A couple months ago, the folks over at Halloween Movies said they were searching for the "lost" deleted scenes from 1989's HALLOWEEN 5, and now they appear to have revealed that their search turned up something interesting. Included in a new interview with Don Shanks, who played Michael Myers in HALLOWEEN 5, is a picture from a storage space that features five boxes of HALLOWEEN 5 materials labeled "Dr. Death".
Dr. Death was a character from an alternate opening of HALLOWEEN 5 in which the wounded Michael Myers would have been taken in by a 20-something occultist – Theron Read as Dr. Death – rather than an old man with a parrot.
Here's how Shanks describes the Dr. Death scenes in the interview:
(I was) placed on this stone altar, and all around (the set) were things that the production had gotten from witches, and people that sell you the occult. And there were scrolls and different chants and this and that. And (suspended from) the altar, right above me, was this rock that looked like a stalactite – it was on a string and it would circle. And Dr. Death was doing an incantation on me, and then he tattoos on me the Thorn rune, which is the sign of eternal life. And so he does all these incantations, and on Halloween Eve (one year later) I come back to life. So I put the mask on, and I grab Dr. Death by the throat and pick him up over my head and break his back, and then put him on the altar, and take the stalactite and I go through his chest with it. I thought it was one of my better kills. But (later) (producer Moustapha Akkad) thought it was too much of the occult type thing. So they decided to shoot it differently."
Shanks adds that Read's performance as Dr. Death was
eccentric, and if you saw it you would just go, ‘Wow, that guy looks really weird.’ But it kind of gave the film a little more of an artistic and avant-garde (touch). I mean, it worked perfectly. For what we were doing and the way the (occult) set looked, you want something that isn’t the norm."
Hopefully the footage has been located by Halloween Movies and we'll get a chance to finally see the Dr. Death scenes soon. I've always been intrigued by the idea of this alternate opening, and actually wish they had stuck with it – it makes more sense than the stuff with the old man, and since Dr. Death was the one who gave Michael Myers the Thorn tattoo the franchise wouldn't have gone down the Thorn cult path.
Halloween Movies will soon be posting more of the Shanks interview, and in that one he'll be discussing the deleted sequence in which Michael Myers massacred a S.W.A.T. team. I'm hoping that one will indicate that the massacre footage has been located as well.