Jamie Lee Curtis Returned for the Post-Scream Mediocrity Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later
The long arc of the Halloween movies reflects the changing fortunes of horror over the last half-century.
John Carpenter’s 1978 original is one of the most influential horror movies, if not the most influential. It was not the first slasher movie, nor the first slasher movie of note, but its seismic impact is hard to overstate.
Along with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, Halloween created the slasher movie. Carpenter was a casual revolutionary who ended up changing horror forever when he just wanted to scare teenagers away from smoking marijuana and having premarital sex by illustrating that if they do so, they will be butchered by an unpleasant masked man with a murderous grudge against humanity.
By the time Halloween II was released to healthy box office and scathing reviews in 1981, the slasher boom had run its course. It was the second Halloween movie, but one of dozens of Halloween-style movies that shamelessly stole from the innovations of Carpenter’s endlessly iconic original.
Halloween’s creator was bored with his creation. Dr. Frankenstein officially considered his monster a crashing bore despite his incredible popularity.
The 1982 cult classic Halloween III: Season of the Witch boldly cast aside Michael Myers so that it could focus on a macabre terror tale involving sinister masks and an evil toy company that had nothing to do with one of the most famous villains in horror history.
The result was a creative triumph that would only be appreciated in the years and decades ahead, but scored underwhelmingly at the box office.
The next three sequels reflected the dire state of horror in a post-A Nightmare on Elm Street, pre-Scream era. They were cheap, vulgar, and opportunistic, artless exploitation movies that set out to give audiences what they craved—Michael Myers killing a bunch of people on Halloween—with little in the way of ambition, artistry, or wit.
The release of 1996’s Scream changed everything. Suddenly, horror was hip again, particularly terror tales full of winking references to the genre’s hallowed history.
The folks behind the Halloween movies were quick to exploit the fad for meta-textual macabre by hiring Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson to work on the film as an executive producer and uncredited script doctor.
John Carpenter apparently asked for 10 million dollars and a three-picture deal to rejoin the series. That was an offer the penny-pinching control freaks at the Weinstein Company had no trouble rejecting.
Steve Miner, a horror veteran whose credits include Friday the 13th 2, Lake Placid, and House, took over as director. Miner has worked extensively in television as well, including Dawson’s Creek, which Williamson created.
Miner was clearly directed to make the movie as much like Scream as possible. That means that the movie is incongruously bright and quippy.
Laurie Strode is canonically dead by the fourth film, so Williamson introduces the wrinkle that Laurie faked her death, changed her name to Keri Tate, and traded in the haunted realm of Haddonfield, Illinois, for a more idyllic existence working at an upscale boarding school in California.
Laurie is irrevocably scarred by her experiences with her older brother. A lot of siblings tease one another, or play-fight, but Michael took it too far by trying to murder his sister and her entire social circle.
Curtis’ steel-willed survivor has been coping badly with nightmarish visions of Michael Myers just hanging out by drinking excessively and staying ever-vigilant in case the unstoppable, seemingly dead maniac that tried to separate her from her organs reappears on October 31st.
Laurie’s sensitive boyfriend Will Brennan (Adam Arkin), and son John (Josh Hartnett, in his film debut) try to assure her that her big bro is pushing daisies six feet deep and enjoying a dirt nap, but they don’t know just how unkillable he can be.
Besides, Laurie has the boarding school’s security guard, Ronald 'Ronny' Jones (LL Cool J), to protect her from the butcher of Haddonfield.
The comic relief lawman is distracted, however. He’s less interested in keeping the school’s students and faculty safe than in launching his career as a romance novelist.
Deep Blue Sea cast the sexiest, most virile stud in Hip Hop as a comic relief chef who spends most of his time onscreen jibber-jabbering with a zany parrot. H20: Twenty Years Later goes even further.
It neuters the sexuality of a Black man legendary for his love of the ladies, and the ladies’ love for him (it’s even in his name) by having him be an asexual cornball whose conception of romance is more Danielle Steele than “Backseat of My Jeep.”
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later has perhaps the best cast in the entire franchise. Curtis carries the film on her slim but sturdy shoulders as a woman who has left her hometown and changed her name but cannot escape her past.
Five-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams may be the finest actress of her generation, but Halloween H20: 20 Years Later captures her in her earlier, less auspicious iteration as the hot blonde teenager from Dawson’s Creek.
The same is true of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, another child star made great, who was the goofball from the sitcom with the aliens when he portrayed the role of Jimmy Howell, a generic slacker teen.
The first half of Halloween: H20 Twenty Years Later is defined in no small part by a puzzling dearth of graphic violence. The pre-Scream Halloween movies were primarily devoted to the bloody red meat of the genre. They were all about the kills, the grislier the better. They understood that fright fans love to see people lose their lives in intense and graphic ways because they’re sick fucks who’d probably become murderers themselves if given half a chance.
That’s not true of Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later. It is more concerned with being clever. Scream did not make horror classy, necessarily, but it did make it hip.
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later doesn’t even try to be scary for much of its first two acts. It’s more about setting up the premise and central conflict rather than wowing with carnage.
Yet the film’s first act is breezy and glib rather than choked with dread or atmosphere.
Michael Myers is a presence in the first act but a disconcertingly airy one. We know that he exists and is still alive. Laurie can feel it in her bones, but everyone else seems more concerned with celebrating Halloween and/or getting laid, or celebrating Halloween by getting laid, than their imminent demise.
It’s only in the film’s third act that Michael Myers makes his presence felt the only way he knows how: vivisecting naughty teenagers who get in his way.
The tone shifts accordingly. Miner stops showcasing the skills he learned directing television shows about precocious young people and switches into B-list frightmaster mode.
The film’s last act is surprisingly straightforward. While the kids are away, Mike Myers comes to play. He pursues Laurie as she gathers wildly insufficient weapons to attack him with, like an axe.
Unlike the Rob Zombie movies, Michael Myers is not played by a nearly seven-foot-tall former professional wrestler. Yet he's nevertheless a formidable physical force, and Laurie, for all of her toughness and resilience, is still a relatively slight woman.
Because Jamie Lee Curtis insisted that Michael Myers die permanently, Laurie succeeds in finally killing the bane of her existence permanently and forever. Laurie is not convinced, however. To make sure that Michael Myers is really dead, and not merely playing possum, she steals the mortician’s vehicle and drives it off a cliff.
When she and Michael Myers both somehow survive, she chops his head off.
Michael was wily, however. He switched clothes with the paramedic transporting his “corpse” and rendered him mute, so it was actually a harmless medical professional she beheaded instead of her bro.
D’oh! That is quite the mix-up! No wonder the next movie opens with her in a mental hospital, filled with guilt over the innocent life she took.
I remember almost nothing about Halloween: Resurrection except that it features a long-awaited battle between Laurie’s ill-behaved sibling and the leader of the Flipmode Squad.
According to Wikipedia, John Carpenter said of Halloween: Resurrection, ”I watched the one in that house, with all the cameras. Oh my god. Oh lord, god. And then the guy gives the speech at the end about violence. What the hell? Oh my lord. I couldn't believe it.”
That just makes me more excited to see it! Halloween: H20 Twenty Years Later is competent and slickly mediocre. It’s not bad enough to be enjoyably awful, nor good enough to work as a horror movie. That’s why a film like Halloween 5: The Revenge is way more fun, even if it is objectively much worse.
That’s another reason I’m excited about David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy. I haven’t seen the first two entries, but if the reputation of the first one proves true, it’ll be a trilogy with one of the most flamboyantly awful entries as well as one of the very best.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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