Ranking the "Halloween" Movies: #1 - "Halloween" (1978)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!! Also...duh.

#1 - Halloween (1978)

The night he'll always come home

Yep, you knew this was coming. From John Carpenter and Debra Hill comes the most simplistic, yet the most iconic slasher film of them all. In 1978, on a budget of $320,000 and with a cast & crew whose average age was no higher than 30, a little film by the name of Halloween was released to theaters and instantly became the highest grossing independent movie of all time, making returns of well over 10,000% (if I do percentage correctly, which I don't. So double check that number.)

Woah. That's a long way down...

The simple tale follows that of a young boy named Michael Myers. On Halloween night, 1963, six-year-old Michael Myers enters his home, takes up a butcher knife from his kitchen, slowly and creepily makes his way to his sister Judtih's bedroom and butchers her mercilessly. He is sent to Smith's Grove-Warren County Sanitarium and placed under the care of Dr. Samuel Loomis. Fifteen years later, on October 30th 1978, en route to escort Michael to court to be tried as an adult for the murder of his sister, Loomis and nurse Marion Chambers are attacked by Michael. Michael, now an adult, steals their car and escapes the Sanitarium. Loomis deduces that Michael is heading back to his hometown of Haddonfield and sets out to track him down. Meanwhlie, three high school students Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Lynda van der Klok (PJ Soles) and Annie Brackett (Nancy Loomis) exit school the following day on Halloween, 1978. Laurie, at occasional points during the day, sees a man in a white mask and mechanic coveralls looking at her from a distance, be it outside of her classroom window or from behind a hedge on the walk home with Annie. She even sees him in her backyard when she returns home that evening. That night, Laurie and Annie begin babysitting Tommy Doyle and Lindsay Wallace, respectively, while Dr. Loomis meets with Annie's father, Sheriff Leigh Brackett, and begins looking for Michael in the streets of Haddonfield. As Annie coordinates with Laurie to drop Lindsay off so she can meet with her boyfriend Paul, she gets in her car to go pick him up. From the backseat springs Michael, who slits her throat and kills her. Later, Lynda and her boyfriend Bob arrive at the Wallace house and seeing that Annie and Lindsay aren't home, they go upstairs to have sex. Bob goes downstairs to get more beer, but is impaled on the wall by Michael. Michael then goes upstairs and kills Lynda by strangling her with a phone chord while she's on the phone with Laurie. Laurie, who calls back and gets no answer, tucks the kids into bed and goes across the street. There, she finds Annie's body on the Wallace's bed with Judith Myers' tombstone, Bob hanging inside the close and Lynda tucked away in another closet. Michael appears and chases Laurie back across the street but she stabs him in the neck with a sewing pin. She then goes upstairs to tell Tommy and Lindsay that she killed him but Michael reappears. Laurie traps herself in a closet which Michael breaks into, but she pokes his eye out with a hangar and then stabs him in the chest with his own knife. She then goes and grabs the kids again and tells them to run down the street to call the police. They run outside and as they're screaming, Loomis looks inside the house and deduces that Michael may be nearby. He then goes inside the house to find Michael, who has risen again, attempting to strangle Laurie. Loomis shoots Michael six times and watches him fall out of a second-story window. Upon further inspection, Loomis looks down on the lawn and sees that Michael has disappeared into the night....

Stop! In the name of Love! I mean...Loomis.

Given what the sequels would later tell us and temporarily putting that out of mind, Halloween comes off as your basic tale of escaped mental patient who travels to a location to stalk random teenagers. The sequels would attempt to give him motives and a backstory, but back in the day, John Carpenter merely envisioned Michael as "evil incarnate". Nothing more than an unstoppable force in mechanic's overalls and a mask.

Speaking of the mask, I forget if I mentioned this previously or not, but Michael Myers's mask was cheaply acquired for the movie. The budget was a mere $320,000 mind you, so much of the props needed to either be store-bought or used out of the actors' personal belongings. Michael's mask was a two-dollar William Shatner Captain Kirk mask purchased from a hardware store. The hair was pulled and teased out, the face was painted a ghostly shade of white, and the eye-holes were widened. The expressionless face of a ghoul makes for the perfect personification when it's covering something that Loomis describes as absolutely "pure evil". A truly faceless evil.

In terms of Dr. Loomis's character, several comparisons can be made with the story of Moby Dick. Loomis himself can be described as Captain Ahab, obsessed with hunting the white whale, which is Michael Myers. Loomis is first introduced to us in the car on the way to transfer Michael to his sentencing. He's calm, but weary. He's well aware that Michael is close to being locked up forever but is anxious that something could go wrong at any moment. Loomis's obsession comes to a point when Michael escapes the sanitarium and returns to Haddonfield. Loomis knows full well Michael's apparent danger to the populace, but cannot find a single person who can believe him. Haddonfield's town sherrif, Leigh Brackett, is the only one that eventually begins heeding Loomis's warnings. Together with Loomis, he searches the town's streets at night while Michael stalks the three girls from the shadows. Loomis fights off Michael at the very end by shooting him six times, but to no avail. Michael escapes into the night anyway.

I seeeeeeee yoooooouu....

The movie's opening sequence made use of the steadicam, showing us Michael's first murder on Halloween night, 1963. Little Michael enters his parents' house, grabs a butcher knife, walks up the stairs and murders his sister while she's brushing her hair in front of a mirror. It's interesting because people think that entire opening shot was done in a single take. Not true. There are two cuts in the opening shot that turns it into three shots. The first cut is when Michael puts the mask on over his face, and then the second shot is when Michael whips around after having murdered Judith. Still though, the opening shot in and of itself perfectly sets the mood and lets the viewer know what they're in for. It's also one of the most memorable scenes in the movie because it's entirely from six-year-old Michael's point-of-view.

The film is notable because of its' lack of gore. Each of the kills are clean on screen with very little, if any, blood loss. Annie gets her throat slit? No blood. Bob gets pinned to a wall by a knife? No gore. Lynda gets strangled with a phone chord? Nothing. The movie was marveled for its simplicity, and films later on tried their best to emulate it at first. Then horror movies started to get gorier and gorier, with Friday the 13th going over the top most of the time.

The score of Halloween is triumphant. It's creepy, sets the mood for a night of chilling suspense, and was only composed in four days. The Halloween theme is one of the most replicated tracks played on pianos and keyboards. Carpenter's score was one of the first all synthesizer keyboard scores to be come so widely well-known. The theme song is written in a rare 5/4th signature, a rhythm John Carpenter learned from his father. The chase music when Michael begins stalking Laurie is one of my favorites because of its simplicity. Laurie's theme is my second-favorite, behind the movie's theme itself. Laurie's theme is totally apart of the season. Whenever you play Laurie's theme (sometime's called "Halloween 1978" on some soundtrack releases), it immediately puts your mind in the mindset that it's Halloween indeed. The leaves are orange, the air has a cool, crisp feeling to it, and there's a killer lurking around your town, unseen to your eyes.

Jamie Lee Curtis looks like she wants to strangle somebody

While I do have almost nothing but praise for the movie, I do have some complaints. The first and foremost being the acting. Nancy Kyes, who plays Annie, is a tremendously poor actress. She draws out all the wrong syllables in her dialogue and has almost no change in vocal octave, mood, or mannerisms. "I have a place for thaaaaat..." It cracks me up everytime. PJ Soles isn't bad, but she gives a pretty big bimbo-esque performance, including her excessive use of the world "totally". She has a memorable death scene when Michael strangles her with a phone chord, and her open shirt allows her breasts to flop around as she's being flung back and forth. It eventually comes off pretty laughable when Jamie Lee Curtis is the only one of the three delivering a worthy performance, and she's acting next to a barbie doll and a block of wood. You know what though? Somehow, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but it works. When I was growing up first watching these movies, Nancy Kyes's bad acting didn't hit me like it does today, so you tend not to notice it.

Three things make the first Halloween the most memorable and the greatest of the entire franchise; the score, the suspense and the mood. The sequels, the remake and the remake's sequel, love them or hate them, do what they can for the franchise but this one is the one that takes the cake. The Halloween franchise can be said to be one of the smarter horror film series' that came around that era of late 70's to early 90's. The first film itself is a classic to watch during the Halloween season. It kickstarted an entire subgenre of horror movies, it revolutionized the independent film market, it made a Hollywood icon out of Jamie Lee Curtis and John Carpenter, it set the standards for how suspense in movies should be paced, it raised the bar as a whole in creepy, moody storytelling. What more can I say? A legendary masterpiece.

So that's my ranking. Whether you liked it or hated it, I at least hope you learned something.

Ranking the "Halloween" Movies: #2 - "Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers" (1988)

Only three days from Halloween. Hopefully you're too scared by this point to even go to the bathroom on your own.

#2 - Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

I think the subtitle should've been "Here You Go, You Bunch'a Whiners."

After people were confused by the third installment in the franchise, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, producers decided that doing the creative thing would only confuse the already confused, so in an effort to make the Halloween franchise viable again, they went back to basics. In a production sense? No. In an ideological sense? Not even close. No, in a storytelling sense. They decided to shamelessly have Halloween 4 resurrect the character of Michael Myers, along with his psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Loomis, recycle the plot from the first film with minor changes, and shove it up the ass of American cinema in 1988. You know what though? It worked. My God, did it work. I make it sound like Halloween 4 was going to shit a chicken upon release, but instead, it was just what the producer's ordered.

Michael could double as a door-to-door pie cutter

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers was released in 1988, ten years after the original film. The story keeps up with that time frame. Set ten years after Michael's original masscare in Halloween and Halloween II, we come to find out that Michael has been in a coma since the explosion at the end of Halloween II, and now he's being transferred from one mental ward back to Smith's Grove under the care of Dr. Loomis. During the transfer, one of the EMTs mentions Michael's living niece, Jamie Lloyd. Michael immediately wakes up after a ten year rest, kills all those in the ambulance, and escapes into the night. Dr. Loomis is alerted by Michael's escape and learns that his old nemesis from ten years ago is back. He springs his chubby, disfigured ass into action and heads for Haddonfield to stop Michael before he can kill again. In Haddonfield, we find out Jamie Lloyd is the daughter of Laurie Strode (and presumably Jimmie Lloyd, the EMT from Halloween II) and has been adopted by the Carruthers family. Their daughter Rachel is Jamie's foster sister, and looks after her begrudgingly on Halloween night after babysitting plans for the Carruthers family fall through. Throughout Halloween during the day, Jamie begins seeing visions of her uncle coming to get her in various places, including her dreams and in the costume store. She must shrug it off real well, because that night she goes trick-or-treating with Rachel. Meanwhile, Loomis shows up in Haddonfield and commands new sheriff Ben Meeker to join him in hunting down Michael Myers. They scoff at first but soon learn of a break-in at Jamie's residence. Word begins to spread that Michael Myers has come back to town, leading a group of drunken hillbillies to saddle up, lock n' load, and go on a hunt for him. Loomis and Meeker eventually find Rachel and Jamie and take them into their custody. They hold up in Meeker's house, but Michael finds his way there. He kills Brady (Rachel's boyfriend), Kelly Meeker (Ben's daughter), and Deputy Logan (Ben's only living deputy after a police department massacre). He gives chase to Rachel and Jamie, who are eventually found by the drunken gun posse and are taken out of town. Surprise! Michael hitches a ride on the truck, kills a few of the hillbillies, but in the end is run over by Rachel in the truck. Later, the Haddonfield police department shows up and eradicates Michael in a hail of gunfire. Michael falls into a mine shaft that collapses inward, presumably crushing his bullet-riddled body. The sisters return home and Mrs. Carruthers runs a bath for Jamie, only to be murdered by an unseen assailant. Loomis, to his own horror, looks up the stairs and sees that Jamie, the little girl, is covered in blood and holding a bloody pair of scissors...

"Stop, in the name of Love--I mean, Loomis!"

The film's prevailing aspect is its tone and its cinematography. Every shot looks and feels beautiful. It's a very seasonal-appropriate movie for Halloween. There's scarecrows, pumpkins, trick-or-treating, costumes and everything in between. It's all represented in full force here. I'm not saying any of the previous films we've talked about so far failed to do so, but of all the times I've mentioned that a Halloween film feels like a Halloween movie, this film is the leading example. It's very tone appropriate and many of its exterior shots are beautiful.

The next thing that I love is the sense of post-apocalyptic living in Haddonfield. The film portrays Haddonfield as a town that has suffered and is doing its best to cope with the events of Halloween night ten years prior. This movie did a phenomenal job with incorporating almost an entirely new cast of characters, minus Loomis of course, to face Michael as he returns for a night of some senseless slaughtering of stupid kids having sex. Bringing back Laurie Strode and Sheriff Brackett would've robbed from the new characters. Loomis, thought, is one you can't omit. Of all of the Halloween/Halloween II night alumni to elect to bring back for another night of psychotic craziness, I'm glad they chose Donald Pleasence for another go as Samuel Loomis. I also love the feel of all of the discussions that relate to Michael Myers, Meeker's especially. Right off the bat, he knows who Loomis is and knows why he's back, but doesn't want to believe it. It isn't until the night starts unfolding that he realizes what he's up against and he comes to respect Loomis for coming back to the town to warn him.

Piling onto the awesome story sense and tone is the setting. Haddonfield suffers not only a power outage but a communications blackout. Haddonfield becomes totally isolated from civilization around it, leaving only those to inhabit the town left as the ones who can fight or possibly even kill Michael. It gives the sense that Jamie needs help to fend of Michael but she can't get any. Rachel's incapacitated by the roof, Loomis is thrown out of a window, Meeker get sidetracked going God-knows-where. Hell, it isn't until near the end of the movie where the highway patrol is brought into the picture. Michael Myers is so unkillable that you even need the state troopers. That is a badass motif for the movie.

Rachel, Jamie and the Badass Haddonfield Posse from Hell

While being a well-told piece of horror cinema, I do have a some continuity gripes, and they all have to do with Michael and Loomis. The first is Michael's mask. As I stated in the previous post regarding Halloween II, they didn't have access to the original mask so the art department had to make a new one. The one that they came up with looks pretty bad. It's entirely featureless and looks too neat. The hair's combed nicely, it lacks any facial structure and it looks too clean. Its a ridiculous thing to look at. Secondly, for being in a coma for ten goddamn years (that's a decade to you and me), Michael sure has beefed up quite a bit. Look at him when you watch the movie! He's built like a hockey player. In fact, according to IMDb, George Wilbur (who plays Michael in 4) wore hockey pads under the coveralls to make Michael look more menacing. Michael was in a coma for ten years! He should be a shriveled up prune of a man, not a fucking body-builder. Now thirdly...and, this is the big one...how in the name of fuck do Loomis and Michael survive the explosion at the end of Halloween II? This is why I blame people who hated Halloween III: Season of the Witch for this catastrophe of continuity. No matter what plot device you use, what explanation you give, or how much burn makeup you cake onto Loomis's face or Michael's arms and hands, there is NO WAY...NO. WAY... that Michael and Loomis survive that explosion. That was originally meant to kill them both, after all. According to IMDb again, the original opening for the movie in the script had a shot of Loomis being thrown from the explosion, showing how he survived. Did you not watch the end of Halloween II? There was nowhere to be thrown. Everything within a thousand feet of that operating room got blown to bits! Michael should've even have any flesh left on him the way he burnt up.

Alright, rant over. Continuity is a bitch to follow I understand, but at least either try a little harder, or ignore the fans like WWE and just do whatever the hell you wanna do with your sequels.

This was the first film in the franchise to have zero involvement from series co-creator John Carpenter. Carpenter wrote, directed and scored the first film, wrote and scored the second one, and just scored the third one. This is the first film where he stopped coming into work. So here, the music is done entirely by Alan Howarth. His opening theme for Halloween 4 is masterful. The entirety of the opening shot is superb. It perfectly sets the tone with glowing orange text on static shots of farm equipment decorated with Halloween stuff. It's just a droning musical accompaniment that makes it all worthwhile. You've got to watch it. It's something about this collection of decorations hanging from a tree and blowing in the wind that sets the mood. "Something's not right" comes into your mind, and "something bad is coming" stems from that. It's to die for (pun intended).

SURPRISE! Jamie did it.

I'll end this review with two of my favorite scenes. The first is when Loomis stops at a gas station/mechanics shop for assistance and finds that Michael has killed the mechanic. What follows is a glorious exchange with Loomis and his former whacko student. Loomis actually pleads with Michael not to go back to Haddonfield, because he knows what's coming and knows that Michael probably can't be stopped. This is confirmed later on when Loomis is leaving Meeker's house and utters the line "...maybe nobody knows how to stop him." My other favorite scene is when Loomis gets picked up by the alcoholic reverend. Mostly because he's basically the same character in a way. Both Loomis and the reverend are hunting evil in a way. Plus, in every scene he's in Loomis is normally the one talking. In this scene, he's the audience. The reverend in the Loomis in this scene, and Loomis is the listener.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, in my opinion, is a near-masterpiece. It's got some continuity flaws, sure, but nothing so big and drastic that they hold the movie back...okay, minus the Halloween II explosion survival shit. Still, the new cast of characters, especially Rachel, are all done really well, and hats off to Danielle Harris for handling all this when she was just eight or nine years old as Jamie. Loomis gives some of his most quotable lines in 4, and Meeker does really well as the new sheriff. So much so that you almost forget about Brackett. Since they chose to abandon the anthology idea and rehash the Michael Myer storyline, this was the best possible result. I love Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers a lot. It's a classic.

Spoiler Alert: Next one's Halloween.

Ranking the "Halloween" Movies: #3 - "Halloween II" (1981)

Oh man, we're only six days and three posts from the end! Well, two more posts if you don't count this one.

#3 - Halloween II (1981)

Michael Myers is now your HMO 

Halloween was a huge success when it was released in 1978. The chilling tale of a psychopath that escapes from a mental institution to stalk babysitters? It seems like a cliche nowadays. Back then, everybody loved it, and because it was the most successful independent film ever released in theaters at its time, it was almost guaranteed that a sequel would have to come about. Flash forward to 1980 and Friday the 13th hits the scene. Friday the 13th has a bit of a similar history with Halloween, in that the first film in the franchise was made on a shoestring budget, featured all-but-one no-name actor/actress, and featured an unstoppable/unseen serial killer killing teenagers. Where they differed was that in Halloween, the killer came to them. In Friday the 13th, they go to the killer. Classic. Well, no more than a year later, Halloween finally got its sequel.

"Michael, where did you stab me?"

Billed as "More of the Night He Came Home", Halloween II picks up precisely where the first film left off. Michael Myers, the escaped mental patient, was shot six times by his psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Loomis and fell out of a second-story window. Upon investigation, Loomis discovers that Michael's gone. Loomis then returns to the neighborhood streets in the desperate search for Michael, believing him to be too wounded to get very far. Little does he know that Michael is alive and well and has merely moved a couple houses down to steal a knife from an elderly couple and kill their young neighbor. Elsewhere, Laurie Strode has been taken to Haddonfield General Hospital to heal from her injuries sustained in the previous film. It is there she is stalked by Michael, as Michael returns to move in for the kill by taking out the overnight hospital staff one-by-one to get to Laurie. Loomis, meanwhile, is ordered back to Smith's Grove by nurse Marion Chambers, the nurse from the previous film. On the ride back, he learns from Marion that Laurie Strode is Michael Myers' baby sister that was adopted by the Strode family. Seeing no other alternative, Loomis hijacks the squad car escorting back to Smith's Grove and heads back to Haddonfield General. What ensues is a nail-biting final stand in an operating room that sees Laurie and Loomis each deal their damage to Michael; Loomis shooting him five more times and Laurie shooting both of his eyes out. Loomis then fills the room with oxygen released from nearby tanks, urging Laurie to run. In an end-all ending, Loomis lights a lighter, telling Michael "it's time", triggering and explosion that immolates them both and torches half of the hospital. The next morning, November 1st, Laurie is put in the back of an ambulance, and remembers the image of her brother's face burning away in the fire...

Let me start off by saying that Halloween II got the mood for Halloween night spot on. This movie, along with Halloween and Halloween 4, nail the atmosphere to a T. Nothing feels better than watching this film late on Halloween night with all of the lights off, a jack o'lantern burning on your front porch and some popcorn and an ice cold beer. Halloween II, with its grainy footage and sonic synthesizer soundtrack, is one of the perfect horror films to watch in October, if not on Halloween night itself.

"Does this wig look too 'wiggy' or naw?"

Donald Pleasence is back for his second round as Dr. Loomis. His determination to catch and/or kill Michael before he can cause any harm grows more and more desperate as the night goes on. With each and every new event, Loomis becomes more overwhelmed but more determined at the same time and Pleasence conveys this growing sense of urgency outstandingly. There's a scene where Loomis thinks he sees Michael down the road and even pulls out his gun in front of a mother and her group of trick-or-treaters to shoot. The Michael impersonator gets smashed in between a squad car and a van, going up in flames. Loomis literally rubs his eyes in fatigue at trying to hunt Michael down and begin denied time and time again. I think it perfectly builds to the end of the film where Loomis detonates the operating room in the hospital with him and Michael inside. Loomis is finally like "Fuck this. We're both going up!" and BOOM! As I stated in the Halloween III: Season of the Witch post, Halloween and Halloween II were supposed to be the only two films in the Michael Myers storyline. So the ending for this film was really supposed to kill Michael and Loomis and put an end to the Haddonfield story arc. So, having Loomis sacrifice himself to kill Michael put a fitting cap on the whole night. Michael even fakes like he's still alive, walking out of the operating room completely engulfed in flames. However, before it can be played up any, he just collapses on the floor and finally burns to death. It would've been great to leave it at that, but considering just how awesomely done Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers was done...ah we'll get there soon.

The soundtrack has the creepiest rendition of the Halloween theme that I've ever heard and it couples well with the opening of the movie. The opening shows the last little bit of Halloween, with Loomis coming to Laurie's rescue and shooting Michael six times. Michael stumbles back out of the window and falls onto the front lawn. Loomis then goes downstairs and looks, seeing Michael's outline on the front lawn. He feels around in the grass and finds some of Michael's blood. A neighbor comes out from his house and asks "what's going on?", to which Loomis responds "Call the police! Tell the sheriff I shot him! Tell him he's still on the loose!". The neighbor walks up to Loomis and says "Is this some kind of joke? I've been trick-or-treated to death tonight." Loomis looks at him, Michael's blood literally on his hand, and tells the neighbor that he "doesn't know what death is." The new rendition of the Halloween theme chimes in right at that moment, letting both the audience and Loomis know that the night is not over. Halloween was just the beginning, and Halloween II has more in store for the night he came home.

One piece of trivia is that this is the only Halloween film to reuse the same mask as another film. Halloween had that two dollar William Shatner mask that was altered by the art department to look as scary as possible. It was literally that same mask that was used in Halloween II. The mask was left under Debra Hill's bed in between films, collected dust and yellowed because of her smoking, and was brought back out for use in Halloween II. Every subsequent film (excluding Halloween III: Season of the Witch, of course) used a different mask. Dick Warlock, the man who portrays Michael in this film, got to keep the mask from production. He literally owns the same mask that started it all. How cool is that?

"Look down my gun barrel and see your future."

The film is notable because it took an extra step forward in terms of adult material. The original Halloween film was notorious for its lack of blood and gore. Most of Michael's kills in the first film were very clean. He was very polite ot the families whose homes he intruded in. No leftover bloodstains or anything. Halloween II, on the other hand, is where Michael decided he didn't give a shit anymore about clean kills. He pushes a woman's head into a boiling tub of water to the point where her skin peels off (surprisingly not burning Michael's hand flesh), he repeatedly stabs people with scalpels, and there's even a scene where a head nurse is leaked of her blood all over a floor, leading the male EMT Jimmie Lloyd (Laurie's love interest and Jamie's father) slips and falls in. It's overall a gorier film. This was a response to Friday the 13th, where John Carpenter did uncredited reshoots for more gore to make the film more intense for harder-to-scare audiences, as he felt the original cut of Halloween II was too tame and lacked much blood.

There isn't much else to note. The atmosphere of a hysterical town is a fun tone to set the story in, and it would be reused in Halloween 4 when Michael returns to Haddonfield and nobody knows what to do, but again, we'll talk about 4 soon enough. The police officers are just as lost as Loomis is in scrambling to find Michael and following his trail of bloodshed, hoping to stop him. The desperation, the tension, everything; all superb.

Halloween II is another example of how sequels are done correctly. Hollywood nowadays is pretty much ruining the ideas of sequels because now, stories are too big to contain in one film. Halloween was a story that could've been left alone on that cliffhanger ending, but Halloween II gave the viewers of the first film some fantastic closure. The acting, story, setting, and tone all kickstart and take off directly off of the momentum of the end of the first film. It's already extremely tense when the sequel starts, being a continuation. It just builds and builds, higher and higher, waiting for the epic conclusion of this night from hell. Most people just make a point to watch Halloween on Halloween. Me? I make a point to watch both of them. Halloween and Halloween II make for a great double feature on the spookiest night of the year.

What is with the spooky skeleton face on the front of the pumpkin on the posters? Could they not come up with anything more creative? It's on part with Microsoft Office WordArt. Lol.

Ranking the "Halloween" Movies: #4 - "Halloween III: Season of the Witch" (1982)

Nine days away from the Hallogivingmas. So let's continue without ranking/countdown.

#4 - Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

The Black Sheep of the franchise, and it's one of the smarter sheep.

Imagine that they made Iron Man with Robert Downey, Jr. in 2008. It comes out to theaters, it's a smash hit, everyone loves it; it's time to make a sequel then, right? Keep the series going with Iron Man 2 in 2010. Same deal; Robert Downey, Jr. as Iron Man, only this time, the story has a conclusive ending that sees Tony Stark sacrifice himself to kill the enemy, effectively ending both lives. Boom. It comes out, it's a pretty big hit still, everyone likes it; so it's time to make a third one! Out, in 2013, comes Iron Man 3, and instead of Tony Stark, it features some divorce attorney named Steve fighting to keep his children in his custody whilst simultaneously training for his corporate office's big "iron man" triathlon in an effort to prove to his passive son that he's worth the time and effort to bond over.

"Yes, officer? I'd like to order a murder...I mean...pizza."

Sounds pretty dumb, right? Well, in that scenario, yes. In this one, not so much. You see, Halloween II in 1981 was produced to cap off the Haddonfield, Michael Myers and Laurie Strode story that was introduced in '78 with Halloween. The definitive ending that was presented was that Loomis blows up Michael and himself in an operating room filled with oxygen released from tanks. Loomis lights a match and BOOM! He and Michael go up in flames. Michael teases that he's still alive by walking out of the inferno, but collapses and burns to death anyhow. Believe it or not, that was supposed to be it! Yeah, John Carpenter and Debra Hill did not want Michael Myers to start getting treated like some gimmicky slasher film villain that couldn't die, I guess. They wanted to kill off Michael Myers and Dr. Sam Loomis, so they did. You can't get much more "end-all" than a fucking explosion.

The plan then was to continue the Halloween franchise in a very interesting way. They wanted to turn the franchise into a horror-anthology series. Each film following Halloween II was going to tell a different Halloween-themed story with each sequel, maybe even doing more two-parters like Halloween and Halloween II. So, that's why Halloween III: Season of the Witch is what it is. It follows the story of Dan Challis, an emergency room doctor who cares for Harry Grimbridge, a man who was attacked on the side of the road by a mysterious figure in a car. That night, while in Dan's care, a mysterious intruder enters the hospital and kills Harry before immolating himself in his car in the parking lot. What follows is an investigation with Harry's daughter Ellie that leads Dan to the town of Santa Mira, California and the Silver Shamrock Novelties factory. Local townsfolk inform Dan that Conal Cochran is the reason for the prosperity in the town. During the night, Ellie is kidnapped by men dressed in suits and taken to the Silver Shamrock facility. There, Cochran reveals his master plan: to murder millions of children on Halloween night. Using remote sensors in his company's masks, he plans to release flesh eating creatures via a signal from a Silver Shamrock commercial onto the children's faces to eat them alive. Cochran reveals he wants to take Halloween back to its sacrificial roots of witchcraft and murder, starting with the children and young adults who wear his masks. The men in suits are revealed to be androids built and operated by Cochran and the Silver Shamrock Novelties company. The movie ends with Dan being attacked by Ellie, now an android, and making his way to a local gas station. There, he calls the local TV station to cut the commercials before they kill millions of kids. One of the commercials stays on too long despite his pleading leaving him to watch helplessly as he screams into the phone "STOP IT!"

The masks produced by Silver Shamrock

Halloween III is very weird. Let's start off by saying that. When they wanted to distance the movie from the established universe, they couldn't have succeeded any better. Nothing about this movie makes any remote connection to the previous films except the scene where the original Halloween plays on a TV. The concept of taking Halloween back to its sacrificial roots by plotting the murder of millions of children on Halloween night is a fun plot, despite its morbid nature. The whole movie just reeks of some kind of story you'd find in a 50's science-fiction magazine that has a horror twist in it.

The acting is part hokey, part not. Tom Atkins does great as Dan Challis, moving to discover the mystery of Silver Shamrock Novelties company and fighting the androids that kidnapped Ellie. He genuinely goes from just an outsider looking in to being the guy who can stop all of this. His performance comes to a point at the end. The Halloween III cliffhanger ending is one of the best cliffhanger endings I've ever seen. Challis finds himself at a gas station/mechanic's shop on the phone with the TV networks, pleading them to kill the commercials before they can kill any children. The acting, his panicked and determined state of mind, is played out flawlessly. His sense of urgency is peaked when the commercials start playing. One-by-one, his pleading works as the networks kill commercial-after-commercial on different channels. Suddenly, one channel stays playing. "The third channel" won't stop playing the commercial. The kids who entered the gas station with their Silver Shamrock masks on watch it in awe, as Dan is in the background begging for the channel to be cut off. He screams "Stop it!" over and over again into the phone, and the audience is left to wonder whether or not the channel couldn't be shut off...or if the networks were in on Silver Shamrock's planned massacre. He screams into the phone one last desperate "STOP IT!" presumably as the children start dying in front of him. Very marvelously done. The ending is superb, and by my far my favorite part of the movie.

Silver Shamrock Novelties

Conal Cochran is a creepy guy. He's also one of the greatest horror movie villains I've ever seen. He's well played by the late Dan O'Herlihy, who would go onto play the lead board member "The Old Man" in RoboCop and RoboCop 2. His speech whilst talking to the captured Challis is chilling. The man who wants to take Halloween back to the roots of burning witches at the stake and killing innocent people by sacrificing them to evil demons is scary as hell, and the magnitude of such a plan is conveyed excellently with his dialogue. "The festival of Sowan. The last great one took place over three thousand years ago when the hills ran red with the blood of animals and children. Sacrifices." He proclaims at one point in the film that "Halloween will be a very busy day for him" which seems like a simple phrase but is spooky in its own right.

That Silver Shamrock commercial is cheesy but brilliant. The music drones in your head as you watch the scene where Buddy Jr. is wearing his pumpkin mask watching the commercial in his room. You watch as the mask melts away and flesh-eating creatures get unleashed inside it on the boy's skull, feeding slowly and painfully as he dies in front of the TV. The music keeps playing as his parents both are killed by a rattlesnake that comes out of the mouth of the mask's remains. Challis and Cochran both look on in different ways as this happens. Cochran is an evil son of a bitch, and that commercial that he uses to kill people with his masks as tools is fucking awesome.

Whaddya mean I gotta watch House of 1000 Corpses?

Now, we get to the elephant in the room. Please bear with me here as this part will be kind of an elitist rant moreso than a review. *Ahem*. Halloween III: Season of the Witch gets too much hate for not enough creative reasoning. Why? Well, it had a lot of potential with a great story and a brilliant cast when it was released, but nope. People wanted Michael Myers and were confused when Halloween III didn't have him in it. People wanted the same old thing over doing something original. Halloween wasn't made to be as recyclable and redundant as Friday the 13th, and this "horror anthology" idea should've taken off. But because people wanted the same old shtick of a serial killer that comes back, kills people, only to "die" at the end, Halloween III suffered upon release and continues to suffer. Horror audiences today seem to just blindly follow what they hear or what they want to hear and ignore this one entirely. Even when it got released with the Halloween Blu-ray boxset where some product reviews said that the box set "came with Halloween III for some reason" or "somehow had the balls to include Halloween III." Excuse me, reviewers of Blu-ray products, but in the interest of a spooky storytelling, a great plot, classic scenes and excellent acting, you're pointing your fingers at the wrong movie. Did none of you even watch Halloween II (2009)? You're telling me this movie out of all of them tarnishes the franchise? It isn't even connected to the same goddamn story! How does this tarnish the franchise?! You want to watch the movie that ruins the franchise, Halloween II (2009) is the one you're looking for. Halloween III: Season of the Witch did nothing wrong but try and tell a completely brand-new story. People, I guess, were and still are unfamiliar with the concept of an anthology series. People who love Tales from the Crypt hate Halloween III and it makes zero (ZERO) sense. Of course, if the anthology series idea continued we would've never gotten the greatness that is Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers so it's a mixed blessing.

So there, take it and leave it. Halloween III: Season of the Witch, in my opinion, is the fourth best Halloween movie. It's more suspenseful than Halloween: Resurrection, a lot smarter than Halloween 5, even creepier (in the right sense) than Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, feels more like the October-Halloween season than Halloween H2O, and...is just eons superior to Halloween II (2009). It's dark, well-paced, original, not-too-long, and masterfully portrayed. The characters are all well-acted, the music by Carpenter and Howarth is glorious, some scenes are cinematic classics, and the ending is one of the best endings to any movie in the history of cinema. Ever since high school, I've made a point to watch this at least once every Halloween, and with perfect reason.

(View this kick-ass ending here).

Now go watch Halloween II (2009) and learn which one these movies ACTUALLY sucks balls.

Ranking the "Halloween" Movies: #5 - "Rob Zombie's Halloween" (2007)

I hope you enjoyed that little five-day break. We're a mere twelve days from the O-Unholy Night itself. Best get on with the top-five of the countdown!

#5 - Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007)

This movie gave more "fucks" than I did.

After the oh-so-glorious entry Halloween: Resurrection in 2002, the studio had other sequels in the works. For a while, there was Halloween: Retribution, which would star the same actor as Michael Myers and take place a year later. That was canned in favor of Hall9ween, which was immediately dumped after negative screenplay results. Then, some egghead at Dimension Films said "Hey! Let's just remake the first movie! It'll be a shoe-in to be glorious!" Each of the other Dimension studio executives agreed, puffed on Cuban cigars and lit hundred dollar bills just for the hell of it in agreement.

Michael looks like the personification of botched plastic surgery

That's just my interpretation of the events, but they probably went something like that. Tasked with breathing new life into the Halloween franchise was renowned shock rocker Rob Zombie, known for his kick-ass '98 solo album Hellbilly Deluxe and his film The Devil's Rejects in 2005; but he's also the numbnuts responsible for House of 1000 Corpses, so kind of a mixed blessing. Zombie received blessing from series originator John Carpenter, who told him to "do whatever he can to make it his own." Make it his own, he most certainly did.

Because we'll go over Halloween 1978 in due time, I won't necessarily go through the movie's plot. The movie is split into two parts, the backstory/prequel, and the present day/remake. It does make many, many additions to Michael Myers's backstory and gives us a glimpse into his life as a child growing up. Which is an interesting route to take. However, the movie insists on presenting piles and piles of evidence that Michael Myers grew up in a broken home. Like, it takes the fact that he did so and buries you underneath it. The house is rundown, his family's poor, his sister's a slut, his step-dad or mom's boyfriend is just the worst person ever imaginable, he's bullied at school, he tells his principal "fuck you", he kills cats and dogs; saying there are clues is an understatement. Clues have to be found, not blatantly thrown in your face. What Zombie did to make the remake his own thing was to make the audience sympathies with Michael over the growing up in a broken home. It made him a broken character that Zombie wanted the audience to relate to, minus the whole "killing people" part. You root for Michael when he beats the bully to death with a tree branch, slits the throat of Ronnie, whacks Judith's boyfriend's head with an aluminum baseball bat, and they even made Judith a shitty character enough to where you root for Michael to kill her too. Michael Myers is the main focus of the backstory, and the remake's story. I'm not necessarily saying that's a problem, but John Carpenter once said the main point behind Michael Myers was that the audience was never supposed to relate to him or sympathize with him. I can see how this was the biggest attempt by Zombie to make the premakequel his own work, but any fan of Halloween is going to have a hard time swallowing the pill that Michael is the "hero" of the film, or at the very least the first half of the film. The nurse is mean to him, let's have him brutally shank her with a fork in the cafeteria. Judith was rude to him, let's stab her to death! Ronnie was a fucking ass, let's slit Ronnie's throat and watch him bleed out. Michael is not necessarily the bad guy in this movie. He's an anti-hero; somebody who does heroic deeds violently or whatever the cost.

"Is that what I think it is, Dr.?" "Yes, my dear. Old Spice."

Now, moving past that, the movie as a whole is not that bad .In fact, it's still entertaining and I actually do make a point to watch it during October season. Malcolm McDowell takes over the role of Dr. Sam Loomis and does a great job. His original dialogue is eerie and spine-tingling, and the recycled dialogue from Donald Pleasence in '78 is delivered in an entirely different manner. Some of the recycled dialogue seems a bit hokey when uttered by McDowell, but I think he's a huge highlight of this film. Sure, just like in Zombie's Halloween II he's a book writer, but he's not quite a prick yet. That will come later. Across the board, Brad Douriff is fun as Leigh Brackett. He too makes the performance his own, as Zombie integrated Brackett moreso into the backstory of Michael Myers and made him a bigger piece of the folklore rather than being "just the town sheriff that happens to help". My only gripe is that he he disappears from the climax after they find Annie bleeding in the house, leaving it up to Loomis to save Laurie. Speaking of Laurie, there's the three main girls of the story. Laurie's now played by Scout-Taylor Compton. She takes Laurie from being a shy bookworm to an eccentric bookworm and makes her no longer enjoy babysitting as she did in '78. She's a different character, but the same character. It's weird, I don't know, I just know she's my favorite of the three girls. Danielle Harris returns to the franchise as Annie Brackett, Leigh's daughter and Laurie's friend. Having played Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4 and 5, it's weird to see her in a different role. Especially when her character is 17 and she's 29, but I digress. She takes Annie's character from being a bitch who can't act to a bitch who can. It's a great trade off and I think she's an improvement. My only gripe with her is we never got Danielle Harris's take on "Hey jerk. SPEED KILLS." Then there's Lynda, played by Kristina Klebe. She's...there. Pretty forgetful. In fact, she's only memorable because she shows full-frontal and full-rear nudity. Other than that, she's just...there. One of my favorite characters is actually Deborah Myers, played by Sheri-Moon Zombie, Rob's wife. Her character arc is pleasing and she's very well done. I take my proverbial hat off to her. She's someone who's down on her luck raising a slut, a psycho and a newborn on a stripper's salary dating a complete dickhead in a broken-down, impoverished home. We sympathize with her when Michael goes apeshit and kills Judith and Ronnie, basically leaving her alone with the baby Laurie. Her death is very iconic, simply because it's sad and I felt pretty down after watching her take her own life. She was perfectly cast and portrayed. She was also perfectly ruined in Halloween II two years later, but that's a horse of a different color. Ba-dum tss...

Spy Kids Game Over indeed...

The movie is almost too adult to contain. I know horror movies usually are, but the amount of nudity in this movie is just tipping the scales of unsettling, even for someone as immature as myself. There's three sex scenes in the movie, four if you count the rape scene. There's Judith and her boyfriend, Lynda and Bob, and then Annie and Paul. Breasts in all three. Don't watch with your parents or you'll/they'll be scarred for life. Guarantee the living room freezes in a state of awkward confusion. On top of that, as you'd expect, the blood and gore is far over-the-top. It's about as bad as Halloween II (2009), but here the deaths are simple and down-to-Earth. Oh, except the fact where the kid from Spy Kids gets fucking massacred by a tree branch barrage, but I digress. Nobody's getting stabbed repeatedly or getting their heads smashed into a mirror over and over again. There is no shortage of blood, however. Ronnie getting his throat slit is unsettling. Judith's ugly boy toy gets his head smashed in with an aluminum bat. Many characters who get stabbed but don't die bleed profusely from the wounds and their mouths. The fake blood budget is a little bit higher than "a few bottles of it'. There's blood and gore everywhere. Just like Lynda's breasts. Everywhere.

Guys, quick! Look like the photographer just ruined our conversation

So as I stated earlier, the movie's split into two acts. The first act is all Zombie and it's where he got ot shine. The entirety of the first half is basically the first five minutes of the original film. The only thing from Zombie's film that carries over to Carpenter's is Judith's murder. Everything else was conceived by Zombie and feels very original. It adds to the folklore and makes the characters we were introduced to in '78 more vibrant on screen. We know more about them and develop greater connections with them. Once Deborah kills herself, the movie rapidly switches gears to John Carpenter's Halloween. You start seeing scenes replicated straight up, like when Michael is watching Laurie from across the street, when Michael appears from behind a hedge to watch the girls, when Loomis shows up Smith's Grove to investigate Michael's escape. All of it feels weirdly familiar. However, in touch with Zombie's conceived universe, some of the remade Carpenter scenes feel out of place or don't serve the overall scope of the story well at all. The key example is the graveyard scene. In Carpenter's movie, the graveyard scene was essential in that it let Loomis know that Michael had indeed "come home" to "visit his sister". In the Zombie scene, it serves no purpose other than to 1) pay homage to Carpenter and 2) give Zombie regular Sid Haig something to do. Other than that, serves almost no purpose to Zombie's story piece. Why would Loomis go to the cemetery?

The music is marvelously tributed by Tyler Bates. Bates took all of the original motifs from Carpenter's original score and gave them a modern-day sprucing up. His recomposed Halloween theme is chilling, pays homage to original tune, and updates itself for modern audiences all at once. Great fun to listen to! Some of the other musical queues are hit-and-miss, but mostly hit. The inclusion of Kiss's "God of Thunder" needs no introduction. It's hugely known that Rob Zombie is a huge fan of that song, even covering it with his band White Zombie. I also like the inclusion of "Love Hurts", by Nazareth. Touching in the scene its played in.

All in all, Rob Zombie's Halloween is a mixed concoction of weird. It's not as weird as Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers; it's weird on a completely different level. Half of it feels like a Rob Zombie exploitation movie, and the other half feels like a Halloween movie. Still, it's at least worth a watch to see a different take on the story that started it all. Zombie takes the Loomis, Laurie, and Brackett characters and gives them very interesting spins. Michael may be hit-or-miss with people in this one, but at least the atmosphere brings to life that charm of the autumn October Halloween feel. Zombie did just what John Carpenter had suggested; he made it his own. For better, or for worse.

"That was actually surprisingly good. I can't wait to see the sequel!" - What we all stupidly thought.

Ranking the "Halloween" Movies: #6 - "Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later" (1998)

It's a mere seventeen days to Halloween 2016, and our countdown/ranking of the Halloween movies (again, in my opinion you opinionated extremists) continues! Also, I meant to post this yesterday.

#6 - Halloween H2O: Twenty Years Later (1998)

Michael Myers gets his ass kicked as Laurie goes apeshit.

*DISCLAIMER*. This is the Halloween movie I've seen the least. Prepare for kind of a light review. Apologies.

Now we come to when the Halloween franchise got even more chronologically confusing. Halloween H2O (stylized as H20 for the twentieth anniversary of the franchise) is the seventh film in the series. The producers felt that there was no bouncing back from Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers with a sequel that could even appear semi-logical, so they abandoned that whole storyline and started fresh. That's right, Halloween H2O is named as a sequel to 1981's Halloween II, ignoring all the events from Halloween 4 to Curse in the process. Jamie Lloyd, Rachel Carruthers, Tia's silly ass, and the whole cult of Thorn; gone from continuity. They never happened. Why? Because series co-icon Jamie Lee Curtis decided to return for the film as Laurie Strode, which was unprecedented as Jamie was a huge success at the time. She was calling for John Carpenter to even return to write and direct the film, which ultimately never came to be.

Telegram for Mrs. Strode!

The movie opens with an older Marion Chambers, the nurse and Sam Loomis's feminine cohort the first two Halloween films. Loomis died in between II and this film, apparently ALSO surviving the explosion at the end of II but dying before the events of this film anyway. In real life, Donald Pleasence had passed away prior to this film being made (hell, Curse technically wasn't even done yet). Marion finds that someone has been in her house and has stolen her file on Laurie Strode. I may have missed the part where she's allowed to keep files on other people, but I digress. Marion realizes that it was Michael Myers who was in her home, who kills her next door neighbor before killing her and going off to find his baby sister. Pretty strong opening and eerie opening to the movie, not going to lie. Meanwhile, Laurie (who's surprisingly kind of bitter about the whole ordeal on Halloween night in '78) moved to California under the name "Keri Tate" and had a son named Josh Hartnett, who's going under the moniker of "John Tate". The last time she saw her brother Michael, he was burning to a crisp after the hospital explosion at the end of II. She runs a boarding school for preppy weirdos who like to dress alike and study poorly, her son included. Together with a security guard played either seriously or ironically by LL Cool J (I still haven't decided), most of the class prepares for a field trip to Yosemite National Park. John, however, decides to stick around with his girlfriend, 90's girl #1, and party it up at school. Too bad his deadbeat uncle Michael has other arrangements, and invades the school grounds in search for Laurie. Laurie initially is terrified at her brother's return, especially when they come face-to-face in the glass circle in the door. However, soon, Laurie's had enough. Twenty years of frustration, twenty years of hiding, twenty years of being afraid, Laurie's at her wit's end. She decides to step up and fight Michael once and for all.

That final battle between Laurie and Michael that goes all over the school is a ball-buster. It's balls-to-the-wall revenge for Laurie. She throws literally everything at Michael. Michael gets his ass kicked by his sister. He takes an axe chop, gets hit with a fire extinguisher, has knives thrown at him, gets stabbed a few times, falls through a table, and at the end of it all, gets his head chopped off. That's right, this movie tried to definitively end the entire series! Basically, after Michael is loaded into the ambulance, you'd think the movie's going to have a nice, calm ending like the other films that made you think Michael was dead. No! Laurie's not convinced! She's not having it! She hijacks the ambulance at gunpoint and drives it off into the night. Surprise, surprise, Michael's not dead. He wakes up in the back of the ambulance and ambushes Laurie, causing her to crash and go off an ridge road and down a hilly slope. The ambulance crashes against a tree, pinning Michael to it. It's seriously the worst shape we've seen him in and the most defenseless he's ever been. During what feels like a moment of pity, Laurie reaches her hand out to him and almost takes his hand, but in realizes that she must finally put the evil down for good and chops his fucking head off. With one swing of the axe, off with Michael's noggin. It seriously can't get any more end-all than that. Except if you read my Halloween: Resurrection review, it can. (Read it here).

They both look constipated.

So, that was lightly touching on the plot. Of course, there's still more to say other than the plot because this movie's riddled with random tidbits. First off, Josh Hartnett. This was the same year as The Faculty and Josh was slowly working his way up to becoming a major Hollywood star. The funny thing to me is that in this movie and in The Faculty, Josh Hartnett looks exactly the same. Even his hairstyle, the goofy messy lump of fuzz that most slackers in Hollywood utilize, is the same. Stupid little things like that are funny to me, I guess. A fun little tribute is Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis's mother and the star of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, who has a supporting role as Norma. There's even a scene that tributes Psycho directly, when she walks up to her blue car, which even has the same license plate, to a small musical piece recycled from Psycho.

Like I said, the biggest thing about this movie and what made it ignore the events of 4 through Curse and be a sequel to II is the fact that Jamie Lee Curtis returned from the stardom of Hollywood to the role that made her famous. It must've been an odd feeling. A major Hollywood star returning to a small-time role that made her famous is truly humble and, as you'd expect, she did a fucking phenomenal job slipping right back into character. This time, Laurie's much different. She hasn't seen Michael since the catastrophe on Halloween night in Haddonfield twenty years prior, She's initially very anxious and weary that Michael may not be dead and may be coming back soon. When she sees him roaming around Haddonfield in her visions she is initially terrified. By the end, Laurie's pissed off that Michael has been killing her students and threatening her son. She flips out! She's not afraid anymore! She's ready to whoop some ass, and the entire end chase/battle through the school proves it What Jamie wanted to happen was a Halloween anniversary homecoming, that is as many cast and crew members from the original Halloween as possible to return to make the movie. She even campaigned heavily for series co-creator John Carpenter to return as director. He accepted the offer, but asked for too much money and Moustapha Akkad rejected the request, so he left.

I'm 'bout to carve dat turkey like a baws

Another thing they did was shrink Michael Myers back down to an average build. In Halloween and Halloween II Michael was of average size. He didn't have an overbearing physique and looked like just a regular guy. In Halloween 4, after being a coma for ten years, he was somehow swelled up in size. He looked like a football player that could bench-press a car. That didn't change in 5 and Curse, He was huge. In H2O, he returned to being very meager and average. While his build looks correct, his mask looks a little hokey. I don't know, just something about it doesn't look right. I can't put my finger on it. For the most part, he looks pretty good.

Aside from that, there's really not much else to say. The movie wasn't so much about the side characters as it was Jamie Lee Curtis returning to kick some ass. I wish I'd watched the movie again before reviewing it as it's been so long and so little viewings, but there's really not much to say. The ending is what really makes the movie good, and the rest just feels like your run-of-the-mill 90's slasher movie. It feels so 90's it almost doesn't even feel like a Halloween movie until Laurie and Michael duke it out.It's not a Rocky V scenario where the ending is the only good part, but it's definitely the highlight. I say give it a watch, and then watch it again for me!

Coming in 2018. Halloween H4O; Forty Years Later. Jamie Lee Curtis returns again to battle Michael Myers in the mental ward of the international space station.

Ranking the "Halloween" Movies: #7 - "Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers" (1989)

Twenty-one days away and we're cranking! Not cranking strong, but still cranking!

#7 - Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

I have a psychic link with the producers. This movie is just going to disappoint.

Imagine what would happen if Marvel or Star Wars movies came out year-after-year. Hahahaha...oh, wait. Well, that wasn't always the case back in the day. Gone are the days where studios take time and patience to produce quality sequels. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers had been released in 1988 and was both a critical and commercial success. It breathed new life into the franchise that was all but abandoned after Halloween III: Season of the Witch in 1982. Due to the immense success of Halloween 4, producer Moustapha Akkad fast-tracked Halloween 5 into production at lightning speed and had it out in theaters no more than a year later...and it shows. Boy, does it show.

"Loomis, look at me when I'm talking to you!"

Jamie's in a catatonic state after killing her foster mother at the end of 4. Instead of following through with Jamie being the new killer, which wouldn't have been all that believable anyway, the story changes gears back to the recycled way of doing things, which is just to have Michael return after a supposed death and stalk a member of his family again. Nothing new, business as usual. But, wait! There's a twist this time! As it turns out, Michael has a psychic connection with Jamie and he was the one who made her stab her foster mother. So, ipso-facto, Jamie's innocent again! Hooray! This psychic link also proves advantageous to the tired and decrepit Dr. Sam Loomis, played once again by Donald Pleasence. Loomis is upset because they keep dragging him back for sequels that don't make any sense and are nothing more than recycled jargin, but he could use the retirement funds so who's fooling who? So Loomis decides to use Jamie's psychic powers for the forces of good and to work with the Haddonfield police department to predict where Michael is or is going to strike next by having Jamie tap into her sudden psychic potential. "Are we really doing this?" is a question you'll be asking yourself constantly.

But I digress; Michael survived the gunshot barrage at the end of 4, and barely escaped a dynamite explosion to go live with a hermit in a coma for the next year. The hermit nurses Michael back to life (again, over the course of a year), but Michael then reawakens and kills him. Michael's an ungrateful little shit, isn't he? Michael then returns to Haddonfield and begins stalking Jamie's foster-sister Rachel, killing her by stabbing her with a pair of scissors. Why? Good question. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers teaches us that Michael must kill all members of his family, suffering from the affliction of the curse of Thorn. Rachel isn't even his family though, so he's getting kind of sloppy. The new characters besides Rachel? Suck. They're obviously nothing more than fuel for the fire, or in this case, bodies for the meat wagon. The only one that's even remotely tolerable is Tia, and she's obnoxious. Her blonde friend and her blonde friend's stooge of a boyfriend both suck balls. The audience will surely rejoice at their demise. On top of them, there's two bumbling, comedy-relief cops. The soundtrack makes cartoon noises whenever they're on screen, so you wonder if they're even in the right movie. Sure, the movie could use some levity, but these guys are a tad over-the-top.

"I sure hope I don't come back for more of these movies after this"

This movie is riddled with the fake scares. You know the kind. A horror movie will be building suspense, making you watch and wait with anticipation that some shit's going to go down, but then nothing does or something totally whacky goes down instead. This movie has quite a few of them, and each and every subsequent fake scare robs from Michael's presence more and more whenever he does finally show up. By the time he shows up in the barn to kill the two kids with a scythe, we don't even give a shit anymore. Even some of the purposefully suspenseful situations are lame. The scene where Michael's chasing Jamie, Tia and Billy in a car, Michael drives like five miles per hour and has trouble keeping up with little children who have to run through fields! In a car! Come on, Michael. Do you want Jason and Freddy to look more badass than you? Step on the gas! Run these little bastards down!

Another goof that fans love pointing out is the Myers house. It looks nothing like the original Myers house. It's not even the same constructional categorization. The old Myers house looked suburban and simplistic, but the new one looks old-fashioned and Elizabethan in a way. It's got a very retro style construction, and it's at least another story taller. It makes the final chase more exciting, sure, but it takes continuity out back and shoots it in the face. Then there's the scene where Michael unmasks himself. He corners Jamie in the attic and takes off his mask for her at the mere mention of "Uncle". You don't see anything except what you do see is Michael's eye shedding a tear. Also strange, considering Laurie shot Michael's eyes out in Halloween II, but that would also render Halloween 4 mute as well. These movies despise continuity, I tell you.

"If you blow me, you can be in Halloween 6."

The ending isn't bad, but it could've been much better. Let me back up. Throughout the movie, we see a man in a black trench coat appear in Haddonfield and even show up at the Myers' house. He follows the action around throughout the entire movie.The end of the movie sees Michael chase Jamie through the Myers house following a failed coupe by the Haddonfield police force. Loomis then grabs Jamie and uses her as bait, because he's finally given up on life, love, protection, all that shit. He lures Michael into a room where he drop a chain net on him and proceeds to not only pump three tranq darts into him, but then he beats him with a wooden 2x4 repeatedly. Loomis, then realizing that Halloween 5 will ACTUALLY be released, faints in despair and passes out on top of Michael's unconscious body. The next we see of Michael, he's chained up in the police cell as Sheriff Meeker and Jamie look at him. Meeker says he'll remain locked up "until the day he dies", which Jamie chillingly replies with "he'll never die". Just as another officer prepares to take Jamie home, the man in black appears and shoots up the police station, killing several cops and breaking Michael out of jail. The last we see of Jamie, she's looking on as the cell door keeping Michael locked up has been blown open. That's it! That's the cliffhanger we get. Not only do we get zero explanation throughout the entire movie as to who the man in black is, but he's the one that busts Michael out of prison and keeps the series alive. Even the writer's didn't even know who he was. Don Shanks, who plays Myers in this movie, reported that he played the man in black in most scenes because the writers were still trying to figure out the man in black's identity. Personally, I think the movie would've ended far more creepily if it just ended with Jamie's line of "He'll never die", leaving Michael's fate unknown. Breaking him out of jail after a movie-long crusade to capture him is so cheap. Now you know there's going to be a sequel, and no sequel is going to be strong enough to adequately cover all of the loose ends.

Tia speaking with "Indiscriminate Female Victim #1"

I'll say one thing. Michael's mask is much scarier looking than in the previous film. We haven't talked about Halloween 4 yet, but just know for now that the mask looks much better. Plus, the eerie atmosphere that was present in Halloween 4 is kept intact. Halloween 5, while not being a very well-made piece of art, is at least creepy in the sense of how it feels. The movie's filmed in a way that makes it feel rustic, quaint and eerie. It's not par with the atmosphere of Halloween 4, which is downright award winning in my opinion, and it still feels like an October movie. One of my favorite scenes is after Michael kills Tia's boyfriend (also called "Mike") and appears in Mike's car wearing a caveman mask. That scene is extremely suspenseful and very-well paced. Tia gets in the car with Michael, has him drive her halfway to a barn party, and drop her off at a gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes. When she's found by the police thanks to Jamie, Michael speeds off, much to her confusion. She even kissed him on the cheek, and Michael allowed it. We're lucky Michael has such patience or else she would've been dead the instant she got in the car. If Michael were Jason Voorhees, he'd probably smash her face in the dashboard repeatedly or in the door frame of the car itself...repeatedly.

To sum it up, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers is definitely weak. It's not bad, but it can be pretty dumb at some times. Tia's friends suck whenever they do anything and Rachel's death goes the same way as Laurie's in Halloween: Resurrection. It drops the whole "Jamie is the new killer twist" in favor of the psychic thing, which bodes well for the whole "war on Michael Myers" aspect of the film, but considering what we get next in Curse, (Jamie not posessing psychic abilities) we really don't get a whole lot of payoff. Plus, the ending isn't satisfying at all. Same deal as Curse. You can watch it only if you REALLY want to know what happens after 4.

Next in the Halloween twist: Michael Myers is actually a cyborg sent back through time to kill members of the Strode/Lloyd family.