KYMM'S 365 DAY MOVIE CHALLENGE #36-#37: HALLOWEEN H20 & RESURRECTION
Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
“What do we do? What do we do?”
“Try to live.”
So, that happened.
After six Halloween films, we arrive at the seventh where they retcon the previous four! I mean, they sort of wrote themselves into a corner on the last one. They killed off Laurie in 3. Donald Pleasence died in real life after 6. They were in a whole cult situation with Michael, psychic visions become big plot points, there was a baby, what was going to be next? Well, they got Jamie Lee Curtis back, so the only thing to do was to make poor Jamie the character never exist, and all Dr. Loomis’ hard work, pfft. Never happened. Only the first two movies happened, and it’s twenty years later: go.
Now they indicate this by starting with Mr. Sandman playing over the opening credits, as in both the opening and closing credits of Halloween II. That’s the magical reset indicator. And, in a big switch for the franchise, it’s starting on October 29th instead of October 30th! Crazy!
A nurse is going into her house, and finds that it has been broken into, so she goes next door, where she finds…Joseph Gordon Levitt! Now, anyone would be surprised by this, who expects a child star to be right there, but apparently he is a regular kid named Jimmy and this is a movie.
They call the police, then Jimmy goes to look through the house and destroy physical evidence or something. He steals some beer and gets scared and smacks up the kitchen with his hockey stick, then comes out and says that the office was messed up, and, um, the kitchen. The nurse goes back in, discovers the file marked Laurie Strode is empty, and then just misses a shadowy figure. And then! And then! And then! Jimmy is possibly over-punished for stealing a couple of beers.
Turns out the nurse was Dr. Loomis’ nurse, Dr. Loomis died a couple of years ago, and he had lived in that house with the nurse until his death. The police explain the plot to each other, and how Michael Myers disappeared twenty years ago and they never found his body, one cop scoffing, and the other calling Haddonfield to warn them that the movie was starting and to brace themselves for carnage.
Then we hear Loomis’ famous big speech in the first movie, (though by Tom Kenny instead), while the camera plays over newspaper clippings, including Pleasence’s picture, and I’m glad they are making this little tribute to the actor who made this whole series possible.
Aha! The Paul Rudd of this film is Josh Hartnett! He gets the “introducing” credit, and it’s his first film. He didn’t quite end up with Paul Rudd’s career, but he didn’t do badly for awhile there. Also in the film are Michelle Williams, Adam Arkin, LL Cool J, and, at last, Janet Leigh. So they really were working hard on classing up the jernt.
Also on the wall of clippings is an article about Laurie dying in a car accident, but my psychic abilities say that that is an untruth.
Jamie Lee gets a FANTASTIC entrance, a real star entrance that shows you that the movie is hitting the ground running, we see what turns out to be a dream, the camera swinging through a classroom and then mysterious terrible things, and then there is our Laurie Strode, waking up, screaming her head off, in the middle of a nightmare. Josh Hartnett runs in, because he is her son John, and Jamie the daughter never existed (still salty about that!), and gives her medication from a wall of pill bottles, because even twenty years later, you don’t get over the events of those first two movies that easily. And now. It’s October 31st.
Laurie Strode changed her name and became headmistress of a private school, Janet Leigh is her secretary, Adam Arkin is the guidance counselor and her boyfriend, Josh Hartnett goes to the school, and Michelle Williams with Shirley Temple curls is his girlfriend. Also, LL Cool J is a school guard who writes erotic fiction.
There is going to be a school trip to Yosemite, but Laurie doesn’t want John to go camping, because, even though it was a Halloween movie that she was in, not a Friday the 13th movie, she knows that camping is a serial killer activity. So he stays home with his friends and they plan a secret party instead. Shoulda let him go on the camping trip, Laurie.
This is an absolute corker of a film, 100% the best since the original, only missing Donald Pleasence. The performances are top notch, everyone takes it seriously, without being humourless. This is actually the only one of the films besides the first that I had ever seen before. I remember when it first came out, it was a real sensation, Halloween is back and Jamie Lee Curtis is leading the way!
“I’ll see you in hell.”
So here we are in Halloween: Resurrection, and I have no idea how they are going to manage this sequel, what with the DEFINITIVE ending of H20 and everything, though that certainly hasn’t stopped them in the past. Also, there are literally five more movies, six counting the one that is being released next year, so it’s not as though I’m not aware of that fact. This film not only stars Busta Rhymes, he is top billed, so that’s different. Tyra Banks is also in it, billed at the end with a “with” credit, and the last is “and Jamie Lee Curtis.” So my guess is that she has a cameo. Here’s hoping that Busta Rhymes can act.
It starts with a voice over by Jamie Lee about coming to a door at the end of your life and behind that door is heaven or hell, and then we see her, behind that door, and she is in an asylum. Two nurses walk down the hall, explaining the previous films to each other, and we find out why we are able to have more movies after all. Which is pretty clever, actually.
Barely ten minutes into the movie, we already have murders and Michael and Laurie and all kinds of stuff. makes for a nice short, but what’s going to happen for the remaining hour and 15 min?This is the most 2002 thing that ever 2002-ed. It’s got reality TV, the Internet, people pretending to be who they are not on said Internet, found footage-style camerawork, first person shooter angles, it’s got it all. This is even the first Halloween movie with cell phones! It’s all very cutting edge, which means that 19 years later, it all looks very quaint and old fashioned like Little Murder House on the Prairie.
Six college students are going to be live-streamed (before such a term existed) from Michael Myers’ childhood home on Halloween night. What do you suppose might occur during that little Internet show? I’ll bet not all of them might make it to the morning, call me a pessimist.
Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks are in charge of this terrible idea, and ol’ Busta ain’t bad! He is believable, he has a country mile of charisma, why didn’t he become an LL Cool J level star? It’s a mystery.
Everyone is basically doing it to become famous, everyone except for Our Heroine, Sara (Bianca Kajitch), who really doesn’t want to do it, but her friends Jen (Katee Sackhoff, later Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica) and Rudy (Sean Patrick Thomas) really want to, so she reluctantly joins the show.
The kids go through the house, the online friend pretending to be someone else watches online at a party, with the rest of the party eventually joining him, it’s a bunch of fuzzy footage trying to look real, of course Michael is in there with them, it is definitely not the best of all the movies. More than any of the others it is stuck hard in its time period and seems sort of limited.
But the real question is, what the hell was up with that first fifteen minutes? It was a completely different movie. Also, a better movie. Lesson learned: don’t start with a really good film, stop it, then finish with a completely different and worse one.
Busta Rhymes is great, the last half hour is pretty good, with the online watchers helping the people in the house people evade Michael. But that hour in the middle, between Laurie in the asylum and Sara in the house, is deadly. And not in a good way. Bring back the evil masks and murderous Mormons.
Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog