MOVIE REVIEW : No New Tricks, Treats in ‘Halloween’

After four “Halloweens� of numbingly similar carnage we know what to expect from “Halloween 5� (citywide): nubile teen-agers clutching one another lasciviously and getting slashed to death by a white-masked fiend.

This is the same infinitely repeated plot of “Halloweens� 1, 2 and 4 (3 took a slightly deviant turn), with the same unkillable bogyman Michael Myers, wreaking the same programmed havoc, and Donald Pleasence as the same distraught psychiatrist, repeating the same dire warnings to no avail.

Is everyone in this small town a hopeless moron? At one point, a squadron of police have Michael trapped in the woods; they immediately leave to set up a trap in a deserted house somewhere else.

At the end of “Halloween 4,� poor little Jamie (Danielle Harris) was apparently cast as the new bogyman. Now, through some quick double-shuffling, she’s once again a victim and Michael, apparently destroyed, is back for another night of slaughter. Danielle is a great screamer, but you quickly get tired of watching her trance out and psychically link with the rampaging Mike: a talent, which, naturally, fails her at crucial moments. You also get quickly tired of “Halloween 5� (MPAA rated R: for sex and violence), even though director/co-writer Dominique Othenin-Girard tries to wake you up by pushing the series’ subjective camera strategy to hand-held, quasi-Polanski extremes.