Director: Dominique Othenin-Girard
Writer: Michael Jacobs, Dominique Othernin-Girard, Shem Bitterman
Starring: Donald Pleasance, Danielle Harris, Ellie Cornell, Beau Starr, Wendy Foxworth
Certificate: 18
Running time: 97 minutes
Blu-ray release date: 15 October 2012
Halloween 5 opens, as was customary with slasher sequels, with a flashback that leads into a loose justification of ‘why he didn’t die’. Before Myers is back, like a particularly troublesome yeast infection.
Could this be better than the previous movie? You know you’re in trouble when two local cops turn up to a comic musical theme that sounds like The Chuckle Brothers have taken over filming. They later play Snap while on surveillance duty. They should have gone the whole hog and had them amusingly step in pots of paint and accidentally brain one another with mishandled lengths of two-by-four.
We’re introduced to some new perms, and victims as dressed by Clock House from C & A. One of them even turns out to be the Fonz. Briefly.
Like the sequel before it, the movie is terribly empty and, critically, not in the least bit frightening or suspenseful. An attempt to bring something new to the table with a mystical cult that pays off in the sixth sequel, the equally flawed Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, can’t salvage what is, sadly, just a glossy mess.
A perfect product of that late-80s cinematic hinterland where franchises went to die. Or not.
What of the disc itself? Well, contrary to popular opinion, turds certainly can be polished. Both the picture transfer and audio are a solid step up from the fourth film. As with the Halloween 4 release, the disc contains a pair of audio commentaries from cast and crew plus a more contemporary ‘onset’ piece lasting just under twenty minutes.
This would all be very well if the film was good enough to justify further digging, which sadly it’s not.
GUY ADAMS
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1 comment
One of the HALLOWEENS I haven’t seen, and I suspect I never will. The first few minutes of HALLOWEEN 6 were oddly awful and incoherent, but I don’t even have the curiosity to find out how they got from Part 4 to that.
Oh, and it’s bad enough that you are familiar with trash fashion house giant C&A, but what on earth is Clock House? I do hope that’s not where you used to shop.