Original Release: 1989

Picking up the action in the last minutes of HALLOWEEN 4, The Shape lands on the stony floor of an abandoned mineshaft after Sheriff Meeker and the State Police emptied their guns into him. 

Michael crawls out through a side tunnel toward a stream just before troops toss dynamite into the hole.  Wounded, Michael floats downstream to safety, avoiding capture and certain destruction. He pulls himself up onto the river bank and collapses at the feet of an old hermit living in a shack at the water's edge.

October 30th, one year later: at the Haddonfield Children’s Clinic, Jamie Lloyd awakens from a nightmare, reliving her Michael-like attack on Mrs. Carruthers the previous Halloween. Jamie is frantic as medical instruments monitor her racing vitals and brainwaves, alerting a nurse who rushes to Jamie’s room.

Jamie’s psychic link with her uncle, Michael Myers, resumes again as she senses him breaking the neck of his caretaker, the Thorn scar visible on his wrist.  Jamie scrawls on a chalkboard “He’s coming for me” before she falls into a seizure. 

Nurses and doctors rush Jamie to treatment, but Dr. Loomis intervenes, insisting Jamie will emerge from the trance by herself.  Indeed Jamie does recover and the next morning Loomis finds Rachel Carruthers sleeping at Jamie’s bedside. Jamie’s trauma has left her mute, communicating via written messages and sign language.

Tina, an ebullient teenage friend of Rachel’s, arrives to cheer up the little girl. Loomis enters to spoil the moment, just as someone throws a brick through Jamie’s room window – a note reads “The evil child must die.” Jamie’s psychic link during last Halloween’s attack on her foster mother has Haddonfield irrationally scared of the young girl. Loomis insists that Jamie holds the clue to Michael’s power but the trauma won’t let her speak it.

Rachel has plans for the weekend and feels guilty about leaving Jamie alone in the clinic, but party girl Tina insists Rachel needs some fun while the Carruthers are out of town. Little does Rachel know that as she showers, Michael Myers has returned and stalks her.

Loomis, his obsession overpowering his professionalism, badgers and pleads with Jamie to tell him what she knows about Michael, but he only upsets her more.

Rachel dresses to start her weekend of fun, unaware The Shape hides in her closet, watching his prey from the shadows. Michael attacks Rachel, stabbing her with scissors. Jamie, psychically experiencing Rachel's murder from her clinic bed, helpless to defend her adopted sister.

Simultaneously, Loomis begs Sheriff Meeker to remember the slaughter in Haddonfield last Halloween, insisting Jamie’s seizures are proof Michael has returned to kill again. 

Finding no sign of Rachel at the Carruthers home, Tina and friend Samantha plot their romantic schemes for the boys.  Yet Michael has murdered Tina's boyfriend and stolen his car to follow the teens to the Tower Farm party.  Samantha's boyfriend Spitz fools a pair of idiotic cops that he's The Shape chasing Tina and Sammy.

Having tempted the terrible fate of Haddonfield, while Samantha and Spitz have their sexual liaison in the barn, The Shape emerges from the shadows to kill them.  Tina discovers their bodies and runs to the cops, only to find them murdered in their squad car — Michael is on the loose! 

Jamie and Billy leave their school costume pageant to find Tina, whom Jamie knows is in grave danger.  The trio meet up, only to have Michael chase them into the woods in his stolen car.

Tina plays bait to save Jamie from Michael's rampage, and sacrifices herself to his bloodlust to save Jamie.  Loomis and the Sheriff's deputies arrive to drive Michael into the woods, but Loomis knows their endgame must be played out.

Despite Sheriff Meeker's protest over this desperate ploy, Loomis brings Jamie back to the old Myers house, knowing Michael's insatiable evil will beckon him to claim his niece.  Naturally Michael subverts the plan, killing the deputies protecting Jamie, and he stalks her through the ruin in a deadly game of cat and mouse.

Jamie finds Rachel's body in the attic, where Michael corners her.  She asks her uncle to take off his mask, but as she tries to touch him he flies into a violent rage.

Dr. Loomis and his former patient, both driven by their own inner demons, battle hand-to-hand over Jamie.  Loomis springs a chain-net trap on Michael and shoots him with tranquilizer darts, beating him unconscious with a hunk of lumber.

Meeker and the deputies lock Michael in jail, awaiting his transfer to a secured institution — but the mysterious figure wearing the silver-tipped boots breaks into the police station.  Michael has been freed from his jail cell, escaping into the night once again to continue his reign of terror as Jamie screams in horror.

With the fans embracing the return of Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN 4, the story having gotten back 'on course' for audience expectation as the franchise of an iconic killer, executive producer Moustapha Akkad rushed HALLOWEEN 5 into production.  This haste to cash in on H4's profitable resurgence at the box office turned out to be this fifth film's creative and mythological undoing.

Before the new story was properly thought out and script even completed, production began in an effort to release the sequel within a year after HALLOWEEN 4.  Yet with no clear vision for the plot, tensions on-set quickly arose, especially among the returning cast members from the prior film.

Ellie Cornell agreed to reprise her role as Rachel, but found the script lacking in quality, especially where her character's death was concerned.  Cornell objected to the concept of Michael murdering Rachel by stabbing scissors down her throat.  After some re-negotiations, Rachel was simply stabbed in the heart with the scissors after a few suspense scenes, effectively disappearing at the midpoint of the story.

A number of similar conflicts arose over the violence of the film, with director Dominique Othenin-Girard pushing for more graphic killings and bloodspilling, much to the dismay of the franchise's godfather, Akkad.

Othenin-Girard, a Swiss-born director, was entirely new to studio filmmaking in even the relatively low-budget level of Hollywood's horror genre.  He'd directed one Swiss feature film and two TV projects in Europe before taking on HALLOWEEN 5. 

Yet hindsight reveals it may well have been his own utter lack of familiarity with the HALLOWEEN franchise and mythology which caused the most damage to his misguided installment.

In an on-set interview, this is how the director and co-writer described the plot of HALLOWEEN 5: "It is a question of cat and mouse.  We see the cat and we see the mouse, and the mouse knows about the cat, and the cat is going after the mouse.  Um, that's about it, I guess."

It is no wonder that Othenin-Girard failed to bring any expansion or illumination to the Myers mythology if he regarded this film as a mindless chase stolen from Saturday cartoons. 

Indeed, he focused entirely on the mechanics of the plot and piling up bodies at required intervals to keep an otherwise lifeless story plodding along.  He never understood HALLOWEEN for what it meant and could be, and thus it was doomed from the start.

The victims are largely forgettable, flat stereotypes and faceless pins set up for Michael to knock down every few minutes.

Jamie and Loomis are the only characters garnering any audience sympathy, though even their roles are reduced to servicing an often wildly illogical plot of action without motivation.

Young Danielle Harris does her best struggling with a role which keeps her mute for half the film.  Jamie's psychic connection to Michael Myers can't help but play out as a cheat from HALLOWEEN 4's controversial ending with Jamie holding the bloody knife in her tiny hands. 

Even worse, to saddle Jamie with a traumatizing psychic connection to a mass murderer, then render her speechless to enact this burden is a fatal error in the film.

Fans of Donald Pleasence's work as Loomis also cringe at his dilemma, as the ill-prepared script never gives his character a solid line of motivation to fuel his obsessive actions.

As fans of the series know all too well, as Loomis goes, so goes Michael's believability in the film — a simple concept neither Othenin-Girard nor his two co-writers, Jacobs and Bitterman, grasped.

Making-of interviews with Harris, Pleasence and Beau Starr (Sheriff Meeker) demonstrate their own inability to describe the film even as they are making it, which belies the confusion and turmoil of the rushed and aimless production.

Sacrificing drama for violence, the increasingly gruesome and bloody death scenes flirted with earning an X-rating, which would have been box office death for the franchise.  Yet toning down these murders, which would have looked much more at home in the sausage-grinding FRIDAY THE 13th franchise, left HALLOWEEN 5 with no edge as plausible thrills or engaging horror.

This untenable situation was only worsened by the pointless influx of new characters cut from the blandest cardboard to fill in all the dramatic gaps. Midway through the film, a pair of stupidly-written cops appear in response to calls about Michael on the loose — a duo of "comic relief" which not even the director took seriously. 

Their buffoonish behavior is actually punctuated by bicycle horns and clown music to underscore just how badly they stand out as unwelcome intruders into the serious, supposedly scary world of Haddonfield. Their presence is a true travesty for the HALLOWEEN franchise, to be sure. 

Yet the most infamous of these character intrusions is undoubtedly Tina, portrayed by relative newcomer Wendy Kaplan.  Just speak the name Tina to HALLOWEEN devotees, and you might as well run your fingernails down a chalkboard for the reaction the character elicits.

To Kaplan's credit, it's apparent that much of her character work seems improvised — perhaps the combination of her own unfettered ego and her willingness to enliven an otherwise silly character with some dramatic dimension. 

Alas, the results are so wildly incongruous with the tone and history of the franchise, that her kitschy 1980s look and silly antics stand out glaringly as raw style (and annoying volume) over substance. 

Fans may only tolerate watching Tina if they can root and cheer for her death at hands of The Shape, though it's not entirely fair to lay the film's many failures at Kaplan's feet either.  For better or worse, Tina made an impact on audiences, which is more than can be said about the others.

How far the quality and depth of characters had fallen in HALLOWEEN 5, compared to Carpenter and Hill's 1978 script, ensured these unfortunate actors had no chance for success in making their roles more than typical horror film clichés. 

Had Othenin-Girard possessed any reasonable clue about the film he was making or the franchise he was joining, he could not have made these tragic missteps in storytelling.  Without a solid script to unify the filmmaking team under one creative vision, the project was left to wander aimlessly into theaters, facing the disapproval of loyal fans. 

HALLOWEEN 5 suffered from an utter lack of leadership from its uninformed director, and those failures were engrained on every frame during production from the first take. 

Not since HALLOWEEN III has an installment in the film series left as negative an impression on fans as did HALLOWEEN 5, though they would soon learn more deviation from the strength of the franchise still lay ahead.

HALLOWEEN 5 fared very poorly at US box offices, most unlike its successful predecessor.  On an estimated production budget of $5 million dollars, Othenin-Girard's film grossed less than $12 million in domestic ticket sales.  Internationally, the film went directly to home video, avoiding theaters entirely.  Even HALLOWEEN III earned more in theaters on a budget half that of HALLOWEEN 5. 

This rushed sequel proved a creative and financial low point for the franchise just a year after HALLOWEEN 4 reinvigorated the series by returning the story back to Michael Myers.  Squandering the good will built up with audiences, an incomplete and unfocused script directed by a horror novice quickly blunted any forward momentum in the series. 

Othenin-Girard had a very weak understanding of the HALLOWEEN mythology and appeal, treating it like one of the series' numerous and lesser imitators. An emphasis on gory violence betrayed a reliance on bloody kills for cheap horror instead of Michael's terrifying games played with his intended victims. 

Alas, this was a necessary tactic since the script failed to define Myers as anything but a vaguely supernatural puppet of the yet-unknown Thorn cult.  His forced relationship as Jamie's uncle failed to pay off in any satisfactory way either, except for a few plot points to keep the illogical story moving.

Worse, THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS was largely taken out on the character of Dr. Loomis, whose obsession with defeating the evil in Michael — a central battle between the two since the 1978 original film — no longer had a plausible basis to spur on the drama. 

Setting up Myers as a murdering pawn of the Thorn cult emptied the man who filled the mask.  His lethal psychosis, once a very personal motive for his crimes, was reduced to mindless, robotic programming by outside forces.  Without Michael's personal drive to kill, Loomis' opposition to him was reduced to an obsession without cause.  With Loomis' attention shifted toward Jamie through much of the story, the dynamic between Michael and his former doctor evaporated — this undermined the entire mythological premise of  the HALLOWEEN franchise.

When such overt references to the Thorn cult were omitted from HALLOWEEN 5, Michael now had no clear reason to kill beyond the horror genre's formula expectations.  Lacking any dramatic tension behind his actions, even his gruesome kills lacked any horror impact because audiences had no sympathy for the shallow and silly victims of his random wrath.

Since the script was such a muddled mess of confusion and failed logic, the plot caused more complications in the mythology than it resolved.  To be honest, it took me far too long even to write the story synopsis at the far left, simply because the plot is a tangled string of uneventful scenes and dead ends.  Amid a flurry of new yet inconsequential characters, it's hard even to summarize H5, which only proves how poorly written it is.

Shying away from HALLOWEEN 4's shock ending, implying Jamie might have inherited her uncle's pathology, was probably necessary step.  Would audiences have actually accepted a little girl as the next mass murderer of Haddonfield?

Instead, H5 created a psychic link between Jamie and Michael, resulting in trances where niece could remote view and act out uncle's location and actions — again another weakening puppet motif which absolves any participant of their personal responsibility or free will.

As noted, this divided Loomis' attention between Jamie and Michael in the doctor's crusade against this hometown evil.  With Sam's frustration and obsession diverted to Jamie, the winning formula of Loomis vs. Michael fell out of the story when it's should be the dramatic backbone of the tale.  Captain Ahab is just a wandering madman without the great whale as his eternal foe, just as Loomis is lost without Michael.

This reduced The Shape to an unstoppable robotic killer, impaling, crushing and hacking away at a series of meaningless victims.  Michael Myers had been diluted down to the HALLOWEEN-ripoff likes of Jason from FRIDAY THE 13TH, if not worse.  This tragic mistake in rewriting Michael's motivation to kill was a terrible step backwards for the franchise.

Commenting on the film's failures, Executive Producer and franchise caretaker Moustapha Akkad admitted that rushing HALLOWEEN 5 into production hurt the film's own chances for success, as well as damaged the reputation of the franchise.

If anything, HALLOWEEN 4 proved that the series could recover from a poorly reviewed and fan displeasing chapter.  This demonstrated the inherent strength and appeal of the Myers mythology with audiences, which like it's masked icon seems never to die.  Indeed, the battle between good and evil can never be resolved within the human mind or soul, since the war is constantly renewed in ourselves and the world at large.

By rushing greedily after profits and forsaking this simple formula for proven horror storytelling, Akkad and the writers sold out franchise credibility in the quest for a quick buck.  Seeking extended profits from minimal investment, HALLOWEEN 5 had little if any chance to succeed from its genesis.

Further evidence of this short-sided approach came from the timing of H5's theatrical release, which coincided with the home video debut of HALLOWEEN 4. By pushing an unfinished script into production and have H5 in theaters by October 1989, the film was in effect competing with its own franchise, just as H4 was finding its video audience.  Saturating the horror market with two HALLOWEEN titles devalued the market impact of both titles in 1989, and undoubtedly hurt H5's performance at the box office.

The film's ending proved just as unsatisfying with Michael Myers sedated and locked up in jail, facing state incarceration, only to be freed by the mysterious Man in Black! This explosive escape was both highly improbable and inanely convenient — the filmmakers literally wishing Michael out of custody solely to set up yet another sequel.

Michael was once again made into a pawn of the Thorn cult, saved only by a contrived breakout despite being surrounded by a station full of armed officers.  How this escape was accomplished is never show, of course, since the results could never pass the believability test.  This was the final nail in the coffin for HALLOWEEN 5's integrity for advancing the franchise, instead marginalizing its own iconic star through poor scripting and uninspired direction.

Creative problems would continue plaguing Haddonfield with the 1995 release of HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS.