Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers review.
He came home…again…ten years later. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers delivers one of the best sequels to John Carpenter’s masterpiece.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
Directed by Dwight H. Little
Screenplay by Alan B. McElroy
Starring Donald Pleasence, Ellie Cornell, Danielle Harris, Michael Pataki, Beau Starr, Kathleen Kinmont and George P. Wilbur
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers Review
When we last saw Michael Myers, he was in an exploding hospital room. Appearing to burn to death on the floor in front of his sister Laurie Strode. Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) sacrificed himself to save Laurie and put an end to the evil once and for all. Flash forward to 1988…and forget all of that. Loomis and Myers have both inexplicably survived. Loomis has some scarring but otherwise got away unscathed. Myers has been comatose for ten years (movie time) and awakens to chase down another member of his family. Laurie Strode is the one who hasn’t survived the decade that followed the night he came home. She died in an offscreen car crash. Leaving behind a daughter, Jamie (Danielle Harris).
It’s not that important to know any of this information. The Halloween timeline has been rewritten three times since Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers hit theaters. Laurie dies off screen because Jamie Lee Curtis had no interest in returning to the series at that point in time. She would resurrect the character ten years later in Halloween H20. That was the first time Halloween’s timeline was reset. With that reset went all of Loomis’s adventures beyond Halloween II…and the Jamie Lloyd character in its entirety. In 2018 we’d go on to lose Halloween II’s part of the story too.
But it’s not like the movies cease to exist. They just…no longer count. There are positives and negatives to the whole thing. Undoing the brother/sister part of the story is a major positive. Unwriting the nonsensical backstory and eye rolling explanations the series would thrust upon Michael Myers is too. But we lose some genuinely compelling pieces of the story too. Most notably, what Dr. Loomis is up to after that fateful 1978 night…and one of the series finest characters…Jamie Lloyd.
Jamie always deserved better than she got after Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. The ending of the film teases a big future for her that the series never delivers on. Danielle Harris is so dynamic as the young final girl that you feel an extra pang of anger when she is recast and quickly dispatched in the sixth installment. That’s without even getting into how they violated her character in between 5 and 6. Jamie is one of the strongest characters in the series. Especially in this movie.
Loomis is back on Michael’s trail in Halloween 4. It remains his sole purpose in life…and we love him for it. Pleasence gives one of his better performances in the series here…probably because the material is better than most of his other outings. Ellie Cornell plays Jamie’s foster sister Rachel. She’s the more traditional final girl even though Jamie is the object of Michael’s obsession. There’s no bad performance in the ensemble. A rarity for late 80s slasher movies.
Outside of Harris’s iconic portrayal…the thing that Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers nails the most is the look and feel of a Halloween movie. After II ramped up the blood to match its contemporary slasher counterparts…4 dials it back down and offers a classic sensibility. The movie looks like what a sequel to Halloween should look like ten years later. That doesn’t happen too often in the 13 film long series. At least…it never happened quite as well as it did here.
At its core…Halloween movies should be simple. An unexplainable evil rocks a quiet midwestern suburb in a quest to murder an innocent girl. That’s all these movies ever need to be. You can (and they have) expand on it to show the effects on the town…but the last thing Michael Myers needs is confirmation of a supernatural background or a cult of townspeople behind his evil. You don’t even need him to be related to his target. Though that’s something we dealt with for decades. The Return of Michael Myers is like John Carpenter’s original in that it keeps that stuff to a minimum. The series goes completely off the rails soon enough…but this simple, stripped-down throwback is more of what the series should strive to be.
It’s no mistake that every reset of the franchise marks a bump up in quality. Halloween 4 has the subtitle The Return of Michael Myers because Halloween III: Season of the Witch wasn’t even set in the Michael Myers universe. People wanted him back…and they wanted to make sure there was no mistake. Halloween 5 and Curse of Michael Myers do the series in (almost) for good. The success of Scream saw renewed interest in slasher movies…and thus we saw Jamie Lee Curtis return for Halloween H20. Resurrection would follow and destroy it again. We’ll ignore the Rob Zombie remake and sequel and stick with the Jamie Lee Curtis series for this point. Halloween (2018) gave us a look at Laurie and Michael 40 years later…and then saw Kills and Ends take an odd path of its own.
1988’s Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. 1998’s Halloween H20. 2018’s Halloween. All timeline resets. Each has an argument for being the best sequel the series has seen. The thing they all have in common…they strip the series back down to basics and deliver a proper follow-up story. Halloween 4 is the only one to do it without Jamie Lee Curtis and the iconic Laurie Strode character. Such is the power of Danielle Harris’s Jamie Lloyd.
It’s been 35 years since Michael Myers stalked his niece around Haddonfield. Whenever the topic of where to take the series in a post Laurie Strode world comes up…this is the movie that I come back to. The one time it worked. The one time the series didn’t need Laurie Strode to care about what Michael Myers was doing. With Curtis officially moved on from the franchise (again)…maybe the answer to what’s next should take a good look at what was next the first time someone asked that question. A legacy sequel to Halloween 4 is likely to be a better idea than whatever they come up with. Delivering the promise of the film’s final image 40 years later for the series 50th anniversary? It would be a dream come true. Four decades in the making.
There’s one thing for sure about the Halloween series. Time can always be rewritten.
Scare Value
More than anything Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers feels like a sequel to Halloween. That wasn’t really true of Halloween II. It becomes less true as the series grinds on. But on this night, 10 years after we were introduced to him, Michael Myers has come home, and it feels right. A remarkable achievement given Jamie Lee Curtis opted out of the whole thing. Danielle Harris is incredible as her orphaned daughter Jamie. Donald Pleasence turns in his second strongest performance of the series. Impressively avoids replicating the 80s slasher craze…instead giving us a movie that looks and feels like Halloween. Ten years later.
4/5
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers Links
Streaming on Shudder
Rent/Buy on VOD from Vudu and Amazon
Buy on 4K/Blu-Ray from Amazon
2 thoughts on “Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers Review”