent comic relief cops.
If you want to scare audiences, it’s generally a bad idea to introduce Keystone Kops-style cops going for yucks rather than fright. Apparently, the Barney Fife-style lawmen were a tribute to similarly incompetent police in the original Last House on the Left, where they were annoying and distracting, but not as much as they are here.
Jamie tries to warn Tina that she is in danger, and ends up sharing a moment with Uncle Mikey when she calls him uncle and he takes off his mask and sheds a single, perfect tear.
Then he goes right back to trying to kill everyone. Despite being several hundred years old and a frequent stabbing victim, Dr. Loomis takes down Michael Myers, before the indestructible horror icon is freed from jail by a mysterious figure known as "The Man in the Black”, and played by Don Shanks, the veteran stuntman who also plays Michael Myers.
Here's the fun part: the filmmakers did not know who The Man in Black was when they wrote him into the film as a Deus Ex Machina who liberates Michael Myers from his fate. They figured that the screenwriters of the next sequel would figure it out for them.
That makes me even more excited about seeing Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, despite its dire reputation. This movie is enormous fun precisely because it is so flamboyantly awful.
Movies like this don’t have to be good to be fun. In fact, it sometimes helps to be not just bad, but unforgettably abysmal, like Halloween 5.
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