Last night I managed to catch a little bit of Halloween 4 on the electric television device.

Now, I remember Halloween 1 being pretty scary. Halloween 2, kind of scary. Halloween 3 had that pumpkin mask thing going on, with the great song ""____ more days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween. ____ more days to Halloween, Silver Shamrock!", and then bugs would come out of the masks and eat kids brains or something. I don't know what that had to do with Michael Myers and chopping people up into little bits, but I have some dim memory of Stonehenge being somehow involved. Those were different times, as noted horror film enthusiast Lou Reed has been known to say on occasion. You've got masks and kids' brains being eaten. That's good enough for me.

Maybe Michael Myers was on sabbatical or something. Or some kind of psychokiller exchange program, hacking up the innocent in the south of France for a semester.

Anyway, he was back for Halloween 4. And his strategy seemed to have evolved into basically boring people to death.

To begin with, Mr. Myers victims seemed unable to figure out that this guy moves really, really slowly. Any way you look at that, you're going to have a leg up in the whole "getting chased by a guy with a knife" scenario. Also, Mr. Myers walks around with his knife raised all the time. And I mean ALL the time. This makes him easy to spot in a crowd, not to mention the fact that he's probably going to have some sore muscles from maintaining that pose for any length of time.

So in the movie, he's chasing a little girl around for an hour and a half or so, or until the budget runs out. And boy, is he chasing her around slowly. It's like being chased by an asthmatic or a tree sloth or something. One scene has the little girl (who falls in the category of incredibly annoying) hiding in a garbage chute. Mr. Myers figures out she's in there (which isn't hard to do because she's saying really loudly "PLEASE DON'T LET HIM GET ME!", not one of the better hiding tactics I've ever seen), at which point she slides down the garbage chute. Mr. Myers walks down to the basement to hassle her some more in various ways, all of which involve him trying to stab her unsuccessfully. This goes on for about five minutes, then she wriggles back up to the top of the garbage chute.

Mr. Myers sighs, and trudges back upstairs to do some more unsuccessful stabbing.

Seldom have I seen someone with less job satisfaction. The guy's really just punching the clock at this point.

And then you have Donald Pleasance, the doctor who is obsessed with Michael Myers, and frankly doesn't seem to have any other hobbies or interests. He runs around being dramatic and breathless a lot, and brandishing guns at law enforcement officials. This is a guy who's had four movies in which to kill one really slow moving, sore-armed killer, and hasn't gotten the job done. His work ethic just can't be all that great.

I think I had a point about this. Maybe it was that Halloween 4 isn't very good.