Halloween: H20 holds a special distinction for being the only DVD I own from a different country. I’m not really sure why I bought it on a trip to Germany over ten years ago since I cannot play it on a normal DVD player and my German is so shoddy now that I would need the dub track. But regardless, I have it on German DVD. I figured starting out the review with a random anecdote would be fine since this is more a technically-competent but superfluous anecdote than a real film in the Halloween series.
Even though Part 5 and 6 had their rough patches here and there, both films had their strong points in the ongoing Michael Myers saga. Halloween 4 was just all around excellent. Yet this Scream-derived soulless grab for nostalgia has the balls to say that everything after Myers and Loomis went up in flames at the end of Part 2 never happened. The main response used against those decrying remakes and reboots is “It’s not like a remake destroys the original.” That certainly is true but H20 does its damnedest to try to erase the old-fashioned slasher films of the 80s and replace them with polished, Creed-filled movies like this. That irritates me.
Now, that isn’t to say that H20 is without merit. Jamie Lee Curtis returning to commemorate the original’s twentieth anniversary was a nice touch as well as the other references and callbacks to the first film. But this one spends three-quarters of its runtime sloppily tracing the structure of the original with some post-modern horror moments sprinkled in occasionally. Say what you will about Druid rituals and random tattoos but at least the preceding films tried something a bit different instead of just rehashing the same stuff but not even close in its effectiveness.
As much as I love it, Scream and its successes pretty much killed the Halloween franchise. Even though it was a slasher film with visible fingerprints from the original Halloween, Scream and this series should not come close to intersecting. Yet, the main problem I have with H20 is that it does not gently merge the existing elements of the series with the popular self-aware teen talk of the 90s as much as it barrels into it. The opening scene (featuring Marion Stephens even though she was barely a bit player before) that is mostly divorced from the rest of the story reeks of studios chasing the money with attractive TV actors and a few false scares but little else. The rest of the film plays out more like a high school drama production of John Carpenter’s Halloween with some hip and edgy dialogue and a puzzling inclusion of a movie that basically acknowledges that Halloween is a movie.
Curtis’ Laurie has significantly more to do this time compared to her last Halloween film but this Laurie never really comes across as genuine like some of the previous characters. Josh Harnett (in his debut film) and Michelle Williams try to class the place up with some decent characters and above-average acting. But their other friends are horribly stock and exist only to give Michael something to do. And this features LL Cool J who was not bad per se (at least not the worst rapper to appear in the series) but was saddled with a stupid and ultimately worthless character as the posh private school’s inattentive security guard. I feel bad for Adam Arkin the most since he is only around to extract exposition from Laurie and get stabbed in the back ala Random Nurse #3 from the second film.
The final act though has some great moments as Laurie goes batshit crazy and locks herself in the compound, calling for Michael. Sadly, this lasts all of about thirty seconds before Michael attacks, Laurie responds and then runs and hides. Perhaps this was a much longer sequence but the film’s impossibly short length leads you to believe that there was a lot cut as the bigwigs demanded less boring stuff like talking or stalking and more action. Another sad casualty of the film was the score by John Ottman which is sliced and diced and intertwined with Marco Beltrami’s Scream music that it is impossible to appreciate. That is if you aren’t a nerd like me and own Ottman’s sadly out-of-print score. I took that CD with me to Germany as well.
Director Steve Miner did exactly what he was hired by the Weinsteins at Dimension to do: make a Scream-esque Halloween movie. Yet, doing so strips any remaining originality from the series and reverts it to just another Scream copycat. At least someone had the foresight to “try” and make this the final film in its closing scene. Yet, I still have Halloween: Resurrection to watch so that was clearly as miscalculated as the rest of this film.
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