Halloween Ranked

Halloween III: Season Of The Witch might not have Michael Myers, Laurie Strode or the iconic theme song, but it certain understands what makes the first film work better than any of the Myers sequels/Zombie films. Tommy Lee Wallace able to establish a sense of atmosphere and a good slow burn pace as well as Carpenter, Dean Cundey's cinematography is just as good as it was in the first Halloween, Carpenter delivers a mood score that ranks among his best and Chocran's suited body guards have that similar inhuman boogeyman feel that Myers had. And this is probably the only time the series has been interested in any kind of social commentary. I can't bring myself to say it's as good as the first, but it almost is, and if Green's Halloween ranks just behind this one I'll be satisfied.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is a film that either has a lot going for it or a lot going against it, depending on the angle you take with it. With Laurie Strode having been killed off screen before the events of this film, we follow her daughter Jamie (Danielle Harris) and adoptive sister (Ellie Cornell) as they go through Halloween night being stalked by Jamie's unlce Michael Myers, who has returned to Haddonfield to kill his last relative. So obviously, this film is retreading a lot of ground from the first film and does it in a way that lacks a lot of the subtly the original executed so well (i.e. we have to see Myers kill the mechanic he steals his uniform from). Director Dwight H. Little doesn't try to mimic Carpenter's style like past Halloween directors and takes an approach that's more conventional yet confident and he's able to carve out quite a few suspenseful set pieces. Cinematography Peter Lyons Collister, on the other hand, takes a lot of his cues from Dean Cundey and drapes the films in blue lights, giving the film a familiar look to compliment Little's take on directing. It was a bad call for Halloween II to make Myers and Strode related, and while I find it frustrating that it's a plot point they insist on following up on, but Halloween 4 uses it much better than II (it would honestly be better if Halloween II just didn't exist and this was a stand alone story of Myers trying to kill one relative). The acting is relatively ok for a late 80's slasher, especially the young Danielle Harris who plays Jamie Lloyd as a girl trying to connect with her adoptive sister while being haunted by nightmares of her uncle. The screenplay is well structured for a slasher movie but it still lines up its victims in ways that make them obvious victims. And the ending is so effective shocking, that it almost takes you a minute to realize the film did nothing to earn it. So again, it depends on the angle you take. If you look at it as a slasher movie, it's confidently direct, stylish, well produced and restrained in a ways a lot of others aren't. But as a Halloween movie, it's a dumber reatread of the first film that doubles down on bad plot points from the second instead of expanding upon the interesting direction established by the third. To me, it's ok.

Halloween: H20 was the first Halloween film to come out after Scream, the film which made the slasher genre feel the need to be self referential and hip. Understanding that it's part of the legacy of a beloved film, H20 seems to have ambitions beyond being a meta genre commentary and instead aims to elevate the slasher genre to a more adult level. However, it still can't avoid some of the trends the slasher movie were starting to take. The film, retconning Laurie Strode back to life, follows her 20 years after the events of the first two films (so she's still Michael Myers' sister), where she's now living as in witness protection as a dean for a California boarding school, who has a tendency to be over protective of her son whose the same age she was when her brother came home. It's the sleekest Halloween production yet, it explores Strode's trauma and adult life earnestly, it aims to recreate the slow burn of the first film without relying on cheap scares and nudity, and it even makes the misguided choice of going for an orchestral score. However this grown up slasher movie never fully takes off because it does the post Scream thing where it telegraphs the slasher tropes so you know how genre savvy the film is, as if it's trying to remind you not to take it as seriously as it wants to be taken. Trying to take inspirations from both Silence of the Lambs and Scream results in a stylistically unsure film, but with Friday the 13th alum Steve Miner at the helm, what it really ends up being is a competent slasher movie that has a couple effective moments.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is an incredibly stupid movie, but its biggest sin is just being so dull up to the point where its idiocy becomes inoffensive. This is an improvement over the last entry, which fell to many of the worst trends of the slasher genre. This one has more of a sense of style, establishes a better atmosphere and uses its music cues better. Michael's target in this film is the baby of his niece Jamie, who despite surviving him for two films is brutally killed early on here (I'm not a fan of seeing the final girl of a slasher get killed in the sequel. The Nightmare On Elm Street series pulled it off, and only once). The baby finds its way to Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd), the child Laurie Strode was babysitting in the first movie. Traumatized by those events, he's been living in a boarding house that's across the street from where his attempted murderer used to live, which is now occupied by the Strode family. Doyle has been studying this ancient druid curse that has some connection to Michael Myers as well as one of the Strode kids who lives across the street and there's a druid cult interested in harnessing this power. All the elements that make up the plot are so absurdly coincidental that it hardly becomes engaging, and pushing the mythology of Michael Myers this far makes him even less grounded to anything we can really find scary. This is the the mid 90's Halloween, and there's a lot of that, especially with the dated Howard Stern type character who had to exist in every movie then. It's never really suspenseful and sometimes rushes its scares, although it does have one amazing kill. Rudd is darkly charismatic enough to be engaging when the rest of the film isn't, and Donald Pleasence's final performance as Dr. Loomis is one of his stronger ones (he's a lot better when he plays the character on the edge of sanity rather than off the deep end). But this one's mostly just dumb and uninteresting.

Halloween 5: The Revenge Of Michael Myers is a major step down in quality from part four. When the past films at the very least attempted to establish an atmosphere, this one establishes itself as very off from the outset. It takes place a year after part 4, as we follow Jamie (Danielle Harris returning the role) who's in a children's clinic mute from the trauma of her last encounter. God bless Harris because she's the only thing this film really has going for it. While the series hasn't always hinted something inhuman and otherworldly about Michael Myers, this one establishes an actual psychic connection between Myers and his niece, which makes him less grounded and adds an extra layer of stupidity to the sister plot point. But besides this psychic connection subplot, there's also a typical slasher set up of teens getting together to party that has little to do with the main psychic plot other than to be bumped off by Myers. And there's a mysterious figure who you expect to be paid off in someway, but he never gets explained and just creates a dumb ending that sets up questions for a sequel I don't care to be answer. At it's best, this feels like one of the lesser Nightmare On Elm Street movies. At it's worst, it feels like one of the lesser Friday the 13th movies.