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Halloween is one of the great modern horror films, but as a franchise its track record has been spotty at best, painfully bad at worst.
Halloween H2O: Twenty Years Later, directed by horror vet Steve Miner (
Friday the 13th parts 2 and 3,
House), won't displace John Carpenter's original but it might help you forget the films in between. Miner certainly has: the film begins as if sequels 3 through 6 never happened. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, reprising her role for the first time in almost two decades) faked her death and is now a single mom and headmistress of an exclusive California private school. She's also a secret alcoholic who lives in fear of her homicidal brother-bogeyman Michael Myers. Guess who decides to show up for a family reunion? The film begins with classic horror-movie exposition (the deserted college campus, Michael's escape, Laurie's waking nightmares) accomplished with some humor and style, but it's all setup for the second half, a driving roller coaster of stalk-and-slash thrills. There's little of the self-conscious genre referencing of
Scream and at times the film is a little far-fetched--it is a slasher movie about a knife-wielding homicidal maniac who won't stay dead, after all--but Curtis transforms Laurie from a shrieking victim into an empowered, determined horror-movie heroine who's learned a thing or two from the previous films. Adam Arkin, Josh Hartnett, and TV cutie Michelle Williams (
Dawson's Creek) costar, and the script received uncredited polish from
Scream writer Kevin Williamson; Curtis's mom, Janet Leigh, pops up in a cameo.
--Sean Axmaker
From The New Yorker
The title of Steve Miner's new film raises hopes that Michael Myers, everybody's favorite bogeyman from "Halloween," might return to Haddonfield, Illinois, and spend the whole of the movie in public swimming pools; sadly, it refers to nothing more outré than the twenty years that have passed since John Carpenter's original shocker. Most of the innumerable sequels were tripe, but this one has a freshness-even a kind of wit-mixed in with all the blood. It also has Jamie Lee Curtis, who was always the mainstay of the "Halloween" saga at its best. Her character, Laurie, has now found a job as the headmistress of a school in California. Myers tracks her down, wasting a few disposable teen-agers on the way; finally, Laurie and her nemesis come face to face, or, at any rate, face to mask. The movie is not the exercise in undiluted fright that Carpenter gave us; nor, perhaps, should we expect it to be. Viewers of this stuff are less innocent than ever before, and Miner trades efficiently on their knowing glee. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
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