Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) Review

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) Review

Considering that Steve Miner had well and truly fucked things up with Friday the 13th Part III (1982), before partially redeeming himself with the agreeable Mel Gibson vehicle Forever Young (1992), which also happened to star a certain Jamie Lee Curtis, I approached his contribution to the Halloween franchise with some trepidation. Would this twentieth-anniversary instalment be cause for celebration or another excuse to bury Michael Myers once and for all?

Thankfully, I needn’t have worried.

With a stellar cast (I’m not including comic relief LL Cool J, who seems to give pretty much the same performance in every film he appears in), a refreshingly tight script and plenty of knowing nods and in-jokes for fans, Halloween H20 is a considerable improvement on much of what had gone before. The gag involving Janet Leigh and her comment about the girls’ showers being blocked again is a particular squealer, not least for its wonderfully cheeky nod to Psycho.

Indeed, after John Carpenter’s seminal original, this is about as close as the franchise gets to recapturing that particular magic. It understands that atmosphere, tension and a well-timed payoff are far more effective than simply piling up the bodies and hoping the audience stays awake.

Bringing Jamie Lee Curtis back as Laurie Strode is a masterstroke, lending the film an emotional grounding that had been sorely missing from some of the later sequels. Her return gives the story a genuine sense of history and unfinished business, rather than simply wheeling out Donald Pleasence for another round of bug-eyed warnings about the embodiment of evil. No disrespect to the late actor, but even Dr Loomis must have been running out of ways to tell people that Michael Myers was a very bad man.

That said, Laurie seems remarkably oblivious to the daughter she supposedly had, whom Michael spent a couple of films attempting to murder. Never mind; continuity has never exactly been the franchise’s strongest suit, and there are bigger fish to fry.

Most importantly, Michael Myers is back, and he’s every bit the killing machine we remember. The body count may be lower than in previous outings, but I’ve never considered that the defining ingredient of a decent Halloween film. Michael is at his most effective when the filmmakers take their time, allowing the tension to build before unleashing him upon his unfortunate victims. Here, the build-up is terrific, and the payoffs are suitably nasty. My God, the man is mean!

Released during the late-’90s slasher revival, when Scream and its assorted imitators were busy making self-aware horror the flavour of the month, Halloween H20 feels like a welcome return to basics. It delivers the goods without becoming overly reliant on knowing winks at the audience or turning its characters into walking horror-movie encyclopaedias.

Audiences clearly agreed to some extent, with the film earning approximately $55 million in the United States alone. Not bad for a franchise that had spent much of the previous decade wandering around in the cinematic wilderness.

A welcome return to form, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later is a slick, entertaining slice of slasher horror that gives Jamie Lee Curtis a worthy return to the role that helped make her a genre icon. It may not quite match Carpenter’s original, but it comes closer than most of its predecessors.

It’s just a bloody shame they had to go and ruin the good work with the next one!