Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers - It Escapes!

As much as I LOVE the opening minutes (which look to have been shot second unit on the outskirts of a city in rural America), and it does set an October seasonal and eerie tone, it really has nothing to do with the majority of “Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers” (1988), a celebrated return of the white-masked, mechanic-suited, silent, stone-cold killer that Akkad couldn’t wait to bring back to form onscreen, moving the story to a different pursuit, a child of the Laurie Strode character (Danielle Harris). I dig the Howarth score set to the various Halloween homemade décor on some seemingly unused farm, a sort of slight earthy “voice” accompanying each shot, the kind of sound you might hear all alone while taking a stroll on some boring insignificant chilly morning. It just works its spell on me.

I’ve talked about that in times past, too. I don’t want to fail to mention, though, as I continue to work through the Halloween and Friday the 13^th films, how openings can often seem more inspired than what follows them. I don’t think anything in the fourth Halloween film quite captures what those opening shots do in terms of spooky autumnal atmosphere, although I do like how all involved managed to really bring out more of a feeling of Illinois, the Midwest, small towns and everyday life, sort of keeping in spirit at least at the onset what Carpenter was doing in “Halloween” (1978).

Following the opening minutes, director Dwight Little reveals a rainy Illinois night, an ambulance coming to “escort” Michael to a different institution, as Dr. Loomis (Pleasence, showing a doctor who is quite slipping away in mania because no one seems to get that Michael should never see the light of day on the outside of any kind again), burned but alive (despite every reason to believe he would have been burnt to a crisp) trying to tell the administrator (Pataki who considers him worthless and better off dead!) not to let this killer off the premises. The Howarth score still holds its chill, punching home that if a maniac, a boogeyman that no one wants to meet in the dark, is loosed, this is the kind of night he would perfectly fit. “Jesus hasn’t got nothing to do with this place.”

When Michael’s hand slips off the bed, it recalls Friday the 13^th, and a majority of Little’s film, I always felt even when I was a teenager renting this on VHS—it was quite a popular choice, as when I would go to rent it sometimes, the box would be without the tape in that memorable white case—feels quite closer to Jason Voorhees than any Myers interpretation up to this date. Of course by 1988 the slasher genre was starting to falter, so Little’s effort, not nearly as gory as what came before it a few years earlier, was indicative of the final embers still flickering off the heated bricks. The film is at its most violent really in the ambulance where Michael pushes his thumb through a paramedic’s forehead after learning about Jamie, his niece, being alive in Haddonfield.

Pataki, happy to have signed the transfer back to Smith’s Grove, isn’t the least bit shaken by the ambulance crash and Pleasence’s Loomis once again realizes “It” has escaped. In the past Halloween films, Sheriff Brackett blamed him for the release of The Shape even though he tried, as he does in Part IV, to keep Michael locked up. Once again, Michael is loose despite efforts never taken seriously…Loomis feels he must take matters into his own hands.

Rachel caught Brady