am failing in that pledge.
But I haven't written anything else this week, and I've got some time on a Friday afternoon.
The fourth movie in the Halloween series, and third I've watched this month (I watched Halloween III only back in January), is subtitled The Return of Michael Myers, but the more noteworthy return, in terms of plausibility, has got to be that of Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis.
Now, it is entirely implausible that either Loomis or Michael Myers would have survived the explosion that ended Halloween II (oops, spoiler alert). But we are already giving Myers, an unkillable killing machine whom Loomis describes as the personification of evil, the benefit of the doubt. Considering that I believe this character is still alive even in the movies made the last few years, it seems clear that he's going to survive several more climaxes of several more movies that should have obviously killed him. That's just standard slasher movie tropes for you.
But Dr. Loomis? He's a human being, plain and simple.
So how did he emerge from the explosion at the end of Halloween II with nothing more than a slight limp and a relatively modest scar on this face that seems to be only cosmetic in nature?
Well, folks, it appears that reboot logic and fan service logic was alive and well even in 1988. Loomis returned because they thought the presence of Pleasence in some way underpinned the success of the franchise.
And, spoiler alert, he's still alive at the end of Halloween 4, so we are certain to get at least one more movie with him.
I wanted to hate this movie. I really did. The fourth movie in any slasher series, especially series that had their origins in the 1980s (or late 70s in this case), are supposed to be terrible. Although I haven't seen them, I feel pretty confident that I could wave off the later Friday the 13th movies without a viewing, just knowing they are bad because they were made quickly and no one who was making them gave a damn.
Halloween 4 is not great, but I actually found it less egregious than Halloween II, which was poorly directed and silly. I'm not sure if Dwight H. Little is a better director than Rick Rosenthal, but he made a movie that I dislike a little less. And something happens at the end of this movie that redeems its otherwise unremarkable narrative. Arbitrarily, I won't spoil what that is.
I do of course have nits to pick.
1) Because Michael Myers must, it seems, always be motivated by killing his own flesh and blood, here he is going after a little girl named Jamie, played quite well, I thought, by actress Danielle Harris. She gets the fear down, which is what you need in a child performance in a horror movie. The character's name is a bit cheeky, as it is obviously inspired by Jamie Lee Curtis, who played Laurie Strode in the first two movies -- and is absent here except for appearing in a photograph.
Why does she appear in a photograph at all? Well because she's Jamie's mother, of course, now deceased.
Now, we know that Laurie Strode is not actually dead, because she's the main character in David Gordon Green's three most recent Halloween movies, which I'll get to sometime in the October 20s. And whether they were already setting that up for a long-term payoff, I don't know.
But I thought it was very curious that this movie tells us both Laurie and whoever Jamie's father was are both dead, leading young Jamie to be adopted, yet the movie tells us nothing about how that happened, and does not make it a significant portion of the story. It's almost like they poochied Jamie Lee because she didn't want to come back for this movie, abruptly ending the storyline of Laurie Strode, at least within the context of this movie's narrative. "Don't want to be in this movie? Fine, you're dead. You went back to your home planet and died on the way."
But begging of an explanation even more might be the fact that in the ten years since that traumatic 1978 Halloween, Laurie not only recovered enough to get into a serious romantic relationship, but also to have a child who is now seven. That's a lot of recovering to do between the end of 1978 and sometime in 1981.
2) Michael Myers' ability to show up in places he wouldn't otherwise be able to be, too soon after he was in a very different place, is equaled in absurdity only by his knowledge that Laurie had a young girl and this is where he can find her, when by all accounts he was lying in a sort of vegetative state in a prison hospital for all the years in between. That's slasher film logic for you.
The other details of the movie are a bit bland and are already fading from my memory.
There is quite a good chance that I will write a combined post on Halloween 5 and Halloween 6. But don't hold me to it.
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