Halloween: H20

A few years ago I set out to see every single Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th film. I failed, but I got to the near-end of most of the series, so, when I saw HALLOWEEN: H20 newly added to Netflix Instant Watch, I thought, what the hell, I might as well continue through the series. Mind, not all of the Halloween films are bad, and a few of them have odd flairs to them which are appealing, but, in HALLOWEEN: H20, I found only a single redeeming quality, and that was that Jamie Lee Curtis drives the same car as I do in the film. Curtis reprises her role as Laurie Strode, the terrorized sister of stoic, masked killer Michael Myers. It's twenty years later, and she's now the head of a boarding school, living under a different name after faking her own death a few years after the original film's events. Michael Myers has just killed the nurse to the only doctor who ever took him seriously, and died obsessing over Michael: Sam Loomis. Along with Loomis' nurse, Myers also felled a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and that's a good laugh to be had. Now, inexplicably staged, Myers has decided that after his twenty year stint as an unseen masked behemoth parading about the countryside having never been seen or killed anyone, his vacation is over, and it's time to go kill that meddlesome (? why ?) sister of his. The supposedly unstoppable Myers has apparently been halted for a good twenty years, but now he's back dammit, and ready to fuck with anyone who gets in his way. Stealing a car (he can drive!?) Myers takes the information collected after killing Loomis' nurse to find his sister (he can read?!). Meanwhile, a good first forty minutes of the film are spent hashing out the bitchfight between headmistress Laurie and her son, John (Josh Hartnett). He's had to deal with his mom's incessant twitchiness all his life, for she still lives in fear. He thinks she's an idiot for it, and, based on what he knows, he's right, and when Myers finally does show up, I don't know what I was being convinced of: that the twitchiness was justified? Myers kills a couple of John's friends, and there's some idiotic interplay between Laurie and Michael, and she goes badass on us and takes up an axe that she briskly loses as she becomes determined to kill her brother and rid herself of fear. That's a decent premise, but one that comes late in the film and is weakly upheld by Laurie's ineptitude and Michael's superhuman powers of catholic-resurrection. The film ends in an abrupt ugliness, and I determined to not see HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION.

★ out of Five