I did myself a major disservice. I rewatched Halloween 4 this morning, and man, man man is this better than I remembered. I think I grouped this together in the Halloween 3 and 6 category as a film that was a steep decline in value and in horror. I remembered that Danielle Harris was great, but I also confused this with Halloween 5 and even with 6, put them all together in my mind as an odd mishmash of white masked killer movies.
Halloween 4 picks up with Michael in an institution, being transfered again to somewhere, and Doctor Loomis returns and learns that this is happening too late to do anything about it. It's hilarious that they give him a tiny face scar and they don't explain at all how he survived the explosion which happened in Halloween 2. It's fine, don't ask. Of course when Michael is being transfered he escapes and takes a truck and heads out to Haddonfield. In Haddonfield, he has a relative named Jamie, a young girl who is his niece, Laurie's daughter. Jamie is having nightmares about Michael and soon enough Michael arrives and her nightmares have come to life...
This movie was a lot better than I remembered. First of all, the main girl in the movie Rachel is played by Ellie Cornell and she delivers a great and strong performance almost as good as the original Halloween girl Laurie Strode. She is written with confidence and cool, but is vulnerable as well. She is painted as being firmly on Jamie's side as her adopted sister. Jamie is played by Danielle Harris and is excellent in the film. She is smart, funny, pained, but confident and powerful and unwilling to submit to Michael.
As the movie goes, we have pretty average pacing in the film, and it's got a great balance of kills as well as plot movements. The kills are great and one thing I liked and was surprised by was how little Michael uses his trademark knife to kill people. When he gets to Jamie and Rachel in the last 30 minutes or so, that is a fucking thrillride nearly paralleling the original Halloween. I don't know why they decided not to use the trademark Halloween music more, that's one thing I thought would make it a bit stronger, but it's still a really strong, really fantastic end sequence.
I guess the one thing I'll mention and spoil is the very ending where we got hints that with Michael truly dead now, we were going to switch to Danielle Harris as the new killer. You know, it's a solid idea even if Firday the 13th did it first with Tommy. I don't blame them for not sticking with it, but it would've been interesting. I don't remember how they explain this in Halloween 5, but I also bought that on DVD and it's next, fool!
I thought this was like a 2ish star follow up with murky plot and strange acting. It's not. This is better than Halloween 2 and it's better than most the other sequels I can think of off the top of my head. It got a bit derided of course, but this is a true slasher and a great Halloween film that I now own on DVD. 4 stars.
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