MOVIE REVIEW : No Treats in ‘Halloween 4’

Remember the good old days when Halloween meant trick-or-treat, bobbing for apples and bags full of candy bars? When the holiday’s main movie image was wide-eyed little Margaret O’Brien, as Tootie in “Meet Me in St. Louis”?

How times change. Nowadays, mention of “Halloween”--and the ridiculously inevitable new horror sequel, “Halloween 4” (citywide)--suggests frantically groping small-town teen-agers, interrupted in their promiscuous love-play to be hideously slaughtered by a white-masked, bloodthirsty fiend.

Gore. Skewerings. Carnage. Little girls running around in clown suits pursued by maniacs. Eviscerated cops. Charred corpses. Howling lynch mobs. Once again, Haddonfield, Ill., that hunk of complacent suburbia where unkillable psychotic Michael Myers wreaked his bloody will 10 years ago, is subject to the peregrinations of this taciturn slasher-come-home. Now, he’s stalking his little niece, Jamie (Danielle Harris). And her doggie. And her mama. And everybody else.

Once again, thoughtless, lustful teen-agers paw one another, while the smiler with a knife--and an ax and a truck--waits to pounce. Once again, Donald Pleasence, as psychiatrist Loomis, runs around pleading with everyone to realize that Michael is evil incarnate, conquerable only by several police forces, the National Guard and perhaps a small thermonuclear device. Myers is not just a man, not just a monster. He’s something far more loathsome and destructive: a high concept from hell.

Anyone who goes to “Halloween 4” deserves what they get: stale, sordid tricks and no treats. Original writer-director John Carpenter has long since bailed out, survived only by a snatch of music and a pastiche of his patented subjective tracking shots. Jamie Lee Curtis is present only in a snapshot. (And at that, she gives one of the film’s more animated performances.) Donald Pleasence is still there, sadly enough, wandering around in a mass of scar tissue, giving this hopeless trash a patina of class. But he looks weary unto death, as if the prospect of being disemboweled by a maniac boded sweet, merciful release. What is more remorseless and cruel than an endlessly rampaging sequel?