User Reviews

This Retrospective Making of featurette on "Halloween 4" can be found as an extra on the special edition DVD of the aforementioned movie. It runs just under 17 minutes and deals with the fruition of the back to basics approach to the story, the race against time to get a script ready before the writer's strike, the casting, and the tribulations. Featuring interviews with all the main crew, and actresses Danielle Harris (who has grown up to be quite the hotty) and Ellie Cornell, as well as the guy who played Micheal Myers. I enjoyed this little feauterette a lot. It just had a fun feel to it.

My Grade: A-

I know a lot of people don't like lengthy films or documentaries but when I buy a special edition of a Halloween 4 I want a little more. At least 30 min. Now a lot is explained in this documentary but it's nothing like Halloween's 25th anniversary edition final cut. A good anything can be lengthy and not put you to sleep and keep your attention. and that is the whole problem here, a film with such a huge fan base I owes their fans more then a few 17 min behind the scenes. It's quite hard to give a documentary a full 10 stars, for it ought to be flawless. None the less this isn't worth buying the special Divimax Edition of the film for. 6/10

Halloween 4 Final Cut (2001)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

This 17-minute documentary can be found on the Anchor Bay release of HALLOWEEN 4. Director Dwight Little, screenwriter Alan McElroy, producer Paul Freeman, musician Alan Howarth are joined by Moustapha Akkad, George Wilbur, Danielle Harris and Ellie Cornell in a series of interviews about the production of the film. It should go without saying that 17-minutes really doesn't give you a great view of everything that happened but for a featurette this this is extremely well-made and fans of the series and film will get some pretty good stories. We start off hearing about how Akkad bought the rights to the series back just so that he could try and return Myers to his good old days of being a scary monster. Writer McElroy discusses how a writer's strike was forcing him to rush the screenplay and that's why he decided to just come up with a story that he would like to see. Little talks about how he got involved with the production and also discusses the various technical stuff he lifted from Hitchcock. Both Harris and Cornell go over how they got the roles and everyone else discusses why they were both so good in their parts. Even Wilbur, who plays Myers, gets to relive some fun on the set when he was hiding under a bed scaring anyone who came close to his reach. Overall this is a pretty fun featurette to view after you watch the film. There are longer documentaries that were released after this one that go into more details but this here is still worth viewing.

At a mere 17 minutes, it's obvious that this short making-of documentary doesn't go into great detail about the making of Halloween IV, but it does have some excellent interviews, such as the one with George Wilbur, who played Michael Meyers in the film. I wasn't that impressed with Wilbur's performance, he just didn't have the right body style and didn't move the way Michael Meyers does (especially in scenes like the shooting at the very end), but it was the first time I had ever even seen the face of someone who had played Meyers in one of the movies, so I found that very interesting.

More time is spent talking about pre-production than any behind-the-scenes, probably because the movie was made before DVDs and no one thought to do any shooting behind the scenes. There is, however, a great interview with Moustapha Akkad where he talks about many aspects of pre-production, such as who agreed to sign on and who didn't and who then signed on instead, etc. Danielle Harris also gives an interesting interview about working on a horror movie set as a little girl, and how Wilbur would always take off his mask between takes to remind her that he wasn't really the boogeyman, he was her friend.

Another interesting interview was with Ellie Cornell, who played Rachel in the movie and talked about the film's release, telling an interesting story about how she and some other cast members went to see the movie in LA to see if people would recognize them. They didn't. Harris did, however, dress up in her clown outfit after the movie was released to freak out her family.

I think that this documentary was so short because they really didn't have a lot to work with, since all of the interviews were done more than a decade after the movie was released, but it works out at this length. This is a sequel that's pretty hidden within a huge number of other Halloween films, so there is really no reason to make a lengthy documentary, since not many people are likely to see it, which means that even less people are likely to read what I'm writing right now. But if you do find yourself reading this, make sure to let the credits play at the end, where there is a great performance of the Halloween theme song on the piano.

Now days, featurettes are fairly common for just about any DVD (most of them are for promotional purposes only and are painful to sit through). Back when HALLOWEEN 4 was released on DVD in 2001, it was somewhat of a new thing. This documentary, directed by Mark Cerulli (who hasn't directed since), is only interesting if one is looking for a comparison of just how comprehensive DVD documentaries have become over the past five years. 'HALLOWEEN 4' FIANL CUT keeps information to a bare minimum. There is very little meat. With the exception of actresses Danielle Harris and Ellie Cornell, all the participants look as if they want to say what they have to say and leave, making the short running time boring to sit through. Screenwriter Alan B. McElroy shares limited insight into his craft of writing the script. All he says is that he was a fan of the franchise and seems to be extremely impressed he was able to write the script in eleven days. Furthermore, there is no mention of the input by the three other writers on the project that came up with the story. Credit should go where credit is due. HALLOWEEN 4 director Dwight H. Little gives the most insight into the making of the film though he doesn't seem to passionate about his work. Worst of all is executive producer Moustapha Akkad, coming off as a complete business man and nothing of a fan of the genre. I respect him for trying to keep the series alive, but come on, show some interest. Overall, a very disappointing documentary that should have been much longer and thorough. I'm giving it 4/10, since it slightly better than the average fluff piece.