Films That Witness Madness
review
HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS
Franchises are compulsory things for movie studios. Good revenue will immediately send a new installment into production regardless of the ever-weakening quality of the series. Fans of franchise films eat up the offerings with gleeful gluttony. These films consist of a formula they enjoy and a pattern they recognize. If they may seem redundant and unnecessary to those of us who don't see either the need or the worth in the franchising of anything, for fans they are yearly indulgences. These are films exclusively made for fans. Studios don't often do too much to change up the elements of franchise films because, when they do, they are often browbeaten into a quick retreat back to what came before. Having learned that lesson with the under-performing and roundly dismissed SEASON OF THE WITCH, it only made sense that if a resurrection of the HALLOWEEN franchise was to be done, it would have to bring back into the fold it's masked psychopath.
Taking a quick look at the release schedules of the other two big horror franchises, FRIDAY THE 13TH and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, reveals the biggest flaw in the notion of horror franchises. From 1980, with the release of the original FRIDAY, to 1986, Paramount had released a FRIDAY THE 13TH film every single year. FRIDAY THE 13TH, PART 7: THE NEW BLOOD came a year after, in 1988, with the last of the Paramount FRIDAY releases coming the following year. Eight films in ten years.
The NIGHTMARE franchise shows a similar release pattern, with only 1986 devoid of a release. Since the release of the original NIGHTMARE film in 1984, Freddy was at the box office four more times in the remainder of the 1980s. That's five NIGHTMARE films in six years. It's little wonder these films quickly became dull, lifeless and, especially in regards to the NIGHTMARE franchise, sad parodies of themselves. The 1980s are often referred to as Golden Years and heralded as the decade of greatness for the horror film. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Boundary pushing does not mix well with franchising and neither does innovation. When New Line shot Jason into space many fans howled in disapproval but, come on now, what the hell else is there to do with him? The longer these franchises exist, the closer that narrative dead-end gets. Long before Jason took Manhattan, the franchise was dead in the water. Yearly releases had blunted any fear that Jason might have dredged up and, as early as the third installment, Freddy had become as recognizable as Mickey Mouse, spewing one-liners like a poor man's Leno and even getting his own primetime television series. Like a never-ending insult to audience's collective intelligence, these films continued to stink up the theaters year in and year out, dragging horror into pure commercialism and turning once memorable villians into marketing machines.
So it was quite a surprise when Moustapha Akkad resurrected the HALLOWEEN franchise in 1988 and turned out a film that didn't fall into the humorous or splattery tactics of its contemporaries. HALLOWEEN 4 certainly has its fair share of logical lapses but it is one of the few franchise films that keeps its foot grounded in reality. No amount of words can explain away why people keep returning year-in and year-out to Crystal Lake despite the yearly slaughters that occur there. It boggles the mind. In HALLOWEEN 4, Michael Myers lies in a coma deep within the bowels of Ridgemont Federal Sanitarium, his murder spree seemingly long forgotten by the individuals living their lives in Haddonfield. Myers has been reduced to a sort of urban legend - kids at school call him, as Tommy did in the original film, "Boogeyman" - with only those whose lives have been changed by his crimes living with any sense of caution. Enough time has passed between the ending of HALLOWEEN 2 in 1978 and the beginning of HALLOWEEN 4 in 1988 for us to believe the lack of awareness when Michael comes home.
The strength of the franchise up to this point had been its characters. Unlike the vapid, sex-obsessed, and throughly braindead cardboard characters of the FRIDAY series, the characters in HALLOWEEN films have always had real personalities. Annie, Lynda, and Laurie looked like real teenagers and acted like real teenagers so it was easy to invest yourself in them. Having recently watched the majority of the >FRIDAY films, I was struck by how little I actually cared for any of the characters. In HALLOWEEN, HALLOWEEN 2, and HALLOWEEN 4, I never actually wanted to witness the death of any of the characters. I liked them and was therefore emotionally invested in them. That helped to make the suspense much more unbearable. What we have in HALLOWEEN 4 is a re-mix of the elements in the original film. We again have a young child, a babysitter, the obesessive Dr. Loomis and a disbelieving Sheriff and his doomed daughter. We even have a redux of the original films opening sequence, but more on that later.
HALLOWEEN 4 contains perhaps the best pair of protagonists in the history of 1980s horror. During his transfer from the Sanitarium to Smith's Grove, Myers overhears a conversation between the two doctors handling his transfer about a young niece he has back in Haddonfield. A quick thumb through the forehead and Myers is on the loose again. Having grown either unresponsive to or too expensive for the HALLOWEEN franchise, Jamie Lee Curtis had her character written out of the plot. Killed in a car accident, Laurie has left behind a young daughter, Jamie, now under the care of the Carruthers family. Having a child as the lead in your film is always a risk as few can accurately convey the range of emotions needed to carry a picture - which would be why you often see the same child actor over and over again - but, in the case of HALLOWEEN 4, this is not a worry. Danielle Harris, in the role of Jamie, is a true revelation, creating not only one of the few unannoying child characters to ever run screaming through a horror film but also one of the few believable. She ably carries the film and her presense gives the film an additional layer that was missing from the previous installments. Ellie Cornell, playing Rachel, the teenaged daughter of the Carruthers, completes the pair, likewise turning in a very strong performance. The film rests on their shoulders and they carry it with conviction and skill, helping lift the film over the heads of its contemporaries and help the audience.
Those logical lapses I spoke of earlier are the kind that normally crop up in horror films. Myers has the ability to move incredibly quickly, even though we always see him calmly walking. In the course of the film, we find that he has somehow managed to wipe out the whole police force - I'm not kidding, the only survivors are the Sheriff and a deputy - then walk clear across town and cut the power to the whole town by tossing poor Bucky into the lines. All in about an hour. Then he somehow manages to sneak out of a schoolhouse and get underneath a mans truck without anyone noticing him. He also decides, instead of simply coming out of the already broken attic window in order to pursue Jamie and Rachel across the roof, to scale the freaking house. Then, after Rachel takes a fall off the roof, he calmly shows up a split second later on ground level. Myers is apparently not only a homicidal killer but one hell of a power walker. Add to that the fact that neither Loomis or Myers would have been able to survive that explosion at the end of HALLOWEEN 2 - Loomis had a nasty scar, one toasted hand, and a limp and that's it - and you might think this film couldn't survive it's own gaffs.
Fortunately, director Dwight Little does a magnificent job. He's not as skilled a director as Carpenter but he's obviously a quick learner. Mixing a few Bava-esque lighting choices with the deep blues and blacks of Cundey's original lighting scheme, Little manages to recreate most of the original films atmosphere. He shows that, when he has to, he can create some incredibly tense scenes - the rooftop chase, Myers hanging onto the roof of the speeding car, the wonderful first excounter between Loomis and Myers at the gas station - that do justice to its namesake. If the film is a bit more contrived and lazy in its construction, it's certainly not his fault. Alan B. McElroy, the screenwriter, had only a brief eleven days to complete the screenplay before a scehduled Writer's Guild strike. That the film has any cohesion at all is a small miracle.
The ending to HALLOWEEN 4 is truly blood chilling. After witnessing Myers being riddled with bullets and then falling into an old mine shaft, Jamie and Rachel are returned home to their parents. Mrs. Carruthers takes Jamie upstairs for a bath and we are witness to a recreation of the original films opening, this time with Jamie stabbing her adopted mother repeatedly with a pair of scissors. Hearing the woman's scream, Loomis runs over to the stairwell only to see Jamie, dressed in her clown costume and covered in blood. His scream of utter terror and helplessness - perhaps only matched by Edward Woodward's exclaimations at the end of THE WICKER MAN - is the perfect coda for the film. It still, to this day, sends chills down my spine.
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