MadCap's Reel Thoughts - "Halloween: H20" (1998)

So, Halloween as a series finally becomes good again...though not without some problems and then a quick dive back into "OH PLEASE GOD WHY!" that would last another twenty years.

Thanks, Rob Zombie!
I joke, but I'm happy that the only film that I have left to review from this leg of the Halloween franchise is Resurrection and then Halloween...the 2018 version, not the 1978 version or the Rob Zombie remakes.

I'm not happy to say that I've covered the remakes. Also, the original some time ago. That one is considerably happier for me.

Anyway, before we delve into the Blumhouse reboot franchise (which will continue with Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends probably before I get around to reviewing them - provided Corona doesn't keep on going), let's have a look at the first time the franchise got a reboot. So, without no further to go, let's go further.

H20 is the eleventh album of pop duo Daryl Hall & John Oates released in October of 1982 to wide acclaim from fans and critics ali-oh, sorry, that's the wrong set of notes.

...

Here we go, last time we were here, we had Paul Rudd being Paul Rudd and some crazy retconned in nonsense about a cult that had been manipulating Michael Myers from the beginning. Naturally, only two years after this...producer Moustapha Akkad decided to drop that entire plotline and start on something completely different.

Namely, forgetting every film after the second one.

This does make sense for a few reasons, namely that long-time star of the franchise Donald Pleasence sadly passed away upon finishing his shooting for Curse of Michael Myers. Rather than recasting him or attempting to slot a new character in to fill the void left behind, the production team decided to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the franchise by doing something that will seem strangely familiar to anyone who has seen the newest (at the time of this review) Blumhouse film - bringing back Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). This was back when this was actually a revolutionary idea and not a cheap ploy to get butts into seats - I'm looking at you, Resurrection.

Being that we're ignoring 4, 5, and 6...we pick up with Laurie Strode already in progress and not dead by car crash offscreen. Except we don't begin with that because we have to watch Joseph Gordon-Levitt get a cameo appearance before he got super famous and with a dudebro buddy gets killed off in the house of Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens, reprising her role from the original). Marion was the nurse of Doctor Loomis, who has passed away in this continuity.

It seems that Michael Myers spent twenty years after being blown up in a hospital just kind of chilling out and then deciding to hit up Marion's place for Loomis' files on a particular individual - Laurie Strode. Spoiler alert! Laurie's not dea-oh, already made that joke. Yes, it appears that Laurie faked her death and is now living in Southern California rather than in Southern California that is pretending to be rural Illinois.

Not only is Laurie hiding out, but she's hiding out as the headmistress of a private school and living under the alias of Keri Tate along with her son, John (Josh Hartnett). John attends the school alongside his girlfriend and their couple friends who are all there basically to get killed off. They also aren't the main focus of the story, that's all on Laurie.

The film has some very good points - including a call back to the English classroom in the first movie, where Laurie is giving instead of receiving a lesson that touches on the themes in the story. Namely, speaking of Frankenstein's Monster in this case. Ever since she apparently faked her death and moved away, Laurie has been living in perpetual fear that Michael will find her and murder her to death...as one tends to be in such situations.

This is, of course, a polar opposite to the Blumhouse films where Laurie lives in perpetual fear that she won't be able to find Michael and murder him to death. More on that much later.

Jamie Lee Curtis does an excellent job of showing us how much Laurie has changed in the twenty years since the original two movies. She is shell-shocked, wakes up screaming from nightmares induced by her trauma, and is forcing herself to down drugs and alcohol to escape the pain even for a temporary moment. It's weighing down on her, hidden under the thin facade of a stern headmistress she tries to project.

Eventually, however, she comes to the same conclusion that Victor Frankenstein does in Mary Shelley's novel: namely that she has to face the monster that she has created.

Of course, by the time she finally does this several people have died horrifically, so the effect is somewhat lost. However, Halloween was never about the drastically high body count like certain other slasher film franchises. While 4, 5, and 6 did amp up the gore a little from the first two, suspense has always been more Halloween's game and H20 provides...for the most part.

"Hey, baby...wanna go...grade some finals?"

This film has the unmistakable stench of the 90's about it, though. This is largely due to the penmanship of one Kevin Williamson, who you might remember as the scribe of the Scream franchise (a franchise I haven't covered yet, but I adore). It doesn't have the over the top sex or drugs of the 80's films as well as feeling more like an episode of some WB teen drama than an actual horror movie in spots.

There's also a bit where two characters watch Scream 2...a film franchise in which the previous entry saw some characters watching Halloween.

Cue the "You've created a time paradox" joke.

Oh, and LL Cool J is a security guard who is attempting to be a writer of erotic fiction. Ironically enough, the black guy actually survives. I'd call this progressive except that it reminds me of a certain film from ten years earlier that still fills me with murder frenzy.

The ending of the film is actually my favorite part of it, and I don't actually say that ironically. It's very well done.

Laurie sends her son and his girlfriend away to go get help and, fire axe in hand, hunts down Michael within the school. The only sad thing about this is that we had to wade through seventy minutes to get to it, because it really is the highlight of the film. I know this, because it ended up in most of the trailers.

But yes, Laurie confronts and defeats the monster that is Michael Myers. In a moment of sanity breakage, when the paramedics are wheeling his body away, she steals the morgue van at gunpoint and drives Michael off to make sure that he's dead herself. After a crash that ends with Michael pinned between the van and a tree, there is a moment of genuine humanity as Michael reaches out to Laurie and for an instant she wonders if he's trying to hold her hand...and upon realizing that he's trying to kill her even then, she decapitates him with the fire axe.

IT'S FUCKING AWESOME!

That's where the movie just ends. Laurie Strode confronted and defeated Michael Myers and he is totally, really dead forever. It was honestly a perfect ending to the Halloween franchise as a whole.

Josh Harnett and Jamie Lee Curtis do have a good bit of chemistry as
mother and son, I just wish he had more to do.

...apparently, this is not a memo that got to Dimension Films. Four years later, the sequel came out. Halloween: Resurrection.

Now, for those who haven't seen the film, I know what you're thinking. "Madcap, how can Michael possibly come back now? I mean, the ending of Halloween II saw him blown up after being shot in both eyes and he survived that, sure. This time, though, Laurie cut off his head in one of the most awesome scenes I've ever seen in my entire life! Surely he can't come back from that!"

Oh, my sweet summer child...but he can, and he did. The reason for why he came back is way, way more stupid than him coming back. That, however, is a story for the Horror Month of another year. As for this movie...it's pretty good. Not as good as the original two, but pretty good. The worst that I can say for it is that it's a paint by numbers Halloween film with the occasional quip thrown in that gets some kind of chuckle from me. It does celebrate the original film and II as well, and this is where I'd usually joke about it not knowing what the original film was, but it kind of really does.

It's just that they don't really know well how to produce that.

It's not my favorite, but it also doesn't get into the pit that Resurrection and the two Zombie remakes fall into. As far as H20 goes, for the efforts of the time it's a pretty harmless thing. I enjoy it, though not as much as I enjoy the original or Halloween II. You can certainly do a lot worse as we have seen...and as we will see going forward in the years to come.

With that, we have finished off the movie reviews for the month of October.  We have only four films before us, being that Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends are both scheduled to come out long before I reach them in the Horror Months to come. It seems, like Dracula in the Castlevania games, it takes a little more than a bunch of sequels to kill off Michael Myers!

Next year is his short lived Resurrection!

. . .trick or treat, motherfucker!

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later is brought to us from Dimension Films.

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