Director: Dominique Othernin-Gerard
Cast: Donald Pleasance, Danielle Harris, Ellie Cornell, Beau Starr
Have I Seen it Before: When I wrote a story a few years bak about a boy terrified that the VHS boxes in the horror section of a rental store are out to get him, my memory of first eyeing this movie’s poster in a Homeland’s video rental department* that inspired it.
Did I Like It: Now, if only the film had lived up to that moment of undefined anxiety completely divorced from any context. Any virtues of Halloween 4: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1988) are washed away (literally, there’s a raging rapid and some waterfalls) in this film’s opening minutes.
Pleasance goes from camp hero to camp lunatic in this one, sadly paving the way for the work Malcolm McDowell will do in another fifteen years. Harris continues to equate herself well.
But every Halloween film that tries to immediately follow after the (sometimes mild) successes of their predecessors end up with even more problems in the end equation. If the concept of the Man in Black and the Thorn cult would have landed anywhere comprehensible, then at least the series might have landed in a campy mythological place. Here, things aren’t the worst yet, but they are grim portents of sequels and reboots to come.
Also, the mask is still unrelenting trash. I’d rather wear a real Silver Shamrock mask. I could write a whole book about these masks, but I don’t want that kind of evil in my life.
But that’s all fine, because at this point the film series would really have to have run out of steam, and there aren’t going to be any more Halloween movies to come.
If only.
*Long, long ago, grocery stores often had their own video rental stores in them. It was a wild time. Kids, ask your parents all about it.