Ho boy, where to begin? At this point in the series, Dr. Loomis has become abusive, the characters are all hateful, Michael's slipping, and the scripts are making even less sense.
We begin right where we left off from Halloween 4, a la Halloween I and II: Michael escapes from the mine shaft, crawls to safety, and gets nursed back to health by some random bum with a parrot. One year later and with a lot more energy, his immediate action once he's able to move is to off the bum and head back to town, hoping to hunt down his niece who now has a psychic connection with him. A troop of teenagers are introduced, and the movie promises carnage. Sort of.
This movie is bad. By bad I mean incompetent on pretty much every level. In horror movies, part of the delight and part of the terror is the fact that the teenagers die, but one character at least we hope will live. Not so in this one. Every single character is a hateful, stereotypical 80s idea of idiocy, and Michael's carnage can't come soon enough. This storytelling is backed up by probably some of the worst editing and directing I've ever seen, as characters move sporadically through jump cuts to... well, they don't really do much of anything, except ignore the warnings of a traumatized little child with a psychic connection to a serial killer. That role is given over to Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis, who somehow still has a practice and still is listened to, despite the fact that at this point he breaks about every rule of clinical ethics and the fact that he's an obnoxious jerk.
Breaks every rule... that's what this movie does. This movie is so unable to bring actual horror, suspense, or gory delights to the fore that it literally just bumbles around hoping for something to photograph until Michael comes around, and then the storyline and directing are so incompetent they can't even make Michael seem cool. The scenes in the barn are pretty much must-see for film students who want to know exactly what NOT to do. And then, as if it's not enough, the movie has the audacity to introduce a new character for the sole purpose of letting Michael out of prison... who he is, what he's there for, what he knows, even if it's a he... there's no explanation. They literally wrote a character into the script because they were too lazy to know how to end this movie. That's like THE single basic screenplay no-no.
Of course, there's always room for camp, but camp only works when the film goes in outrageous directions and does things creative and fun. This movie isn't even creative enough to come up with crazy, out-there ideas like Halloween 3, it just lazily serves the tropes of its genre without even the craft and skill required to make a successful continuity cut! By the time this movie ends, you will feel frustrated, bored, betrayed, and uninterested. While this movie plays, you will wish for every character to die just so that you no longer have to watch their stupid, mindless antics, and you will regret renting (or buying) the disc. Halloween 5 isn't even worth the plastic it's printed on, and that's bad considering how cheap it is to put things on DVD.
--PolarisDiB
We begin right where we left off from Halloween 4, a la Halloween I and II: Michael escapes from the mine shaft, crawls to safety, and gets nursed back to health by some random bum with a parrot. One year later and with a lot more energy, his immediate action once he's able to move is to off the bum and head back to town, hoping to hunt down his niece who now has a psychic connection with him. A troop of teenagers are introduced, and the movie promises carnage. Sort of.
This movie is bad. By bad I mean incompetent on pretty much every level. In horror movies, part of the delight and part of the terror is the fact that the teenagers die, but one character at least we hope will live. Not so in this one. Every single character is a hateful, stereotypical 80s idea of idiocy, and Michael's carnage can't come soon enough. This storytelling is backed up by probably some of the worst editing and directing I've ever seen, as characters move sporadically through jump cuts to... well, they don't really do much of anything, except ignore the warnings of a traumatized little child with a psychic connection to a serial killer. That role is given over to Donald Pleasence's Dr. Loomis, who somehow still has a practice and still is listened to, despite the fact that at this point he breaks about every rule of clinical ethics and the fact that he's an obnoxious jerk.
Breaks every rule... that's what this movie does. This movie is so unable to bring actual horror, suspense, or gory delights to the fore that it literally just bumbles around hoping for something to photograph until Michael comes around, and then the storyline and directing are so incompetent they can't even make Michael seem cool. The scenes in the barn are pretty much must-see for film students who want to know exactly what NOT to do. And then, as if it's not enough, the movie has the audacity to introduce a new character for the sole purpose of letting Michael out of prison... who he is, what he's there for, what he knows, even if it's a he... there's no explanation. They literally wrote a character into the script because they were too lazy to know how to end this movie. That's like THE single basic screenplay no-no.
Of course, there's always room for camp, but camp only works when the film goes in outrageous directions and does things creative and fun. This movie isn't even creative enough to come up with crazy, out-there ideas like Halloween 3, it just lazily serves the tropes of its genre without even the craft and skill required to make a successful continuity cut! By the time this movie ends, you will feel frustrated, bored, betrayed, and uninterested. While this movie plays, you will wish for every character to die just so that you no longer have to watch their stupid, mindless antics, and you will regret renting (or buying) the disc. Halloween 5 isn't even worth the plastic it's printed on, and that's bad considering how cheap it is to put things on DVD.
--PolarisDiB