Films That Witness Madness

review

HALLOWEEN H20: 20 YEARS LATER

If you were a fan of HALLOWEEN, this was the film you were waiting for. After 20 long years, Jamie Lee Curtis was returning to play Laurie Strode in a sequel which seemed to promise closure for a franchise that sorely needed it. Rumor had it John Carpenter would be returning - he didn't, having washed his hands of the franchise many moons ago - and that the series would be going back to the slow burn suspense of the original. The film received a good bit of press during its production, even getting itself featured on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, and fans were in a frenzy waiting for the release date to come. When the film was released, I was in the theater for the first showing opening day with my popcorn and large Diet Coke, genuinely excited as the lights went down and the first notes of "Mr. Sandman" began to tickle the air. When it was over, my excitement was gone and I was left wondering if it was really worth the wait.

Make no mistake, the extended chase sequence between brother and sister is a knock-out. Though the final sequences of the film, with Myers fighting his way out of a bodybag while Laurie speeds away in the ambulance, are somewhat corny, the final third of HALLOWEEN H20 is great. This is what fans have been waiting for for years and it doesn't disappoint. Everything else, however, is so routine and boring that it sort of negates any replayability this film had. Starting with the casting choices, a mix of unknowns and WB faces, the film feels aimed squarely at the SCREAM audience, teens and males in their early-twenties. There are plenty of poorly written jokes and lame teen dialogue, with some soft, gooey Dawson's Creek romance thrown in for good measure. Add to that the curious decision to cast LL Cool J as the comic relief security guard - who spends the majority of his screen time reading the romance novel he is writing to his screeching stereotypical wife - and you have a cast custom made to appeal to anyone but HALLOWEENs core audience. The lesson that should have been learned from HALLOWEEN 5 is rather simple: stock characters in danger don't work. Real characters, people we care about, people who are interesting and not mere talking heads, will pull the audience into the situation. Unfortunately, this is HALLOWEEN 5 all over again. Obnoxious teens don't make for good viewing, only good target practice.

As for Jamie Lee Curtis... She gives Laurie a real sense of fragility in her early scenes. A paranoid alcoholic, living in near isolation, Laurie is trying to cope with the events of her past. She doesn't believe Myers to be dead and spends everyday of her life seemingly in preparation for the day her brother comes to town. Her divorce was messy, her relationship with her son is failing and her social life is strangled by her post-traumatic stress syndrome. She is on countless medications. This is a wreck of a woman. When Myers finally tracks her down, her first instinct is to flee. Moments from safety, she hesitates, sends her young son and his girlfriend away and locks herself inside the deserted campus with her demented brother. She has decided to stop running. The strong performance in the first half of the film makes her sudden turnaround all the more powerful. Grabbing an axe, she wanders back to the school. As Carpenter's iconic theme music begins to build on the soundtrack, she stands in the darkness and screams for her brother. The sense of finality is overwhelming. This will be the last stand, the final battle. It's one of the greatest moments in the history of the franchise and Curtis sells it with nothing more than the utter conviction and rage in her voice as she screams "Michael!".

Choosing to simply just drop the previous three installments - and hoping no one would notice - freed up the franchise. No more cults, no more curses, no more psychic connections. This brought a certain purity back into the franchise. Despite the numerous false scares, cheap jump tactics, and random guffaws, director Steve Miner - who was no stranger to the slasher film having directed the second and third films of the FRIDAY THE 13TH franchise - manages to work up some genuinely unnerving sequences without succumbing to the gross-out special effects that dominated HALLOWEEN 6. Basically a talent-for-hire director - I won't use the term "hack" - Miner's strengths don't really lie in suspense, but he creates a look and feel that doesn't betray the original film.

Much like HALLOWEEN 4, the overall film feels right for the franchise. It is, however, altogether less scary than it should be. This is the kind of film where the lights go out for no reason whenever someone wanders off on their own. It fits squarely into what I call a "Jumping Cat" film. Every fourth or fifth scare is for real, the rest are false scares or jump moments - all it's missing is a cat jumping out of a trash can or through a window. When the annoying, horny dork with the hot girlfriend wanders off alone into the kitchen looking for a cork screw and ends up sticking his hand down into the trash compactor, anyone would expect a few missing fingers in this kid's future. But this isn't that kind of film. Instead the kid survives with his hand intact only to turn around and run right into Myers. BOOM! goes the music, the audience jumps, cut to the next scene. That's not effective, just lazy. And it happens way too frequently here.

Another flaw in the film is Michael Myers himself. He looks small and unthreatening. His hands are curiously clear of scar tissue - this film does include the fiery explosion at the end of HALLOWEEN 2 into its timeline - and the mask he's wearing constantly changes appearance. The "H20 Mask Controversy", as it is often called, is now well known. Due to creative differences between producers and director, different masks were brought in at different points in filming with no attempt to re-shoot existing scenes to, ahem, mask the change. Watch the film carefully and you'll catch a glimpse of each of the different masks, some are much more obvious than others - including a CGI mask most evident at the end of the aforemention hand-in-the-compactor scene. The mask used during the final chase scene simply doesn't look right. Either the mask was too small or Chris Durand's head was too big, but either way the look is off. The Michael Myers of this film is much less menacing than in the majority of the sequels.

Watching this film again recently, I was struck by how much I missed the town of Haddonfield. The California location of HALLOWEEN H20 naturally does not allow for the same Autumn ambiance of a small town in Illinois and, as a result, HALLOWEEN H20 does not have the same kind of atmosphere that the previous installments have. The small town setting of HALLOWEEN, in my opinion, was rather crucial to the success of the original film. It felt like every town. It felt like home. Moving HALLOWEEN away from the small neighborhoods and streets to a secluded private school allows the privacy necessary for the actions of the film to take place but it also creates a level of disconnect with its audience. For me, Haddonfield could have been my town and that scared me. When I watched FRIDAY THE 13TH, I didn't feel threatened afterwards because I didn't live near the woods nor have I ever went to summer camp. The threat existed out there somewhere instead of in my own backyard.

So does HALLOWEEN H20 succeed? Overall, I would say yes. It's a lazy film in its construction and technique, never really overwhelmingly scary or suspenseful, but what it does have is Jamie Lee Curtis and she gives it her all. No matter what her successes have been, Curtis has never turned her back on her experiences making HALLOWEEN. Her comeback in HALLOWEEN H20 shows her desire to create a film that finally offered a conclusion to the tale that launched her career. Because of her - and her final showdown with Myers - HALLOWEEN H20 rises above all its faults and flaws to become a franchise highlight. I said before that the HALLOWEEN franchise should have ended after HALLOWEEN 2 but it didn't. Now I'm going to say it again... the HALLOWEEN franchise should have ended here, with Myers' severed head lying by Laurie's feet as she finally frees herself from her past.

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