Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

(On TV, October 2019) It doesn’t take two minutes in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers to rewrite the ending of the previous film in the series, audaciously inserting material in between the frames of the previous film in order to absolve its young heroine, juice up Myers’s upcoming presence and introduce a strong supernatural element in the whole thing. Which is almost inevitable when you run out of ideas. Indeed, other than the slightly better direction, what follows is pretty much the usual for that kind of movie: an unstoppable killer, an innocent victim (once again too young for this to be good fun), a small town’s graduating class of teenagers being murdered throughout the film. It’s all quite dull. There is a flicker of interest at the very end of the film as a mysterious force ensures the possibility of a sequel, but otherwise this is very familiar material—even the various hints of the supernatural aren’t capitalized upon, leaving an unfinished, unsatisfying impression. Granted, I’m no fan of the series nor of the slasher subgenre in general, so my grain of salt is not particularly sympathetic to the film from the beginning. Still, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers feels like one dull movie, barely worth watching unless, like me, you’re committed to filling out the blanks in the series.