HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS

CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS, THOUGH IF YOU DON'T KNOW BY NOW HOW THESE THINGS WORK OUT THERE'S REALLY NO HELP FOR YOU

Having flirted with the idea of making unconnected horror movies under the Halloween banner, on one level it's rather nice to see the producers deciding that Halloween III: Season Of The Witch wasn't really the direction to take the "franchise", and promptly hauled Michael Myers and Dr Loomis back from the grave for another festival of stabbing and shouting respectively. Never mind that when last seen, both Myers and Loomis were staggering around Haddonfield Hospital burning to death - if Jason Voorhees can come back every year despite being macheted to death on several occasions, so can Michael. It's the nonsensical what-the-hell lore of slasher movies.

On another level, however, it wasn't really such a good idea because the result is frankly pretty lame. Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Myers (the subtitle is presumably there to reassure us that this is a "proper" Halloween movie) actually begins with a helpful sanitarium guard providing us with a handy chunk of exposition detailing how Loomis and Myers both miraculously survived the fire at the end of Halloween II ten years ago. Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) is now dead and her seven-year-old daughter Jamie (Danielle Harris) is plagued by nightmares of The Shape even though he's been in the asylum since before she was even born - but on Halloween night Myers wakes up, escapes and heads back to town to kill members of his family that he doesn't even know exist. Loomis (the mighty Donald Pleasence), still wearing the same old raincoat and now boasting stick-on burn scars, limps off to Haddonfield to stop him yet again.....

It's directed by Dwight H Little, who's done a few semi-decent films: Marked For Death is probably Steven Seagal's funniest movie, Anacondas: Hunt For The Blood Orchid is engagingly stupid, and I'm one of the seven or eight people who rather like his take on The Phantom Of The Opera with Robert Englund. But Halloween 4 is weak: there's little in the way of blood and gore (it's still an 18 though) and even using the famous John Carpenter theme as the backbone to the soundtrack doesn't help. It's not as if I'm a huge fan of the original John Carpenter film, so Halloween 4 didn't exactly have mountains to climb, but it doesn't even achieve the even lesser heights of Halloween II. Certainly it's always fun to see Donald Pleasence ranting about how dangerous and inhuman Myers is ("Evil on two legs!") but it's nowhere near enough to make the movie actually worth seeing. Totally forgettable, and I'm reconsidering adding Halloween 5 to the rentals list.

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Forget it: