Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)
d. Dominique Othenin-Girard, 96 minutes

Film Plot Summary

The film recapped the conclusion of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) in its opening, after the credits. With abrupt maneuverings and the sharp braking of a pickup truck driven by Rachel Carruthers (Ellie Cornell), Michael Myers (George P. Wilbur) was thrown off the top of the cab. She deliberately attempted to run him down, and his body was sent flying through the air into a fence.

Sheriff Ben Meeker (Beau Starr) and state troopers arrived at the scene, as Jamie Lloyd/Carruthers (Danielle Harris), in her clown costume, was walking to the seemingly-lifeless corpse, where she touched the burned/scarred hand of her uncle's body. Revived, the Shape suddenly gripped his knife and sat up, forcing the troopers to open fire as he rose up. Michael was relentlessly shot dozens of times by state police before he fell down into the entrance of an abandoned, collapsing mine shaft.

The killer survived the long fall and a dynamite blast as he crawled out a side tunnel and then floated downstream in a rushing river. Later, he stumbled into a river-side shack inhabited by a local mountain man/hermit (Harper Roisman), and collapsed onto the wooden floor.

HALLOWEEN EVE. One Year Later. [1989] CHILDREN'S CLINIC, Haddonfield, Illinois.

During a thunder and lightning storm, nine year-old Jamie was undergoing monitoring-testing as she tossed and turned. In the mental health clinic, she woke up screaming (although her cries were muted) as she recalled the final nightmarish scene of the previous film, in which she wore her clown costume (with mask) and stabbed her step-mother Darlene Carruthers (Karen Alston) as a bath was being prepared for her. She still retained a telepathic, psychically-possessed link between herself and her uncle Michael, after touching his hand, and their movements mirrored each other. The traumatized girl experienced frightening visions and a seizure-like presence as she wrote on a chalkboard: "He's coming for me."

Michael Myers (Donald L. Shanks) awoke from a year-long coma at the same moment, donned his mask, and murdered the mountain man (by stabbing him several times - after breaking his neck?) from behind (# 1 death). Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) interrupted the girl's emergency treatment to open her trachea, asserting that she would stabilize.

The recuperating, mute Jamie was visited in her clinic room by her foster sister Rachel Carruthers, her ebullient friend Tina Williams (Wendy Kaplan), and Dr. Loomis. A rock thrown through her window contained a note: "THE EVIL CHILD MUST DIE!" Dr. Loomis feared that the whole series of events, at Halloween-time, might happen again - the inhabitants of the town were irrationally scared. As Rachel returned to her red-brick Haddonfield home with the Carruthers' new Doberman Pinscher dog Max, the masked killer watched her from nearby bushes.

In her art class, Jamie sensed a premonition of death (believing Max was in danger), as Rachel was being stalked at her house - followed voyeuristically by the camera (and by Myers?). Dr. Loomis phoned Rachel, interrupting her taking a shower and getting ready for the weekend party. Nude and wrapped in only a towel, Rachel fled from her house when ordered by Dr. Loomis to vacate immediately.

Afterwards, police found no evidence of foul play and the dog Max returned safely. Later however, as Rachel dressed in her upstairs bedroom, Myers again appeared in her closet as she dressed. In another room, after Rachel found a framed picture of her foster sister Jamie with cracked glass, she was suddenly stabbed in the chest/shoulder with a pair of scissors wielded by Michael (# 2 death). This violent death again caused shaking and convulsions throughout Jamie's body.

In the police department, the crazed Dr. Loomis recalled the emotionless killer of the previous Halloween with Sheriff Ben Meeker (Beau Starr):

"You never saw his eyes. You never saw that nothing, no expression, blank... My memory goes back twelve years to the night when I offered...(he removed his black glove to show his disfigured, scarred, fire-burned hand) Look at that. I prayed that evil would burn in Hell, but in my heart, I knew that Hell would not have him."

They were summoned to the local cemetery. Party girl Tina arrived at the Carruthers home (where there was no evidence of Rachel), looking forward to a weekend Halloween party (while Rachel's parents were away). She was planning to party with her friends:

• Tina's boyfriend, car enthusiast Mikey (Jonathan Chapin)
• blonde Samantha Thomas (Tamara Glynn)
• Samantha's boyfriend, Food Mart store-clerk Spitz (Matthew Walker)

Although Michael was in the house spying on them, nothing happened, although he soon turned up outside the Childrens Clinic as a gardener. A terrorized Jamie thought she was being stalked by Myers as she fled through the clinic's corridors, laundry room, and basement's furnace room, although it was only the clinic's real gardener (Jack North).

Dr. Loomis badgered Jamie - begging her to help him find Michael - he asserted frantically:

"We both know he's alive. But you know where he is! Why, why are you protecting him?...You can't hide from him. He can always get to you...Today in the cemetery, somebody dug up a coffin - it was a coffin of a nine-year-old girl. What do you think he's going to do with that! Huh? You're nine years old, aren't you, Jamie?...Tears won't get you anywhere. Help me to find him. We'll find him together. There's a reason why he has this power over you. Do you ever wonder what it is?"

A Chicago-bound bus arrived in Haddonfield, where an unidentified, black-dressed, trench-coated figure with silver steel-tipped boots disembarked. Dr. Loomis took his gun into the Myers home in town - it was completely in disrepair and overgrown with weeds. He called out: "Michael" as he roamed through the dusty, vacant rooms: "Have you come home, Michael? I know what you want from her." The mysterious stranger with boots (and a tattooed rune on his wrist, similar to the one on Michael's wrist) was also in the house.

Tina's boyfriend Mikey loaded his trunk with three cases of stolen beer from Spitz' food store for their planned Tower Farm Halloween party later that night. Michael Myers scratched Mikey's freshly-waxed and polished convertible with a garden claw implement. When Mikey challenged the masked killer ("OK asshole, you wanna play? Trick or treat"), he was grabbed by the throat and stabbed in the forehead with the three-pronged claw tool (# 3 death) before being dragged away. A costume pageant was being planned at the Childrens Clinic - Jamie dressed as a pink princess with a tiara, and one of her young friends, Billy Hill (Jeffrey Landman), was dressed as a pirate. During the pageant, Jamie fainted and convulsed again - because of the impending danger to Tina.

In front of the Carruthers house where the black-garbed stranger stood, Tina - costumed as a sexy room service maid, was picked up by the masked Michael driving deceased Mikey's car. He was wearing her present - a grotesque, bulbous-nosed mask. She flirtatiously told him: "I just love barbaric men" and "I can't resist your new look." She wasn't aware that Mikey was dead, and called him a "psycho-boyfriend" when he screeched to a halt in the middle of the street, to stop for cigarettes at a gas station convenience store. Stuttering out a few words, Jamie was able to warn Dr. Loomis about Tina's location (she identified his location at Bill's gas station at 5th and Main, known for selling giant cookies), and police were radioed to intercept and protect her there, as Michael (with his own mask) drove away. When Tina was reunited with Jamie at the clinic, the young girl was able to speak, and expressed fears that Tina was going to be the next victim of the "boogeyman."

Two state deputy police officers, Deputy Nick Ross (Frank Como) and Deputy Tom Farrah (David Ursin), who were ordered to follow Tina, drove her to the Tower Farm party. They unknowingly led Michael Myers to her location. Seen intermittently and intercut into the next few scenes, Jamie and Billy ran on foot to the farm house, to warn Tina about her life being in grave danger.

At the Tower Farm, Tina, Samantha, and practical joker Spitz played a prank on the two idiotic officers - the two females pretended to be assaulted by a knife-wielding masked 'Michael Myers" (Spitz in costume). In the farm's barn adjacent to the farm house, the trio ran after some kittens (Tina: "I'm coming to get you"). When Tina returned to the house, Spitz and Samantha prepared to make love (he produced a handy condom) among some straw bales. [The puritanical morality of the film series necessitated their deaths.] Spitz was impaled with a pitchfork stabbed into the middle of his back (# 4 death), splattering blood onto Samantha's breasts underneath him. And then Samantha's body was sliced with a curved scythe (# 5 death).

Outside, the two deputies, Ross and Farrah, innocently assuming that Spitz was still wearing the 'Michael Myers' mask, were both stabbed multiple times with a pitchfork in their squad car (# 6-7 deaths) (off-screen). Afterwards, Tina, who went looking for her missing friends in the barn, called out:

"You guys, I don't hear any noise. Are you sure you’re doing it right? You guys wanna come skinny dipping? Maybe you guys are already naked?"

The bloodied bodies of her two friends rolled onto her, and as she fled screaming to the house, she saw the two dead patrol officers in their vehicle. When the two children arrived at the farm, they and Tina were chased by Myers, who was driving Mikey's stolen vehicle through a crop of Christmas trees, until he crashed the car into a tree and appeared dead. However, Tina was the ultimate victim when Myers was resurrected and brutally knifed her in the chest with a butcher knife (# 8 death), as she defended Jamie.

Sheriff Meeker and multiple police cars arrived on the scene, as Dr. Loomis aided the two young children. Loomis asked Jamie in the ambulance: "Now are you willing to help me?" and she agreed to help in his quest to kill the evil Myers. Loomis spoke facing into the woods that surrounded the crime scene, luring Michael back to his old house in town - with Jamie as bait:

"Michael? It will destroy you too, one day, Michael? This rage which drives you. You think if you kill them all, it will go away. It won't! You have to fight it in the place where it's strongest, where it all began. If you want to get rid of this rage, Michael, go home, GO HOME! Go to your house! I shall be there waiting for you! You will find her waiting for you!"

Jamie sat conspicuously in view, in front of the second-story window in the large Victorian-style Myers house protected by Deputy Charlie Bloch (Troy Evans). She was planted there while other officers and Dr. Loomis surrounded the home or guarded from the inside. The massive operation was circumvented when a distress call from the clinic diverted most of the police force to that location. Dr. Loomis predicted: "Now you'll come, won't you, Michael?"

Outside the house, Deputy Eddy Grey's (Fenton Quinn) parked police car was rammed from behind, and his face was repeatedly smashed against the steering wheel (# 9 death) - his death cries was heard on Deputy Bloch's walkie-talkie. At gunpoint, Dr. Loomis coerced Deputy Bloch to remain in the house and proceed with the original plan. Loomis was excitedly expectant: "You've come back to us, Michael." He then turned and spoke to the menacing masked figure in front of him:

"I know why you've come back, Michael. Because the little girl, the little girl can stop the rage inside. She knows how to do it, Michael. If you let her, she can stop the rage. The rage inside. No, she's not up there, Michael. She's down here in the middle of the old house..Your house, Michael. Your house. Don't you remember how much better you used to be? Let me take you, let me take you to her. She'll take your rage away."

When Loomis reached for Myers' knife, he was slashed across his chest, his head was pushed through a window, and he was thrown through a stair railing.

Deputy Bloch attempted to escape with a rope ladder extended from the second floor window, as Michael burst through the door. He emptied his gun into Myers with ten shots, with no visible effect, and then was hanged in one of the rope ladder nooses (# 10 death) outside the window, as Jamie fled to another room. Sheriff Meeker supervised as the bodies of Nurse Patsey (Betty Carvalho) and Dr. Max Hart (Max Robinson) were taken out on stretchers (# 11-12 deaths) (off-screen) at the Childrens Clinic. [There may have been more bodies in the clinic, but they were not seen or mentioned.]

Jamie's screams echoed in the laundry chute as she dropped to the basement, and then valiantly struggled to climb away from Myers' frenzied stabbing knife through the metal. She managed to emerge from the chute on the next floor up, and then found herself in the candle-lit attic of the Myers house (littered with the displayed bodies of victims, including the dog Max, Mikey, and Rachel). As the killer approached, she laid in a coffin (the one that Michael had earlier dug up in the cemetery) ready to accept death. As he raised his sacrificial knife, she called out: "Uncle! Boogeyman." She pointed at her eye, and requested that he remove his mask so that she could see his eyes: "Let me see." Michael paused, then removed his mask. She responded: "You're just like me" - watching as a single tear streaked down his face.

When she reached to wipe it away from his cheek, "Let me," he reacted wildly and continued his raging pursuit. She ran down the stairs, directly into the arms of Dr. Loomis, who cried out: "You want her. Here she is...A little girl. Come and get her." He led Myers into a trap in the living room, using Jamie as the prize. A heavy metal chain net was dropped from the ceiling on Myers. Dr. Loomis fired four tranquilizer darts into the seized madman, and then beat him unconscious with a wooden plank to further subdue him, as he cried out: "Die, die Michael."

Myers was taken into police custody and placed temporarily in the Haddonfield Police Department's jail, for future transport to a maximum-security facility by the US National Guard, where Meeker claimed "he'll stay until the day he dies." Jamie added: "He'll never die."

In a patrol car outside, as Jamie awaited transportation back to the clinic, an explosion rocked the jail. The black-garbed stranger with silver steel-tipped boots had entered the police department, and murdered numerous police officers with a machine gun, including Sheriff Meeker (# 13 death) and seven other officers (# 14-20 deaths) (all off-screen). In the aftermath, Jamie walked through the carnage all around, and looked at Michael's empty cell with the exploded, flaming bars bent open. She sobbed and screamed: "No, No!"

[A sequel was required to reveal the identity of the mysterious stranger or Man in Black with a briefcase or doctor's bag - he was Dr. Terence Wynn (aka Nurse Wynn), the former administrator of Smith's Grove - Warren County Sanitarium, and an ex-colleague of Dr. Loomis. He was also the leader of a Druid-like cult.]

Film Notables (Awards, Facts, etc.)

The fifth film in the series.

With a production budget of approximately $5 million, and box-office gross revenues of $11.6 million (domestic) - and one of the least successful films in the franchise.

Body Count: 20, and one dog.