(1989) ***1/2
Call me crazy, but I've always liked Donald Pleasence. I'm not put off by his hamminess in the slightest. He pulls off dead earnestness, while at the same time remaining the calmest person in the room. Dr. Loomis has studied Michael closely. He knows what to expect from him. And so since the moment we first met him, even before Michael escaped from the asylum, he's known how to respond to Michael's every move. Understanding precisely how Michael's mind works is, indeed, what has kept him in the game to this point, while all of the other known quantities have fallen by the wayside.
Here though, for the first time since Laurie Strode, we have a new known quantity in Jamie Lloyd. She, like Laurie in Halloween II, has already been through one terrifying Michael Meyers experience. She's still scared completely out of her wits, but she's focused enough to think and move quickly when she's under pressure and that saves her on more than one occasion. I've always been fond of Danielle Harris. She turned in good work in Last Boy Scout and Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead. She doesn't get talked about much in discussions of child actors these days because her child actor years were overshadowed by Macaulay Culkin. And while she'll never be spoken of in the same breath as Dakota Fanning, she's every bit as convincing playing the part of the kid that thinks. Also, she's got a great face for fear. Watch as she wakes up from her nightmare in the hospital in her first scene. At this point, she has no voice, but there she is, screaming her poor head off and barely a squeak comes out. Her finest moment in Halloween V involves a laundry chute.
It's also worth mentioning that the Haddonfield police is now completely on the ball when it comes to Michael Meyers related mayhem. Always arriving in overwhelming force at a Meyers sighting, there are two shots of a line of cop cars charging down the streets of Haddonfield. If I lived in Haddonfield and I heard 5 cop cars, sirens blaring, even if it was from clear on the other side of town, I'd know exactly what was happening and who was involved. I'd also be paralyzed with fear because it wouldn't be entirely out of the realm of possibility that sometime that evening, I'd be getting stabbed to death with an enormous knife. No wonder at the beginning of the film, a rock gets thrown through Jamie's window at the hospital. That's not some crackpot throwing that thing, that's someone who really doesn't want to die and wishes the little Meyers-bait girl would go somewhere else.
Surprisingly effective. And I might even have given it four stars if it weren't for that patently ridiculous ending.
4 comments:
My problem with this film is that Haddonfield is portrayed as a white-trash, hillbilly town rather than the middle class suburb it was in the previous films. Also the Myers house seems to change from film to film. I'm with you though, I love DP in these films and he's sorely missed in the later sequels. I would love to have seen him in H2O.
Yeah, that makes for some pretty gaping plot holes changing the location -- this was shot in SLC, Utah and the first was shot in, I think Burbank.
However, I think it kind of makes sense that the common denominator has lowered a bunch in Haddonfield. A multiple murderer makes that his vacation home. All the decent-folk went elsewhere.
Good point. I was going to say that your statement "If I lived in Haddonfield..." might as well end in "I'm knife-fodder." But I think you covered it.
That ridonkulous ending is a lead-up to Halloween 6, which is much, much stupider.
I don't think Donald Pleasance is all that. He takes his role too seriously for the quality level of the writing. And I don't care for Loomis' obsessive relationship with Michael Myers in Haloween 4-6. They're all one big blur to me.
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