Bates) on their Top 5 Most Powerful Performances in Horror History Since 1960! list, opining that Pleasence spoke "with pitch-perfectly clear intention" and created "one of the greatest characters in film history" in the original film. Screen Rant listed Loomis as the second best Halloween character (behind Michael Myers), asserting that "Pleasance truly gives one of the best performances in Horror films as the determined doctor." /Film cites Loomis as the greatest character John Carpenter made over his five-decade career. Joe Puccio described Loomis as legendary and called Pleasence "arguably the crown jewel of the series". Meagan Navarro called Loomis the pillar of the Halloween franchise and asserted that "Pleasance always gave Loomis his all, no matter where the story took his character." Matthew Chernov of the Chicago Tribune asserts that Pleasence gave credibility to Loomis' ominous warnings and that the actor "never gave anything less than 100 percent on screen", citing this as the reason "why, for many fans, he remains the series' stealth MVP." Justin Davis of Complex praised Pleasence and Jamie Lee Curtis for "star-making performances" in Halloween. Ron Pennington of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Pleasence as Loomis provided "a strong presence, but it’s basically a one-dimensional role, designed to provide necessary plot information." Berardinelli referred to Pleasence as the "saving grace of Halloween II" and that the film "belongs to Loomis, the gun-toting action figure who arrives in the nick of time and has more good one-liners than everyone else put together." Discussing Halloween 4, Vinnie Mancuso cited Pleasence as "absolutely hamming it up to a new level". Cox wrote that bringing back Pleasence as Loomis was one of the "major things" Halloween 4 did correctly and that the film was "anchored by solid performances from Pleasence and Harris". Reviewing The Curse of Michael Myers, Ben Martin lauded Pleasence for giving "a good performance again. So good in fact that I’m reminded of why I liked Loomis in the first place." While admitting that Loomis was "the most interesting" character in Halloween 4, Edison Smith viewed him as suffering the most from the film's repetition of the Myers storyline, with Pleasence's "once-iconic turn beginning to smack of self-parody" whose only growth was "becoming a John McClane style action hero who crashes through windows and leaps fifty feet through the air to avoid gas station explosions". The character's portrayal in Halloween 5 has also received negative