At this point in the Halloween series, it's debatable who's the more relentless psychopath -- Michael Myers, the masked killer, or Donald Pleasence, the beloved character actor slumming it for a paycheck. With all of the plot twists Myers is subjected to in the course of the series, the hulking, speechless bogeyman shows more character development than Pleasence's obsessed psychologist, Dr. Loomis. Not that Pleasence's auto-pilot performance is the only problem with Halloween 5. The script's shortcomings surface early, when the climactic stabbing of her foster mother by little Jamie (Danielle Harris) at the end of the previous installment is explained away as a by-product of the psychic bond she now shares with her murderous uncle. Why bother going to such lengths to preserve our emotional investment in the established characters if the most prominent among them, Jamie's foster sister, Rachel (Ellie Cornell), gets it in the first act? Instead we're left to shudder with the nearly mute Jamie as she tries to protect good-time girl Tina (Wendy Kaplan) from Michael's attentions. By the time her character borrows a page from Corey Feldman's Friday the 13th, Part IV character to save herself, Harris' wide-eyed overacting has outworn its welcome. The only protagonist to inspire any real empathy, in fact, is Billy (Jeffrey Landman), the little boy whose stutter somehow lands him in the same psych ward as the seriously disturbed Jamie. Someone should get this kid to a speech therapist -- and out of this leaden rehash.