Halloween IV (1988)
Ten years on from the first Hallowe'en film, everything's changed. The Sherriff retired. Jamie Lee Curtis has gone (read: doing well in non-horror films). Well, not everything has changed - Michael Myers survived his imminent death, has returned to Haddonfield, and is murdering lots of folk again. And he's got the increasingly frail Dr Loomis after all.
This time, the intended victim is Jamie Lloyd, the daughter of Laurie Strode, who was born after the events of II but before they bumped off Laurie (she got better). The poor girl, who is fantastically played by a very young Danielle Harris, has nightmares of Michael Myers coming to get her. They are, after all, kin, but she is protected by her older foster sister, Rachel.
When I saw this one in the 90s, we got as far as the gas station before laughing and playing GoldenEye instead. Which is a shame, as this one actually builds into a properly good horror tale, with buckets of atmosphere. It's cold, it's dark, and there's a killer on the loose.
I like how everyone acts like they are in Part IV of a series. When Loomis tells the new Chief that Myers is back, he is instantly believed with the first bit of evidence. When the bar men find out, they instantly form a posse to hunt Myers down. There's none of this stretching credibility that folk have to be genre blind. And this leads to some great characters moments, like the rat boyfriend, in the moment of crux, deciding to go hero, only all his character flaws show up at the wrong time for him.
Also, Myers takes out an entire police station off screen, and we see how this possible later on with one stealth attack on our main vigilante posse.
But this is the story of a little girl who who has nightmares which come to life.
Spoilers below
From the start, the inference is that Jamie is scared not just of the man coming to get her but that he is reaching out to her, or she sees herself in him. And at the end, with transference complete, we realise we thought we were watching a slasher movie. Oh, no no no, that was by-product of the main act, an attempted possession which is now writ large in our utterly sympathetic but now deadly young victim. As Donald Pleasance breaks down completely, we realise every unspoken potentiality that the script never needs to spell out. And because Danielle Harris was so good at portraying how deadly scared Jamie was of becoming Michael, his final victory, and her defeat is much worse than everyone dying ever could be. Evil never dies, it just infests...
That is a proper barnstorming finish to the film, and actually marks this out as the perfect climax to the Michael Myers Halloween story. Only, we've got another dozen films after this.
Well, sometimes this age old cynic could be completely wrong footed. I saw most of the franchise sequels in the late 90s when I was getting my horror movie education, and my memory of most of them was a bloody mess.
Knock for me six instead, because Hallowe'en 4 is a genuinely great horror film, which is better than II and even my quite liked (but publicly maligned) Season of the Witch.
Incredible. Just incredible.
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