HALLOWEEN H20: 20 YEARS LATER
Mediocrity at its best

  Conceding (perhaps rashly) that this franchise had painted itself into a corner with the previous installment (which actually blamed Michael Myers' murderous rampages on a constellation), the impossibly badly-titled Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later starts from scratch.  Well, almost.  It ignores everything after part 2 - for that matter, it may well have ignored part 2 as well if it weren't for a throwaway reference to the relationship between Myers and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, reprising her role).  The filmmakers apparently thought that by starting again, they'd distract from the fact that this is really Michael Myers, take six.  And it worked - it made a fairly respectable amount of money, and was actually looked forward to by people I know who two years before wouldn't have gone near a horror movie, let alone a sixth sequel.  But it didn't fool me - yeah, Curtis is back, but since we know that at this point in her career she's not likely to get naked,  is that the best they can do to inject some life into this series?  Yeesh, they were better off with the Druids.

H20 opens with what's become a bit of a teen-horror staple lately - the immediate killing of the one member of the cast you're most likely to recognize.  (well, in this case, other than Curtis)  It's Nancy Stephens, reprising her role as the nurse Marion.  Her house has been broken into and her office ransacked.  It's twenty years (minus a day) after Michael's original escape from Smith's Grove, and it's a fairly good bet that a certain somebody did the deed.  Marion is dispensed with (along with two annoying neighbor kids), and Michael makes off with her car and the file on Laurie Strode, while the cops debate just how plausible the threat of Michael Myers really is.  After all, what's he been doing for twenty years?

Then we get to the opening credits sequence, which involves numerous slow pans across Dr. Loomis's "wall of Michael", onto which he'd clipped scores of photos, articles, and clues with which he intended to hunt his patient down.  This is not the only movie I've seen where a character is killed before his/her actor's name appears in the opening credits, but it's the first one I ever noticed, and man, I laughed.  Over this sequence is voiced some of Loomis's best lines from the first film - voiced by Tom Kane, it appears, since these were not taken directly from that film.  Some of the articles on the wall raise questions, too - what's with the "Youth killed, 2 wounded" headline?  I don't remember that happening.  What's with the bloody pair of scissors, scissors never having been used in this series except in part five which this film refutes?

Soon, we learn that Laurie Strode is alive and well (despite that news clipping on the wall of Michael that says she was killed in an auto wreck), the headmistress of a California private school, living under an assumed name and raising a son by herself.  She's a "functioning alcoholic", she's fooling around with one of the teachers (Adam Arkin), and she's about to have an unwanted family reunion.

The setup for this story beggars much speculation as to what kind of a guy Michael is.  He obviously has a sense of overdone theatrical flair, having decided for whatever reason to wait twenty years instead of, say, one.  Having stayed out of the public eye for twenty years, it's also safe to assume that he has better social skills than he ever evidences in the film - just think, maybe he went to law school and raised a family.  Or formed a band, got signed, went platinum, got addicted to just about everything, went through a well-publicized rehab program, and eventually destroyed his music career by being caught having sex with a goat on camera.  Or maybe he's been pitching for the Cubs.  And when that twenty-year anniversary hit, well, he just couldn't resist picking up that mask he keeps in the corner of the top shelf in the closet.

Michael's more goal-oriented here than we've seen him recently - he doesn't kill everybody he comes across, just the ones which need to be put out of the way.  This is rather refreshing in the wake of so many slashers where the killers kill everybody in the movie but the Last Girl, and helps to make the viewer actually wonder about the fates of some characters, which makes for, in theory, suspense.  In theory.

Good orchestral score by Marco Beltrami and John Ottman (at least when Carpenter's theme isn't performed on horns), and the cinematography by Daryn Okada comes as close to capturing the look of the original as any sequel has since part II, although it's still a little too polished and shiny.  The murders - when usually by this point in a series, the killings have gotten pretty silly - are generally presented as murders and not as bizarre setpieces, except for that one guy whose face gets bisected by a skate.

There's an increased attention to character here, not something you see a lot of in this nook of the genre.  One of the teenaged couples is actually fairly interesting; it's unfortunate that they're not the ones who survive late in the film. As for Laurie herself, Curtis does a fair job with a rather refreshing take on such a role (although I found myself wishing she'd just hurry up and get naked, knowing all the while she wouldn't).  How often have we seen The Survivor From The First Film turn into a strong woman, or a vicious woman, or a nightmare-plagued "survivor"?  We don't see often see her turn to liquor for twenty years - and in most movies, by the end, you just know she'd make some symbolic gesture of getting on the wagon.  Thankfully, not here.

Director Steve Miner (who gave us a couple of Friday The 13th flicks, went on to do chick flicks, and has recently decided to hang around in the genre for a little while, most recently giving us that croc of shit Lake Placid) throws in some nice moments of flair.  Take the shot where Michael slowly lowers himself, one-armed, from a sprinkler pipe (whatever he's been doing for 20 years, he's been working out), or that great shot a moment later of an axe THUNK-ing into the floor.

There are things like that which work in this movie, but it seems just plain overall.  Even the much-despised part 6 has a certain, uh, something, which this movie lacks.  For a while, I thought that something might be Donald Pleasance.  Another look at that last installment suggests that Pleasance wouldn't have been missed if he weren't there, so nowadays, I think it's Myers himself.  There's just so little of him here, without any menace to make up for his absence.  He and Laurie only run into each other in the last fifteen minutes or so.  So basically, it's like the eighth Friday the 13th movie - what the ads promised us is just the last bit in a movie of bland regularity.

Arkin serves no noticeable purpose at all, and L.L. Cool J just seems to be here to provide stupid comic relief in the form of attempts at erotic fiction.  Some of the situations in the script work (particularly one scene where a hapless girl has to ride in a dumbwaiter with her dead boyfriend), but most really don't.  I mean, things like the ol' hand-in-the-garborator bit can't possibly be pulled off - no matter how this turns out, it's either predictable or disappointing.  And the blood's way too orange (despite a brief look at the nastiest leg wound I've seen since the video for Alice In Chains' "Rooster").

What it all comes to is the combined effort of not-really talented people at making a quality horror film - yeah, it's a part 7, but it seems like a sincere, almost respectable effort, despite the cynicism behind putting together a sixth sequel that flatly refutes the five that came before.  Well, four.  Well, three, actually.  But it just doesn't come to anything much.  A lot of things could have improved this movie - more attention to the Michael/Laurie conflict, less attention to the security guard, picking the right couple to get knocked off.  But what we have is what we have - a spectacularly unspectacular movie that distinguishes itself with neither excellence nor awfulness.

Despite an ending which at first glance seems to ensure no further Halloween sequels, yet another film is widely speculated on.  Yeah, like any of us believed this would be the last.

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