There Was Never A Tale Of More Woe, Than That Of The Stupid Mask In Halloween 5: The Revenge Of Michael Myers
Unfortunately, vintage horror movie novelizations have gone the way of all collectors items: They are hoarded by eBay dorks and bar-code scanning resellers, the arch enemies of those of us with actual autistic-adjacent interests (Looks in mirror accusatorily). These dog-eared adaptations are priced in a way that would suggest they're a shred of the Shroud of Turin, and not a literary adaptation of the fifth in a horror movie series about a monster man and his incompetent therapist. All of this to say, I long to read the novelization of Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. Why you ask? Lets start with the riddle of Michael's hobo caretaker.
You see, at the end of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (A legacy sequel by our modern standards), albino Shatner was shot by the surviving Haddonfield police force before plunging down a mine shaft. The fifth installment begins with Michael having a pleasant slide, as the townsfolk toss dynamite in after him. The Shape surviving both mineshaft fall and dynamite brings to mind a Looney Tunes cartoon. The rest of the movie will not disabuse you of this notion. Michael is deposited in a body of water and travels downstream like a migrating salmon before being caught in a net, and saved by an unnamed hobo. This man then keeps Mikey alive for A FULL YEAR. What is he feeding him? Did he wash his jumpsuit? Is there a whole My Dinner With Andre scenario we missed where the two talk about their roads not taken? We don't find out because as soon as Samhain comes calling, Michael fully revives and unceremoniously guts the guy who was providing pro-bono hospice care (Is Michael in the pocket of big healthcare?)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers is a meandering oddity very dear to my heart. Many falls ago, AMC was fond of playing the movie on repeat. I have indelible memories of Michael wielding a scythe, the psychic connection bullshit and an absolutely off the rails Donnie Pleasance. My minds eye paints the movie with better framing, ambience, dialogue...But it remains a seasonal comfort film.
It also remains a challenge unpacking the cornucopia of poor choices. Mikey still has a psychic connection to a pseudo-mute Jamie Lloyd (The movie jettisons the previous plan that Jamie would take over her uncle's business) which manifests as soap opera B-plot scenes of Danielle Harris (Who is gamely working with rough material) attempting to screech out the doings of her evil relative. Jamie's sister Rachel is unwisely killed off early on, replaced by Rachel's ditzy pal Tina. Tina is incredibly grating, with the constitution of someone who would use fist-sized flavored vapes, but I find her inexplicably cute. Dr. Samuel Loomis is a far cry from cute, leagues removed from fun banter with an alcoholic street preacher. Halloween 5 Loomis is a burnt bad lieutenant, foaming at the mouth with the anticipation of violence. He's a mental health professional who now commits hourly psychological warfare against a little girl, using her as bait in the last act of the film. When Pleasance drops a giant metal net on Michael (In the Myers house which is now a Victorian mansion), the nagging feeling returns that someone in the writers room was fixated on Wile E. Coyote.
There's of course the Thorn Cult of it all, as Dick Tracy villain the Man In Black (Dr Wynn, obviously) shadows Mikey's movements. Wynn ends the film by annihilating an entire police force and breaks Michael out of prison, an appetizer for the morass of occult nonsense to follow. I haven't even gotten to the Keystone cops and their associated musical sting fit for a late era Police Academy sequel, but I must first address that I buried the lead. The iconic mask and its design is a sticking point of every movie in this series (The "wealth" of online discourse strains my retinas), but this one is a truly singular piece of shit. I'll skip right past the, "You think this is slicked back?" Tim Robinson hair joke since we have to talk about the neck. I don't care what kind of hand-rolled cigarette, art nouveau bullshit director Dominique Othenin Girard was huffing, the neck of that fucking mask should never be outside the coveralls. Doubly so, if you're going to use a sculpt that makes the face of pure evil look perpetually bemused. Maybe it's meant to be the face of a man looking at a canyon wall painted to look like a tunnel?
-Dr. Benny Graves
