Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers

Directed by Dwight H. Little, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers follows George P. Wilbur’s Michael Myers as he sets out to find and kill his one remaining relative (Danielle Harris’ Jamie) before Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) can stop him. It’s clear immediately that Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers suffers from an often aggressively low-rent feel that remains a distraction, to put it mildly, from start to finish, as filmmaker Little, working from Alan B. McElroy’s screenplay, delivers a flat, far-from-atmospheric sequel that contains few, if any, compelling characters or memorable sequences – with Pleasence’s predictably engaging turn as the obsessive Dr. Loomis standing as the one bright spot within an otherwise sluggish misfire. (Even Myers himself comes off as a tedious, less-than-terrifying villain this time around.) The arms-length vibe is compounded by a woefully erratic midsection riddled with questionable elements and encounters, and although the picture admittedly does contain a small handful of effective interludes (eg Michael takes out a pickup truck full of hillbillies), Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, by the time it arrives at its eye-rollingly anticlimactic conclusion, has firmly cemented its place as a mostly misbegotten entry within a seriously hit-and-miss horror franchise.

*1/2 out of ****