Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
It should probably noted that his appeals to be one of the most stupid movie titles in the history of cinema. Well it wasn't going to take much now for this film to out-do the last sequel. Moustapha Akkad's run of shameless cash-ins had pretty much run this series into the ground. The return of Laurie with a semi-reboot here was a bit of a relief. Or at least it would have been, if the filmmakers had any interesting new ideas on what to do with the franchise.
I have to say that H20 feels like the same as we've seen before only with less brutality from Michael, less of a creepy horror atmosphere and just as contrived as ever. Oh and no Loomis this time. What we get instead is the return of Jamie Lee Curtis, whose recent hits at this time included "True Lies", where she was pretty much out-acted by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and "Fierce Creatures", a fairly unspectacular sequel to the moderately amusing comedy "A Wish Called Wanda" she was in the year Halloween 4 came out. (She would also follow up the success of "Halloween H20" by starring in a widely panned sci-fi horror film called "Virus".)
Simply put, Jamie Lee Curtis is not really a great actress from whom this series was crying out for an encore. The only reason to bring her back would be if the filmmakers had something worthwhile to do with the character of Laurie Strode. And, just like Donald Pleasence before her, they clearly have no idea what to do with her character at all. In the 20 years since her appearance in "Halloween II" it seems that she has managed to become a headteacher at a school, but is nonetheless secretly an alcoholic as well as being over-protective of her son due to a long-standing paranoia that Myers might return. This actually reminds me of the bit in "Black Sheep" where the lead character explains that he has "the completely unfounded and irrational fear that one day *this* is going to happen!" Except that "Black Sheep" was a comedy, but "Halloween H20" takes itself ultra-seriously.
Well, ultra-seriously in every respect except for LL Cool J's character. He's a security guard who spends most of the movie on the phone to a stereotypically loud gossipy girlfriend who we never see, but who is loud and brash enough that we can hear her voice while LL Cool J is on the phone. In a movie which is mostly dead-pan and dull it's quite jarring to have this entirely unfunny attempt at comedy.
Jamie Lee Curtis's son here is played by Josh Hartnett and he's basically playing the same character he played in "The Faculty", except at least there he would make distinctly more sense as a misfit drug-dealer who pretty much everyone finds wholly irritating. Michelle Williams isn't anywhere near "My Week With Marilyn" levels of quality in her acting here, but she is able to make it half-way believable that there's some chemistry between her and Josh Hartnett - and that's a miracle and half.
Perhaps one of the biggest problems in this movie is that we spend so much time with Josh Hartnett's character and his friends. The other two as yet unmentioned friend characters are actually much more interesting, but when Michael Myers turns up they do not really get to stick around very long. They are mostly just there as cannon fodder when Myers turns up.
That we even have a mostly cannon fodder approach to victims is surprising seeing as we spend most of the movie waiting for Michael Myers to do something. We keep seeing his face appear in reflective surfaces thanks to Jamie Lee Curtis' character having paranoid visions of him. We also have one lame fake-out jump scare where she nearly walks straight into Janet Leigh (the main actress in Hitchcock's "Psycho"). It would be nice if the scares were coming from the genuine threat from Michael Myers rather than from our main female protagonist being clumsy. If any of this were helping to build up an atmosphere that would be helpful, but most of the film actually takes place in broad daylight and as a result it's all about as unscary as it gets. Admittedly, we do get an appearance from Michael Myers himself during the day, but all he does is steal a woman's car keys.
Perhaps the worst of the tease and fake-out scenes is where one of Josh Hartnett's school friends loses something down the sink and decides to retrieve it by reaching down the plughole into the waste disposal mechanism. We are shown his hand, we are shown the button that works the waste disposal, we're shown the hand, we're shown the face of the character and this is all repeated over and over until I'm practically begging the film to mash up this characters hand and get it over with. Telegraphing a scare can be effective, but when the film spends most of the runtime proving to be a complete tease it gets extremely tiresome and the whole effect is lost. Couldn't they even have used Carpenter's original musical theme a bit more? The lame orchestral theme did very little to establish an effective mood here.
I should probably mention the utterly contrived plotline whereby all the schoolchildren are going on a camping trip, so that the remaining 6 or so students (in the whole school, really?) are left behind to study Frankenstein with the headteacher. This allows for a mostly empty school for Michael Myers to stalk, when he finally gets around to it. However, when the trip only seems to be aimed at seniors part of me is wondering where all the younger children in the school have disappeared to.
And it's a real pity that the film is such a bore, since the opening scene of the movie actually had a lot of promise. A woman discovers that her house has been invaded and none other than Joseph Gordon Levitt turns up to help. He's playing a loud-mouthed bratty figure and he plays the role perfectly. He ends up being the most realistic character in the entire film and it is really sad when, as you have probably already guessed, he is dispatched by Myers before the film can actually get started.
The opening ties a neat bow around the Myers and Loomis situation, since it seems clear that Myers is invading a house filled with files about him because the house actually belongs to his nemesis Dr. Loomis and there's a photo of Donald Pleasence on the side. Also Myers' neat escape in this opening scene showcases the intelligence that the writers so often seem to want to attribute to Myers and yet so rarely seem smart enough to work effectively into their scripts.
After the long dull middle of the film is finally over, the final section of the film allows the character of Laurie Strode to finally take on Michael Myers head-on. That seems to be the only reason to bring back Jamie Lee Curtis. Unfortunately, for someone who knows that Michael Myers can survive 5 or more bullets to the chest without slowing down and still wasn't dead after being blown up and practically burning away at the end of "Halloween II" she still seems to think arming herself with an axe is going to be enough to do the job.
The run-around between Laurie and Mike at the end of the movie is just too little too late and I did not actually find the scenes of her crawling around under tables while Myers ineffectually pursues her were terribly compelling. For all the promise that bringing back Laurie Strode might have offered to reinvigorate this tired series, the actual result is fairly lacklustre. At best, it could be said that the ending promised to finally put the series out of its misery. But the film as a whole is lacking the intensity of even the weaker entries in the franchise.
E+