‘Halloween 5’ Is A Slasher With Heart Thanks To Tina Williams
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers is my favorite sequel from the original timeline. Halloween III aside (because that’s an entirely different beast), Halloween 5 is the first time since the original that Michael Myers feels dangerous. While Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers tried to shake up the formula with some blonde hair and stunning autumnal composition, seven years after Michael Myers was last seen, his return there felt perfunctory, not noteworthy. Luckily, Halloween 4’s inceptive hermit murder was just a tease for the weird, cultish mayhem Halloween 5 had in store. Yet, for everything the movie does well, especially within a franchise known for its fair share of incredulous choices (the death of Laurie Strode in Resurrection, Jamie’s death in Curse), there is one thing it does better than most long-running horror movies; characterize its body count. Of particular note? Wendy Kaplan’s Tina Williams.
Halloween 4 endeavored to cultivate some earnest pathos with the pairing of Myers’ niece Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris) and foster sibling, Rachel (Ellie Cornell). While it’s undoubtedly the best part of the movie, it doesn’t have the space it needs to develop fully. Rachel’s arc is profound—that rooftop chase is a standout—but the Jamie/Rachel dynamic is only just started in Halloween 4. Infamously, the movie ends with Jamie ostensibly taking over the Myers mantle, though producers were quick to take that back by the subsequent entry. Jamie’s murder of her foster mother becomes an attack, and in the time since, she’s been institutionalized at the Haddonfield Children’s Clinic with Dr. Loomis. She’s mute and shares a telepathic link with her uncle, and other than Rachel, Tina, and Dr. Loomis, everyone in town fears her as the second coming of death.
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Only, of course, the original death is still there. Myers crawls from a mineshaft a year after Halloween 4 to wreak havoc all over town again. The first of Halloween 5’s stakes comes with what many consider to be the movie’s core conceptual sin—Rachel’s death. While remarkably tense and the closest the later sequels have come to matching the efficacy of Carpenter’s sequel, her stalk-and-slash scene threatens to rob the movie of its single source of heart. Yet, killing the past paved the way for an ephemeral yet no less affecting pairing of Tina and Jamie.
Tina never learns of Rachel’s death and the burgeoning Myers threat is new by the time she sacrifices her life to save Jamie’s. The 80s weren’t exactly hesitant to center a slasher franchise around a child protagonist (Child’s Play, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter), and most of the tension stems from the unwillingness of children to communicate and the reluctance of adults to believe them. Tina, not present for Halloween 4, is quick to enter the fray, gamely protecting Jamie when it matters most. A sensational car chase, some dead teens in a barn, and a knife in the moonlight spells doom for Tina, though it does permit Jamie to escape, only for the movie’s other main adult, Dr. Loomis, to exploit her and use her as bait. We really need to talk about Dr. Loomis’ rich shift from hero to quasi-villain.
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Broadly, Tina becomes the movie’s new Rachel, though the two don’t have much in common other than their innate drive to protect Jamie. Where Rachel is reserved and often abrasive, Tina (courtesy of Kaplan having the time of her life) is effervescent and goodhearted. She’s soda pop in the grimmest town in America, even getting into the car with Michael and taking way, way too long to recognize boyfriend Mike is just Michael in a different mask because she’s having that much fun. All hail the Cookie Woman.
Tina’s presence immediately and consistently elevates Halloween 5. She wasn’t the kind of horror protagonist we saw often in the 1980s. Characters of her ilk were either reduced to the periphery or played simply for laughs. While they regularly died, Tina’s death remains a shocking turning point in the film. Not only did Jamie’s original guardian bite it earlier, but her new one is killed the same night. The stakes augment the tension, even upon rewatch after rewatch—next to H20 and the original, it’s the franchise entry I’ve seen the most.
Halloween 5 retains its heart and trauma-informed oomph largely on account of Tina. Few slasher franchises manage to cultivate as much depth and genuine feeling five movies in, and Halloween remains a sterling exception. While the franchise would wildly run off the rails with its next entry, mandating a soft timeline reboot, Halloween 5 is a chilling, almost tear-jerking finale to the brief Jamie Lloyd timeline. Come for the Cookie Woman, stay for Tina Williams.
Categorized:Editorials
