Yes, Michael Myers continues on, picking up where HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS left off. That's right, last time he returned and now he's taking his revenge... on everybody I guess. As with all HALLOWEEN films involving Myers, Donald Pleasance too returns to his role as the increasingly mad psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis. You have to wonder though, is Pleasance really dedicated to the character of Loomis, or is he just taking any jobs offered his way? Directed by Dominique Othenin-Girard (co-director of THE OMEN IV: THE AWAKENING; NIGHT ANGEL; and the Julian Sands vehicle AFTER DARKNESS) our film opens replaying the final sequences of HALLOWEEN 4, as Mikey's gets blasted by a posse wielding shotguns, sending him falling back into a conveniently placed mine shaft. Now we get to see what happened to the William Shatner lover following that moment, as the masked killer crawls further into the cave, only to come out in a creek bed and get washed down stream like a paper boat... "they all float down here!"... sorry, psychological trauma courtesy of Tim Curry. Michael comes upon an old man by the river and attempts to attack the old coot, only to pass out under his own fatigue and loss of blood. That old fart probably doesn't realize how lucky he is! Then again, looking at the conditions he's living in, maybe not realizing how UNFORTUNATE he is would be the better state of the situation.

365 days (possibly 366 if it was a leap year) later, Michael's young niece Jamie, now mute following her slaying of her own foster mother, is residing at the Haddonfield Childrens' Clinic and awakens from a horrible nightmare about Barney getting fingercuffed by Ted Kennedy and Rupert Murdoch! Nah, just kidding, but she does wake up from a nightmare, apparently linked psychically with her uncle Mike, allowing her to witness through his eyes as he comes out of the coma he's been in for the past year and kills the old guy who's been looking after him all this time... somehow, I doubt a hobo is going to look after a big coma-case in a Bill Shatner mask for an entire year, but hey, how else do you expect the producers to explain Jamie's aging? Anyway, the elder caretaker of the killer is dead and the brutality sends Jamie into a seizure, prompting Dr. Loomis to pop up out of nowhere... doesn't anyone go anywhere in a year's time?! Jamie's foster sister Rachel is still alive too by the way, teenage heroine of our last film who also maintains a constant vigil over her little-sister-of-sorts. Her association with Jamie's unhealthy though, as Myers returns to snuff out his young relative and Rach gets caught up in the middle, scissors jabbed in the tit for her troubles! Yes, Michael's back on the streets of Haddonfield, once more targeting the teens of his hometown for complete extermination. Though Rachel's now corpsed up (and of course no one will find her body till after the movie's over), her friends Debbie and Tina (and their respective man boys) still decide to hang out at her house for Halloween, chalking her absence up to a visit to her parents in the rural wastelands of Illinois. I can already see what's gonna happen, and I'm getting a sense of "deja vu", which, in English, translates to, "just another slasher pic".

As for poor little Jamie, Dr. Loomis is desperate to know about these visions she's having, so he might finally be able to track the psychopath down and end his reign of horror and butcher knife-ary. Jamie seems to be mute though from the whole experience, so Dr. L has to treat her like a criminal under "NYPD Blue" interrogation when she seems too distraught to give up any answers... like Sipowitz without the moustache! I wish I were Sipowitz... Man, even I would be intimidated in Jamie's position! Who wants Donald Pleasance screaming at them with his wrinkles tremoring and his neck veins bulging?! I'd piss myself!... provided I was nine and had a bladder problem of course. Meanwhile, uncle Mike proceeds to stalk his two latest targets around the Haddonfield streets, standing practically in PLAIN VIEW out in the open! Has Myers lost his stalking talents? Has he forgotten the object is to remain unseen?! At the same time, have the people in town all gone blind, or have they gotten so used to their personal Boogeyman that nobody really cares that he's around, as long as they just stay out of his way?!?! SO much for the neighborhood watch committee, lazy buncha fucks. Then again, they're probably a gang of old ladies who go to bed at 5:30 anyway, so I guess they were all comatose by the time Myers was stalking the sidewalks. There is one funny scene here as Myers, for the first time since 1979, actually slaps on a DIFFERENT mask for trick-or-treating! It's nice to see a little change from Mike, especially since that other mask has been through so much blood and sweat and the fact it's been stuck to his face for the past year doesn't make it anymore appealing when you consider how unsanitary that is.

But, not to worry you Shatner fans out there, this change of faces is only temporary, as Mike goes to his old reliable Star Trek visage once again. He was probably just cleaning it... for his sake I hope so, because the only thing nastier than wearing a mask that's all sweaty and skanky is to put it BACK ON after taking it off! As for the girls he's stalking, Myers is scared off by some passing police... after all the pigs we wasted in PART 4, now he's SCARED of the cops?! Mikey catches up with Tina later, coming close to cutting her down, all the while Jamie is forced to look on in horror as uncle Mike's eyes once again become hers. The shock of seeing one of her friends about to die though, and being helpless to stop it, finally snaps Jamie out of her mute state as she screams and panics. Tina evades Myers and his homicidal urges and comes to visit Jamie, only to leave once more so she can attend the big Halloween bash that teenagers have in slasher movies. Fearing for Tina's life and tired of not being listened to, Jamie escapes the hospital with a little boy amigo and they seek out the party in hopes of convincing Tina she's in trouble. Sure enough, at the costume party Michael finds a cornucopia (or "horn of plenty" for you non-Pilgrims) of fresh meat, starting with a duo of bumbling comic-relief cops who had been assigned to keep an eye on Tina. These puds are dispatched with some unfriendly looking farming tools. I wonder if farmers realize how ominous and threatening their equipment looks to others, especially in a low light setting...

Mike's murderous intentions are refocused to his niece now and he swipes some high school shmuck's hot rod, dropping subtlety and the element of surprise for the large, loud and hard to control (especially beyond it's asphalt home) muscle car. Mike also embarrasses himself with this move, as we learn just how shitty a driver he really is when Jamie and her little boyfriend outrun him on foot, THEN he wraps the car around a tree! Yes, HALLOWEEN taught us that he learned to drive from his fellow inmates in the asylum, but maybe if he'd stayed in a couple more years, someone could have taught him about driving standard... Mike walks away from the wreckage and continues his pursuit, becoming distracted by Tina, who buys Jamie some time, with her life. Not to waste this opportunity, our pint-sized heroine and her guy pal escape to the protection of Dr. Loomis and the Haddonfield P.D., who use young Jamie as living bait in a trap for Michael. Myers, having killed off the majority of Haddonfield's protectors, slashes Loomis and tosses him aside and hangs the last living cop with a rope ladder while Jamie makes her escape down a laundry chute... yeah, right down into the house's basement, where there's only one exit and it leads upstairs to where uncle Mike is, GREAT escape plan Jamie! Even for a little girl you're a jackass. Loomis isn't dead though, as he's very much alive (at least as live as you can call the ancient Donald Pleasance) and it looks like he plans to sell out Jamie and give her to Mike! Of course, he wouldn't be a hero if he did that, so at the last moment he shows his true colors ("Gay Pride Purple") and drops a big chain net on the goon, pumps him full of tranq darts and clobbers him with a big plank! It's no shock that Donald Pleasance was never even considered for a professional baseball career.

With the mad masked mofo finally down and out, THIS is when the cavalry arrives, as what's left of the always "too little too late" Haddonfield Police Department arrives to take Michael into custody. They toss him in his own little cell and that's the end of that story... and if you believe that the movie's going to end with Michael Myers dropping the soap in the shower, then you're obviously not one to watch many horror movies, are you? Sounds more to me like you're a fan of prison flicks there guys get sodomized. How many times have you watched AMERICAN HISTORY X and found yourself aroused afterwards?! Uhm... anyway, this isn't the end of the movie, as Michael Myers is busted out of the confines of the small town pokey by a gang of dudes in black boots who have been stalking the stalker the entire time. They let loose on the pigs with an M-16, bust the killer free and blow the place to shit, leaving young Jamie to whimper and cry "No! Noooo!" as the film comes to it's true finale. Now the question we're left with is: who are those guys that saved Myers? Are they a government agency who want to recruit Michael to do missions for them overseas ala RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II? Then again, maybe they're a terrorist organization who plan to use Michael as THEIR emissary to help bring down the country? Perhaps they're a local mafia branch lead by the resurrected Al Capone who need Michael for their new enforcer in their plans to work their way from small town Haddonfield up the ranks of Illinois until they can take back Chicago?! Come to think of it, does Myers even know these goons? What's to say he doesn't just hack these guys up on the ride back to their secret hideout? These questions and more will be answered (or just made MORE confusing) by the next installment in the HALLOWEEN nightmare! I gotta stop watching those old "Batman" episodes, they're making me even cheesier than usual... and Burt Ward's little green shorts are creeping me out.

I know many horror fans who enjoy the exploits of Michael Myers and if they were to get within arm's reach of Dominique Othenin-Girard, they would cut him open in a heartbeat and lynch him with his large intestines. "What's with this psychic link shit he's got with Jamie?!" is a line I've heard many times, followed by an empty bear bottle hurtled at my TV screen. I can sympathize, as this is a pretty fucking retarded attempt at refreshing the HALLOWEEN series. At the same time, I'm glad that somebody tried SOMETHING to keep me from falling asleep! Though I do enjoy Donald Pleasance for his hacked and whacked performances as the increasingly mad Dr. Loomis, even after all this time. Last time he made me laughed with his overdramatic delivery of "No! No! No! No! No!" and this time it's his "Die! Die! Die Michael! Die! Die!" that leaves me doubled over and crying from the stomach pains all the laughter is giving me. HALLOWEEN, HALLOWEEN II and HALLOWEEN 4 were all basically the same: big guy in a William Shatner mask and janitor overalls kills teens and whoever else gets in his way while being hunted by his psychiatrist who has an obsessive-compulsive disorder. How many times do I have to sit through that before they start doing something different? Yes, I know HALLOWEEN III was a COMPLETELY different set up, AND it starred Master of the B-Ham, Tom Atkins, but I'm not asking for something THAT drastic, just a little spice to add to the mix.

Over at the FRIDAY THE 13TH franchise, lead boy wonder Jason Vorhees goes through some kind of change in almost every installment, keeping the series, well, not fresh, but it helps keep it from rotting and festering like an un-refrigerated salmon. Meanwhile, HALLOWEEN subjects us to the same Michael Myers every time, so I actually welcome the addition of supernatural elements to the film, namely the psychic link with his niece Jamie. In addition, I liked the "X-Files" type ending, which leaves us with unanswered question and makes me look forward to HALLOWEEN 6, and believe me, those are words that I've never said together in my lifetime other than this one incident... and will never say again. Another thing I liked about this film was the use of a police force to hunt the killer, something unseen in competitive slasher films like the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies. It does have to piss you off that no matter how many times Jason slaughters teens at Crystal Lake, there's never been an interjection of law enforcement, at least not on the scale of a manhunt. So, yes, this element did add to the mild uniqueness of HALLOWEEN 5. Finally, though some people like Myers for his low-key murder style, tending to stick to small and easily managed weapons like butcher knives, I instead found it amusing that he starts using larger weapons in Vorhees style carnage, like a pitchfork, scythe, and, though he failed miserably with it, a souped up auto. Does this make him a second rate Jason? Well, yes, in a sense it does, but I'll take a second rate Jason over a "suspenseful" Michael anyday. Does that make me a lousy judge of horror movies? Well, not only do I believe that everyone (especially me damn it!) is entitled to their own opinion, but I've also seen over 700 horror movies as of this review, how many have you seen?

Sequels: HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS; HALLOWEEN: H20

If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 or SCHOOL'S OUT