Halloween 4
The explosion from Halloween II did not kill Michael; nor did the fire from the explosion that should have cremated him right there on the hospital floor. The explosion merely knocked him out and into a long coma that Halloween 4 will wake up him up from after audiences didn’t like Halloween III without him. He was probably enjoying that coma, and must shortly miss it when he learns that not only is Laurie dead, but that she also reproduced behind his back. It will take him most of the movie to realize just how unfortunate this is. All we have to do is look at the cover. Hollywood will never let you kill a kid, Michael. Especially a little girl. The movie opens with Michael Myers escaping from a Federal Sanitarium in much the same way Hannibal escaped in The Silence of the Lambs – except Hannibal planned to escape whereas Michael merely accepts that he’s in a sequel and lets it happen. An ambulance arrives at the Federal Sanitarium to transport Michael back to Smith’s Grove. Before Michael is put in the ambulance, a paramedic tells Dr. Hoffman, who I suppose is in charge, that he assumed Loomis would be there for the transfer because Michael is still his patient. Hoffman says that if Loomis read memos he’d be there and that Loomis's connection with Michael is more ceremonial than anything. And indeed it is, as Loomis only sees Michael on the Halloweens Michael choses to escape. They take Michael away on the gurney with both of his arms unsecured. Things fell apart when Loomis was Michael's doctor; how much more so when Loomis is only getting memos from time to time. During the drive, one of the paramedics asks about Michael’s living relatives, which rouses Michael from his slumber and results in their deaths. Indeed, it is astonishingly foolhardy to mention Michael’s relatives when Michael is around, and abysmally stupid to recount which ones are still alive. In the next scene a little girl named Jaimie and her sister Rachel sit on the couch at their home in Haddonfield. Rachel and Jamie are not real sisters; Jamie was adopted after Laurie died. Jamie is Laurie’s daughter, and it is quite puzzling that Halloween 4 chose to skip her conception. Rachel sends Jamie to her room where she gets out a shoebox with cards in it. She picks up a picture of Laurie and cries. Then she has a nightmare about Michael that is so detailed I have to wonder what cruel bastard told her what he looked like. Things are busy the next morning at Jamie’s house. A babysitter whom the parents had arranged to babysit Jamie broke her ankle, which means she can’t babysit. The mother wants Rachel to babysit, but Rachel has a date with her boyfriend Brady that supersedes this. As Jamie comes in the dining room, Rachel explains to her mother that she doesn’t want to babysit Jamie because Brady, so she thinks, is ready to make a commitment. She then uses a slippery slope fallacy and enumerates the consequences of canceling the date: no relationship, engagement, marriage, and babies – and especially no grandchildren for her mother. Jamie hears this, which is a truly horrifying schematic of Rachel’s future life as well as one that she is willing to sacrifice Jamie in order to achieve. To make up for her selfishness, Rachel offers to take Jamie trick-or-treating, which Jamie doesn’t want to do. Rachel offers to take Jamie out for ice cream after school instead. In the next scene Loomis is walking in a hospital with a limp that requires an I-Killed-Michael-Myers vanity cane. He storms into an office as dramatically as his cane will allow, demanding to know why “It” was let out of there. He also has a massive scar on the right side of his face from the fire in Halloween II. Loomis also calls Michael “evil on two legs”, as opposed to the evil Loomis is on one. The phone rings, and Dr. Hoffman learns that the ambulance transporting Michael has been in a wreck. Loomis storms off before the doctor can finish telling him where the accident occurred; therefore, Loomis has no idea where he’s storming off to. In the next scene Loomis arrives at a crime scene in a car that belongs to Ridgemont Federal Sanitarium, which I believe is the sanitarium he just left. The ambulance flipped and caught on fire as it went off a bank and into a river. Dr. Hoffman is also there, so Loomis must have waited for a ride from Dr. Hoffman at his car after storming out of his office. Loomis assumes that Michael is gone, which should be obvious, andit would not be a hard thing to prove: there should a precise number of bodies, and if the register of death is a dollar short then Loomis was a day late in stopping Michael from escaping once again. Hoffman objects that Michael could have been thrown from the crash, which the deputy supports with anecdotal evidence by claiming that he has seen bodies thrown fifty to sixty feet in previous accidents. Considering the way people drive in Haddonfield I have no doubt of that. Loomis isn’t convinced and hobbles his way to toward Haddonfield. He arrives at the gas station after driving there in the car from the sanitarium. Michael watches Loomis fill his car from inside the shop. Loomis goes inside the shop and bumps into a stack of tires that release a chain from the ceiling. The body of a mechanic Michael killed is wrapped in the chain; he has a look on his face that suggests he knew Michael would dispose of him in this fashion and was more horrified of that then whatever awaited him after death. Loomis hurries to a nearby dinner, asking if anyone is there although the mechanic thoroughly answered his question. He turns around and sees Michael, who is wearing the mechanic’s costume he must be accustomed to come across whenever he escapes. Loomis tells Michael not to go to Haddonfield, then quickly runs out of patience, says “Goddamn you.” and fires, but Michael has disappeared. He staggers outside to look for Michael, who busts out of the shop in the mechanic’s truck. Michael runs over a gas pump, which explodes and takes the sanitarium car with it (which Loomis just filled with gas), leaving Loomis without the ride he stole from Dr. Hoffman. With a dash of charmed luck, he also knocks out a telephone pole after the blaze at the gas station set it on fire. Somehow the lines are blasted off the pole, which ruins communication for an uncertain area until repair men are called in who will have to shortly go back and call in the dead bodies. I hope the deputy assumes those bodies were thrown fifty-to-sixty feet from an unrelated accident. Meanwhile, school lets out just in time for Jamie to get some ice cream. A boy dressed as a yellow Frankenstein and a girl dressed as a penguin make fun of Jamie for not wearing a costume. She runs away crying. Rachel arrives to pick her up with a friend named Lindsay. Now Jamie has changed her mind and wants to go trick-or-treating. Lindsay mentions a sale of Halloween costumes at a store Brady works at, which she persuades Rachel to shop at with bubbly enthusiasm I can only entertain in porn. Lindsay drops Rachel and Jamie off. Inside, Rachel talks with Brady and lets Jamie shop for her Halloween costume all by herself. Rachel kisses Brady before she tells him about the babysitter situation that he will resent, and he has Jamie right there to resent in the flesh. Brady is irritated and looks at Kelly, the Sheriff’s daughter who also works there. While Rachel and Brady have a talk about the bollixed date, Jamie looks at Halloween masks. She picks a clown costume that is the same as the one Michael wore when he killed Judith. Michael grabs a Captain Kirk mask with his hand, either still charred from the fire in Halloween II or charred again from one of the gas station explosions. Why is this store selling Captain Kirk masks? It is not only insensitive, considering how many people in Haddonfield have been murdered, but also somewhat dangerous, because at least one person has been killed while wearing one. Jamie looks into a mirror and transforms into Michael. I guess this scene is to enlighten the dull that this clown costume is the one Michael wore when he killed Judith. She backs away and runs into Michael, hastily putting on his mask that, by the way, makes him more recognizable than he would be without it. As a matter of practicality, why doesn’t Michael walk around as bald-faced as a hornet? Only Loomis would recognize him and Loomis can’t stop him from doing anything, and there is the added benefit that leaving the mask at the store allows it to be purchased by some idiot who would distract Loomis and the police. Jamie backs into a mirror and breaks it as well as the spell of her hallucination. Michael, once again, is gone. Jamie will have hallucinations of Michael often both in this movie and Halloween 5, and your guess is as good as mine as to why. Loomis is hitchhopping to Haddonfield along the highway. A station wagon passes him by, changing lanes as it does so in case Loomis makes a suicidal jump in the road his current appearance gives every indication might happen. An old man picks him up in an antique truck. The old man is a priest, or someone pretending to be one, and when he calls Loomis a “fellow pilgrim” I know I am doomed. His name is Revered Jackson, and he shakes Loomis’s hand right after sneezing into it. When Loomis tells Jackson he is going to Haddonfield, Jackson says that Loomis is “hunting it”. The reaction on Loomis’s face after he says this conveys a rock-bottom existential doubt as to what exactly he is hunting in Haddonfield and whether he should even bother anymore. When Jackson says he is hunting it as well, Loomis asks him with great sincerity what it is that he’s hunting. Jackson says he’s hunting the Apocalypse and takes a chug of whiskey. Loomis looks anxiously down the road. Jackson says that you can’t kill damnation because it doesn’t “die like a man does”, and when Loomis tells him he knows this Jackson looks at him with an astonished look of affinity sprung from Loomis’s scar, limp, or perhaps general sour attitude about life. He offers Loomis a drink, which, together with Jackson’s impromptu gospel singing, puts a smile on his face that I don’t think I’ve seen in the entire Halloween series so far. Back in Haddonfield, children run around throwing toilet paper in trees that will be very useful when all the murders are said and done. Loomis goes to the police headquarters in a fit of high dudgeon and asks to speak to Sheriff Bracket. Bracket is no longer there: he has retired and moved three thousand miles away. Loomis tells the new Sheriff that Michael has escaped, which the Sheriff does not believe because Michael is an invalid. Loomis, however, got a memo about Jamie from which he concluded that she is in mortal danger because Michael wants to kill her. (In a way, fighting Michael Myers is akin to fighting the AIDS virus: if Laurie had never had sex, and thus never had Jamie, there would be no one to kill.) The Sheriff retorts that Michael has been locked up “since before she was born”, causing Loomis to lose his temper – he is probably drunk – and tell the Sheriff about the bodies he passed on his way to Haddonfield. The Sheriff tells a deputy to call the state troopers and check out Loomis’s story. When the deputy tells the Sheriff the lines are down the Sheriff takes Loomis to hunt for Jaimie. Later that night, Rachel and Jamie trick-or-treat at the house next door, which has an old woman inside who is thankfully so old she has forgotten about the original Halloween murders and does not have a heart attack when she opens the door to Jamie dressed as Michael Myers. Jamie runs into some kids and is invited to join the group after they approve of her costume. When they ring the doorbell at the next house Kelly answers wearing only a shirt that says “Cops do it by the book”. She seems more embarrassed to be almost naked in front of Rachel than being almost naked in front of the gang of ten-year olds Rachel is hanging out with; a gang that does not ask her where the rest of her costume is, the location and kinkiness of which will soon be on Rachel’s mind. To the ten-year olds, Kelly is half naked, but to Rachel Kelly is half clothed. In a superb twist, Brady comes down the stairs as well, thus proving that Rachel was right about the fact that not going out with him would ruin their relationship. She was merely wrong about Jamie being the girl who ruined it. Brady goes after her, and as he stops Rachel on the sidewalk and tries to explain himself, Jamie walks further down the sidewalk in a tracking shot that leaves the Brady-Rachel fight off-screen where it belongs. Unfortunately, the movie cuts back to Rachel and Brady, and so it was nothing but a nasty trick. Brady says that she blew off their date “at the last minute” and Rachel accuses him of jumping on “the next best thing”, which isn’t true because Kelly is a better thing and it doesn’t appear he has hopped on her quite yet. Rachel also calls her “little Miss hot pants”, which is also inaccurate because Kelly isn’t wearing any pants at all. Kelly stands at the door and impatiently asks Brady if he’s coming in or not, which gives him a moral dilemma. I suppose whatever choice he makes will foreshadow what Halloween 4 has in store for him. I don’t care about Brady’s welfare, so when he goes back inside for some best-thing sex with little Miss no-pants, I’m happy he did not follow Rachel because that would have turned the trick-or-treating adventure into a march of migraines. Rachel loses Jamie, despite the fact that she was only minutes behind her and Jamie was walking down the same street, and it appears Rachel has wandered off on her own into another side of town. Rachel’s fate is one of ruthless economy: she lost both Brady and Jamie in one fell swoop by trick-or-treating at one house. After that the movie moves to a bar, where a news reporter on TV informs me that Haddonfield now has a curfew by order of the Sheriff, which seems to have taken immediate effect after Rachel said “little Miss hot pants”. The bartender tells everyone at the bar to “shut up a goddamned minute”. He calls the police station to find out why it is shut down, and after the phone rings about five times he hangs up, finishes a beer, gathers his posse, and together they drive off in pickup trucks. The Sheriff and Loomis arrive at Rachel’s house. Loomis goes inside Jamie’s room and tells the Sheriff that Michael has been there. Then movie cuts to a dead dog that belonged to Jamie. The Sheriff tells a deputy to stay at the house until the family gets there, and “look sharp” as he does so. He does not tell him to dispose of the dead dog upstairs. Meanwhile an electrician named Bucky is working at an electrical site working. Michael sneaks around and confronts Bucky, who tells him not to try “that Halloween shit with me”. After Bucky says he’s calling the police and walks away, Michael throws him into the electrical equipment. This causes a power outage. I don’t know whether Michael came here to cut the power or kill Bucky and knocked out the power incidentally. Back in Haddonfield, parents are driving down the dark streets while they look to pick up their kids. When a car pulls up and a father gathers his kids, a man who was parked on the side of the street gets out and scoops up some kids further down the street, whom I am going to assume are his children. God I hope so anyway. Rachel is still conducting her gloomy search to find Jamie. Michael, however, has found her instead of Jamie. He watches her from behind a broken window in a nearby house. Jamie meanwhile begins to think someone is following her, and tells whoever it is that she “has a big dog with her and he bites”. Rachel finally finds her, which is great because that means they are on their way home, where Jamie can find the fresh corpse of her dog while it’s still fresh on her mind. Rachel scolds Jamie and tells her never to go off by herself again, and then the scene is further enhanced when Loomis and the Sheriff pull up. Loomis sees Michael and begins loading his gun; then another Michael appears, then several: a gang of idiots who have not learned anything from Halloween II and have apparently bought every Captain Kirk mask and gas-station uniform in town. Loomis almost fires at one of them, but the Michael-lookalike (it warms my heart to write that phrase again) takes off his mask and shouts “Hey don’t shoot!” They run off laughing. The Sheriff tells them to get home, and if he catches them “it’ll be a weekend in jail.” If he doesn’t catch them, it’ll be a weekend in the morgue. As they drive away, the Sheriff tries to reach a deputy named Pierce, who is not answering. Michael stands in the road and watches. He has now cut the power off, fueled himself again with a dog, has multiple lookalikes running around, and only one little girl to kill who is in the custody of a Sheriff who can’t contact his officers, Loomis, and Rachel – who lost her. Things could not be easier. When they get back to the station, it has been ransacked as if someone was trying to destroy some evidence they felt the police had hidden everywhere but the evidence room. The Sheriff says “they wouldn’t have given up without a fight.”, and Loomis says ‘They didn’t know what they were fighting.” Apparently, Michael stormed in the police station and killed every officer there like a Terminator on a mission from God. Why this scene was not in the movie, and virtually everything immediately before it was, I want to know. The Sheriff sees a dead officer, who has perhaps already bled out, which suggests he’s been dead for a while. This could mean that Michael raided the police station shortly after Loomis and the Sheriff left, then ran to the power plant, killed Bucky, ran around until he found Rachel, then stalked her until Rachel found Jaime; then Loomis and the Sheriff found them and returned to the police station where Michael might as well have stayed all along. The Sheriff wants to know “how could a man do this?” and Loomis, like a clockwork sour-apple, tells him that Michael is not a man but evil. When they go outside, the posse of barflies arrives. They want to know what’s happening, but the Sheriff tells them to go home. He has no officers, so he might has well deputize them and let them run amok. The curfew emptied the streets of trick-or-treaters, the Michael lookalikes deserve to die, and Michael is apparently now much more powerful post-coma than he ever was. Loomis, however, cannot restrain himself from a speech no matter how many shotguns and hicks are present, and tells them it was Michael Myers who did it, and he’s “come home to kill” – as if Michael Myers would come home for any other reason. The Sheriff tells Earl to “let it be”, forgetting that “police” is a collective noun and all his officers are currently collected under the adjective “dead”. Earl says they’re “Gonna find his ass”, racks his shotgun and walks away. Back at Rachel’s house, an officer rushes to his patrol car to call in the massacre. Michael reclines in the back seat. The deputy says “I’ll be there in five minutes.” and drives away, taking Michael with him. Meanwhile a truck from the vigilante posse cruises down the streets with every light on looking for Michael, and I know it is too much to hope that they will see him suddenly sit up in the back of that cop car and fire at it. They see something in some bushes outside a building, and after they pull over, fire relentlessly into them with a lack of common sense and compassion that goes well beyond overkill and raises questions as to how these gentlemen hunt. Some of their shots miss wildly, hitting a park bench and waste-disposal cans close to the bushes, which is upsetting because whomever they’re shooting at has the only option of sitting in the bushes and getting hit by chance instead of design. When they approach the bushes with guns aimed at the ground, one of the older men says “Shit Earl. It’s Ted Hollister.” The scene cuts without showing whether or not Hollister was one of the Michal lookalikes, but I’m satisfied nonetheless. Brady and Kelly are about to have sex back at Kelly’s house. Kelly takes off her shirt and Brady remarks that he thinks he’s in Heaven, which is where he and Kelly will have to resume making love. As they make out, lights flash across the wall, and Kelly says the Sheriff is home and that if he catches them like this, he’ll skin Brady alive “for starters”, revealing that Kelly has an idea of something worse than being skinned alive. The deputy from Rachel’s house also arrives at the Sheriff’s house. There is no way Michael could have known that the deputy would go to the Sheriff’s house along with the fact the Sheriff would take Rachel and Jamie there as well. As soon as they get inside, the Sheriff tells Rachel to take her sister upstairs, “first door on the right”. Then he tells Kelly to “close and lock all the downstairs windows”, but he does not tell her to put on any pants. He gives Brady a gun, a double-barreled shot gun at that, with no explanation because he doesn’t “have time”. He also tells Brady to secure the attic; Brady insists on knowing what’s happening. The Sheriff arms himself with a shotgun and tells Brady that if he catches him groping Kelly, he’ll use the shotgun on Brady, specifically the gun he just gave him. When the other officer returns to his car, the back door is open, which it shouldn’t be because there is no point to putting someone in the back of a cop car if they can open the door and hop out anytime they want. Trust me: they are always locked. He grabs a shotgun and goes back inside. The Sheriff puts the deputy in charge of the front door after he padlocked the back, and then he tells Kelly to make him some coffee. The house is as secured as a house can be, and thus a case study of how likely it is to survive a Michael-Myers-infested Halloween in a secured house with two armed policemen and one armed idiot in the attic expecting to be flayed alive and then shot with his own gun if he so much as looks at Kelly again. Sheriff Ben gets through to the state police on the radio. They say they’ll send some troopers right away. Loomis decides to go back to Jamie’s house where Rachel and Jamie live, figuring, as he did in Halloween, that Michael will go to the house where his relative lives. I am fine with this: if someone has to survive this movie I want it to be Loomis. Rachel and Kelly have a confrontation over Brady. Kelly says that she didn’t know Rachel and Brady were a couple, to which Rachel retorts that she did know, she “just didn’t care”, supposing anyone would care besides Brady – who didn’t – and herself. Kelly says that Brady isn’t married and she has a right to do “what’s best for me”, to which Rachel retorts: “Don’t you mean what you do best?” The argument ends with Rachel throwing some coffee on Kelly’s shirt, which I dislike because I was looking forward to Kelly dying in that shirt with the implication that a cop killed her “by the book”. The Sheriff is listening to the radio and hears something that upsets him enough to leave. He puts Rachel in charge of the radio. Before he’s gone, the deputy confronts him, and I learn that the vigilante posse is the reason he’s leaving. This is wonderful: not only is the vigilante posse out on the streets killing people that Michael isn’t killing, they have also forced the Sheriff to leave the house and therefore have given Michael a better chance of killing the people in there. Kelly brings coffee to the deputy in the living room. She is now wearing a flannel shirt, which means she does not want to wear pants at any cost because if she went to the trouble to change shirts she might as well have put some pants on too. She offers the deputy in the chair some coffee, but he does not respond. When she lights a candle the deputies face appears beside it, with blood dripping down his mouth. There is a look of shock on his face and his eyes look to the right, from which side I assume he was attacked. Michael is sitting in the chair with the shotgun, and the Halloween theme song kicks in as soon as he sits up. As Kelly backs away from Michael, he impales her with the shotgun, which goes through her and the wall behind her in a violent death that is sadly lacking the gore I was hoping to see. Michael looks at her for a brief moment and then walks away, with her still hung on the wall like a trophy that deserved to be hung with the gun that brought it home. And with perfect timing, the state police notify Rachel that they are on their way, so now she too can go looking for the deputy and find him as well as the wallflower Kelly and then realize that only Brady and herself are there to defend Jamie. At least they have plenty of steaming coffee with which to do it. She goes into the living room, where the rocking chair is empty although Michael could have pulled the same trick twice. She looks around the room for Deputy Logan, whom she spots sitting by the table where Kelly lit a candle, a nonplussed look on his face that seems to say “Why are you looking for me?”, which is different from the look he had when Kelly discovered him that seemed to say “Look in the rocking chair”. Then she notices Kelly’s body. For God’s sake Rachel, at least put some pants on the poor girl. Rachel goes upstairs to get Jamie, but Jamie is nowhere to be seen. She goes downstairs, where she runs into Brady, who sincerely wants to know what’s going on again. They go into the living room, where Brady quickly notices the dead deputy, whom the camera focuses on when he says “Look!”. Look I do, and the deputies face has reverted back to its original expression of horror, as if the deputy died with that face, went through a brief rigor mortis that made him indifferent to the affairs of others, and then went back to being horrified once it passed. Brady goes to the door, which is locked. He fires the shotgun at the door, and whatever comes out of it blows two perfect circles in the door. It is as if the gun was loaded with a slug in one barrel and birdshot in the other. Brady still cannot open the door because, apparently, the blast from his magic gun made the metal on the doorknob too hot to touch. Once again, as with so many other slasher movies, it is never a good idea to barricade oneself in the house. They run upstairs, where Jamie shambles out of a room as if she is tired of looking for Rachel and beginning to realize Rachel isn’t much help anyway. They look down and see Michael by the fire, who looks up and shrugs off the chore of going upstairs to get them. Brady tries to shoot Michael without any bullets; two barrels, two bullets Brady – maybe that second circle wasn’t as useful as you thought it would be. Brady reloads the gun just as Michael gets to the top of the stairs. Michael throws him into the wall and Jamie flees; with or without Rachel, she cares not for Brady. Rachel, the twit, even tries to grab Jamie and bring her back. Brady attacks Michael with the gun, hitting him in the face with the stock. This has no effect, so Michael grabs the gun and hits him in the face with it. I suppose Brady’s head is crushed but the movie suddenly loses interest in this and cuts to Rachel and Jamie fleeing. I have been poorly cheated. With Kelly and Brady on their merry way to Hell, the melodrama might as well go there too, as Rachel shouts “Leave us alone!” at Michael from the top of the stairs. When she gets to the attic she looks back down the stairs to see if he heard her. Then she and Jamie throw boxes and a suitcase down the stairs to block Michael when he gets around to following them. I wonder if the faces of Kelly and Brady are going through the ten stages of pain on the Universal Pain chart like Logan’s did. Rachel and Jamie go out onto the roof, where Michael appears eventually, exhausted and put out with this final chase. Rachel tells Jamie that she wants her to “get down in the chimney”, but Jamie, who more than likely has seen Gremlins, knows the foolishness of that and shouts “I can’t!”. Rachel lowers Jamie with a cord off the roof, then Michael slashes at her and she almost falls off but grabs the edge of the roof at the last second, then she lets go and falls to a satisfying splat on the ground. Jamie goes down and cries over her dead body, then Michael appears behind them, having fared much better than Rachel from a fall of the same distance. Jamie runs down the street screaming for help, where she is grabbed by Loomis. Jamie wants to go home, but Loomis says “That’s the first place he’ll look for you”, which he should know isn’t true because that’s the first place Loomis always looks for him. They go to the school house instead. Loomis blows off a chain locking the doors to the school with his trusty pistol. After attempting to open a few locked doors, Loomis backs into Michael, who redirects him through a door. Jamie tries to open a few more doors, then looks down the hallway. Michael has mysteriously disappeared. She looks around for a bit, then sees Michael at the top of the stairs. She takes a tumble down the stairs as Michael slowly pursues her. He grabs her leg and Rachel, who wasn’t dead, shoots him with a fire extinguisher. Meanwhile the posse hears the alarm Loomis set off, and the fat redneck in the back slaps the hood of the truck a few times with an excitement that cannot be squelched with merely one innocent death. They arrive at the school, and after a brief debate, they conclude to get in the truck and flee Haddonfield. As they drive away, Earl radios another member of his posse to tell them what he’s doing with Rachel and Jamie. This is followed by a shot of the state police speeding down the highway. As they pass the state troopers, one of the men in the back fires his shotgun, and I will never know why he thought that was a good idea. As they drive on, Michel climbs up from the back of the truck. He stabs the redneck who fired at the air, then stabs the other one when he comes to his defense. When he throws the redneck down, he hits the tailgate and opens it, rolling him and his wounded buddy off the truck and on the road. Michael grabs Earl through the truck window and rips his throat open; this is the goriest death so far and one I feel Earl didn’t deserve. Rachel moves his dead body out of the truck and drives it as Michael attempts to grab her. Michael apparently reaches his wit’s end and smashes his head against the windshield. She slams on the breaks and rolls him off the truck. When Michael stands up, she runs over a dummy that’s supposed to be Michael and the truck eventually stops. The state police arrive on the scene. I wonder if they ran over any of the rednecks Michael threw out of the truck. Among them is the Sheriff, who left the house to do something about the vigilante posse he apparently never did. Jamie goes up to Michael’s body and has to be told not to touch him as the police cock their guns for an all-out assault. They could kill Michael as well as whatever revenge he had in mind for Halloween V if their aim is anything like Earl’s. Michael rises up to stab Jamie, and the police fire at him several times; the shots go wild again but enough hit Michael to knock him down a well close by. I suppose Michael is dead. The final scene is at Jamie’s house, where the jack-o-lanterns are still burning although they should have been snubbed to celebrate the death of Michael Myers. Loomis says that Michael is in Hell, “buried, where he belongs”. The mother takes Jamie upstairs, leaving Rachel with a thousand-mile stare on the couch. She also decides to take a bath, although Jamie, Rachel, and Loomis are caked in blood and might need one first. A POV shot, who is obviously Jamie, wanders around and grabs a pair of scissors. The mother screams and the movie cuts to Loomis coming up the stairs. He looks up and shouts “No!”. Then the movie cuts to Jamie holding the bloody scissors over her head. Her Halloween costume was no accident. Loomis aims his gun at her but the Sheriff stops him from shooting Jamie, which, again, would have put a stop to Halloween 5. Loomis’s look of sorrow and horror deserves to be framed and put on the Sheriff’s desk in case he comes back with new claims that Michael has escaped again. The movie ends with a shot of Jamie holding the scissors over her head. It is a good stinger ending, but it makes no sense, because if the spirit of Michael possessed her, she has no relatives to kill who are, after all, the only people Michael wants to kill. So she would have killed herself, and that, since it would have ended the franchise, would have been the happiest ending of all. |