Harefooted Halloween: Halloween H20: 20 Years Later

What I Liked: Good look and movement on Michael.  Well, except for the mask sometimes but I’ll get to that.

The psychological element of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis (Mother’s Boys)) never fully getting over Halloween night 1978 is interesting.  It’s different for the series and delves into the trauma of being a Myers victim better than any other movie in the series.  Laurie had to go into hiding, is very protective of her teenage son (Josh Hartnett (30 Days of Night)) which causes a major strain on their relationship and she thinks she sees Michael wherever she goes making her jumpy.

Michael almost exclusively stabs people with his trademark chef’s knife and I don’t think we’ve ever seen that before.  It was surprisingly refreshing because most sequels try to one up the previous go around on the elaborate deaths.  Here they mainly went for the old standby that Michael is known for and it somehow doesn’t get monotonous.

What I Didn’t Like: Laurie is a borderline alcoholic but that doesn’t come into play at any point.  It never hinders her ability to save victims or she never attacks an innocent person thinking it’s Michael or rants so much that most folks distrust her or any of that.

Michael’s mask changes too obviously throughout the film.  What happened was the filmmakers decided to change the look deep into production and eventually used three different masks from three different effects houses.  They attempted to make them match up in post but it didn’t work.  Sometimes you can see Michael’s skin through the eye holes, sometimes it looks plastic pasty white like from part 4 and sometimes it looks dirty or like there are exaggerated shade lines to accentuate his features.

The jump scares in here are more noticeable and irritating because for the first two thirds they wanted to explore Laurie Strode’s fucked up mind instead of doing a straight ahead horror thing.  So those cheap ass jump scares come across as a petty strategy to keep the audience at bay until the gruesome murders start.

That title is atrocious.  I don’t think it’s ever good to reference the age of the series as part of the official title.  Not only that but they wound up with the very strange H20 abbreviation.  So this one is like the chemical makeup of water?  Like it’s vital for life to exist?  I don’t get it.

The biggest issue here though is they didn’t know what kind of movie they wanted make.  The first hour is more of a psychological thriller focusing on how Laurie and her son cope with Laurie’s horrific past.  Then in the last half hour it suddenly becomes a slasher picture with Michael hacking everyone up.

Overall Impressions: This one certainly has a unique tone compared to the other installments.  First of all the setting is a northern California high class boarding school and not homespun breezy Illinois.  That combined with Jamie Lee Curtis making a return to the series gives the production a classier feel.  The whole thing seems too pristine for a horror film, but I kinda like the juxtaposition.

What also classes this up is they put a bona fide legendary horror director at the helm in Steve Miner who did Friday the 13^th Part 2, 3(D) (the one where Jason gets his iconic hockey mask), House and Warlock.  This is a big upgrade from the previous directors, all of which hadn’t done much at all before taking on a Halloween (this includes John Carpenter).  Miner doesn’t have a particular style but he knows his shit and you can tell this is more competently made than most of the others (mask shit aside).

People tend to like this one and it’s probably for several reasons.  One is that it picks up after part 2 and ignores the events of 4-6 which are considered lesser and begrudgingly canon by most.  The higher budget and production value have to be persuading factors as well.  Story wise it’s a mess but it’s less of a mess than the other sequels.  They went for something a little off the beaten path, at least for a bit, and I appreciate that.  I wish they pushed the psychological shit further and stuck to that angle.  Bizarrely it reaches downright zany cartoony territory at the very end far from where it started.  The final product is unfortunately uneven and lacking.  That’s too bad.  Better luck next time.