Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

After the mine shaft blast, a hermit nurses Michael back to health, and a year later Michael kills him and heads for Haddonfield to find Jamie. Dr. Loomis learns of her link to Michael and wants to use it to track and stop him.

Michael kills Jamie's foster sister Rachel and then goes after Rachel's friend Tina. At a Halloween party on a farm, he attacks two of the teens in a barn, killing one and disfiguring the other. He also kills the two deputies assigned to guard Tina, and Tina herself is killed while drawing Michael away from Jamie.

Loomis and Sheriff Meeker then plan a trap at the old Myers house, using Jamie as bait. A false call pulls most of the police away, and Michael kills the officers who remain. In the attic, Jamie calls Michael her uncle, and he briefly removes his mask and shows emotion before turning violent again.

Loomis tranquilizes Michael and beats him unconscious, then collapses from a stroke. Police take Michael into custody and lock him in a cell. A mysterious man dressed in black then attacks the police station and kills the officers, and Michael's cell is left empty.

The ending of Halloween 5 is a jailbreak: Michael is captured at the Myers house after Loomis tranquilizes him, and the police lock him in a cell. Jamie warns that he will never die. A man in black arrives at the station, kills Meeker and his men, and frees Michael, and Jamie finds the empty cell and realizes Michael is still coming for her.

Who is the Man in Black? The film never says, and in my opinion that is the point of the scene. He exists to hand the story to the next film, and the next film is Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers in 1995. That sequel opens with Michael and Jamie held by a cult, so it could be argued that the Man in Black belongs to that group, though Halloween 5 itself does not confirm it. Perhaps the better way to read him is as a plot device, a stranger who solves the problem of getting Michael out of a locked cell without the film having to explain how.

The attic scene matters just as much. Jamie calls Michael her uncle, and he takes off his mask and shows emotion before the violence resumes. It is the closest the film comes to explaining why he does not kill her at once. Perhaps it is the mental link between them, perhaps it is family, and the film leaves both readings open. In my opinion this is the most interesting idea in the film, because it gives Michael a flicker of something other than menace, and it sits at odds with the rest of the series.

The trap that leads to that scene is worth a look too. Loomis and Sheriff Meeker use Jamie as bait, a false call draws most of the police away, and Michael kills the officers who remain. Loomis then beats Michael unconscious and collapses from a stroke, which shows how far the character has slid from the careful psychiatrist of the earlier films into a man willing to risk a child. Donald Pleasence plays that obsession as the engine of the story, and it is one reason Loomis feels more desperate here than in Halloween 4.

There is also a continuity question. Michael is played by Don Shanks here after George P. Wilbur in Halloween 4, and the unexplained Man in Black adds one more loose thread. That untidiness is part of why Halloween H20 and Halloween Resurrection later chose to ignore films 4 to 6 entirely.

As such, the ending does not resolve anything. It sets a question and walks away from it. The Halloween timeline shows how the series branches from here.