Review: Halloween H2O (1998)

The seventh and--they promised this time!--last entry in the far-longer-than-it-ever-should-have-been Halloween series takes an interesting and significant turn toward the more recent, funny-but-scary slasher movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.

How desperately do the makers of this sequel want to jam it into that mold? They brought in Kevin Williamson, who wrote both of the aforementioned movies, as an executive producer. They also brought in young and fresh faces like Michelle Williams (from Dawson's Creek--yep, every one of these movies have one of those damn kids), Josh Hartnett and Jodi Lynne O'Keefe, and a veteran director in Steve Miner, who helmed a couple of those Friday the 13th movies. They even managed to drag back Jamie Lee Curtis, who managed to survive the first two movies in the Halloween series. Throw in a few other recognizable faces like LL Cool J, Adam Arkin and even Janet Leigh (Jamie Lee's real-life mom), and this last, anniversary-celebrating Halloween takes on a veneer of respectability long absent from this series.

That doesn't mean it's good.

One of the most important elements of the hip mad-slasher films is contest to guess the killer's identity. In this movie, no such fun is to be had: we know from BEFORE the opening frame flickers onscreen who the killer is, and so the guessing game is not who's doing the killing but, rather, who's going to get killed. And the killings are particularly nasty, graphic and unpleasant here--kind of hard to get a chuckle out of an ice skate jammed into somebody's face or a nearly-amputated leg dragging along behind a character desperately trying to crawl away from Michael Myers (who still moves in that slow, deliberate stroll that just makes you wonder who'd win in a 100-yard dash--Michael or the Mummy from those old, awful Universal quickies from the 1940s).

No, this is very familiar, by-the-numbers moviemaking, when you get down to it, even though the filmmakers wisely avoid mentioning most of events in the previous entries in this series--which, in total, have managed to make the groundbreaking original look dated and cliched--and return to the main character from the first two films, Laurie Strode (Curtis). She's now the headmistress at a private school and, as a result of her tortured past, a pill-popping, alcoholic control freak who won't let her son (Hartnett) out of her sight, not even to let him hook up with his adorable girlfriend (Williams). Once Michael shows up, though, it's all run-run, slash-slash-just like you'd expect.

And that's too bad. There are interesting aspects to Halloween H2O, most notable Curtis and her take on Laurie 20 years later. After all, we don't often get to see survivors of these teen mad-slasher flicks deal with their demons in adulthood because, well, they don't very often make it to adulthood. But Jamie Lee's Laurie is a nervous, twitchy and, ultimately, strong and determined survivor who won't let any freak in a bleached-out William Shatner mask destroy her world yet again, and she's willing to fight for her life and her son's using any and all means necessary in a climactic battle that give one hope--for a fleeting moment, anyway--that Michael's shuffling reign of terror might finally, finally, finally be over.

But Curtis's performance is overwhelmed and, eventually, swallowed up and spat back out by the formula, which demands that everybody--even the well-drawn, well-acted characters--run through the maze of slice and dice, slash and hack, run and hide, then do it all over again.

Even as formulaic as Halloween H2O is, it would have been a decent ending to the series. Unfortunately, it did well enough at the box office to spawn at least one more sequel, Halloween Resurrection, which was poorly received by critics and audiences alike.

Maybe that'll be the end of the series. Somehow, I doubt it.