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An experienced horror monger (Friday The 13th III), Miner whets the ghoulish appetite with a hatchet to a teen-aged head here and a nasty bit of suffocation there. But if it's sheer carnage in true barrage proportions you're after, it's not until the film's last twenty minutes that this latest in the famed Halloween horror series delivers its unique brand of revulsion. The hair-raising climax, where loving sister and brother go mano y mano, is a visceral hoot. It nearly redeems the otherwise standard platter of shock and schlock.
In case you've been out of town and lost count, those numerals in the title don't mean this is the twentieth in the series. Though technically Halloween 7, the 20 commemorates an anniversary - the score of years since director John Carpenter's serial killing, hockey mask-wearing Michael Myers first changed the face, so to speak, of American horror films. Ever since, directors have been joyously slicing and dicing with greater glee and determination than a late night Vegematic commercial.
While this resurrection is only slightly headier than the bulk of slasher cinema, there is one nifty reprise here. It's Jamie Lee Curtis reviving her role as the ever-terrified Laurie Strode. Now the stern headmistress of a posh and gated boarding school in northern California, the haunted sister of Michael Myers tries to keep it together by drinking a bit too much, keeping a medicine cabinet stocked with pills, and toting a revolver. And, to protect the completely paranoid, she has changed her name to Keri Tate. Even her guidance counsellor boyfriend, portrayed by Adam Arkin, doesn't know the trouble she's seen. It takes him a while to get the point, if you will.
This go-round, Laurie/Keri is not just worried for her own safety; now she has a 17-year-old son, John (Josh Hartnett)......precisely the same age she was when brother dear killed their sister and all hell broke loose. That was exactly 20 years ago, on Halloween, 1978. The camera ominously focuses on the calendar. Dramatic music underscores this momentous fact. Heaven forbid the subtle irony of this circumstance is lost on the audience.
Timing is everything, especially when Mad Mike is on the stalk. So of course, handsome sonny boy lobbies Mom for permission to accompany his schoolmates on an outing to Yosemite. She issues an emphatic "no." He wishes overprotective Mom would get over her silly old fears. What's a mother with a homicidal maniac for a brother to do? Well, for one thing, stay away from family reunions.
Slowly building his case for an all-out bloodbath, director Miner ascribes a lot of significance to the folklore surrounding the horror tale. This should please die-hard Halloween cultists as well as those among the great unwashed who, for some reason or another, were denied this important history in their formal education. But while some of it is witty and playful, all too much is silly, absurdly self-congratulatory and incongruous to the evil doings that await.
For instance: it's like old home week when Miss Curtis' true-life mom, Janet Leigh, as the headmistress' secretary, offers some "maternal" advice and notes that they've "both had their share of trouble." Of course, the moment alludes to Miss Leigh's classic status as a terror victim and the obvious mother-daughter parallels therein. She then, wink-wink, takes off in the 1958 Ford she drove in Psycho. The glibly tacked-on lesson in comparative horror cinema is cute, but what of it?
Aside from these interspersed novelties, Halloween H20 adheres to the usual modus operandi. This requires putting attractive teens in harm's way. Happy to oblige, the well-scrubbed monster fodder includes: Michelle Williams of Dawson's Creek as Molly, Jodi Lynn O'Keefe as Sarah, and Adam Hann-Byrd (Little Man Tate) as Charlie. Making it convenient for killer Michael, who doubtless has checked his calendar also, the kids have decided to skip the outing, opting instead for a candlelit night of romance in one of the campus' vacated buildings. Having relented in her objections, Laurie mistakenly thinks John is off to Yosemite. Once this scene is set, all the audience needs do is take book on who's getting the axe, literally and figuratively, and in what order.
Bloodthirsty viewers who couldn't care less about the campy legend of Michael Myers or how seamlessly Miss Curtis picks up on Laurie Strode, will be disappointed by the relatively low body count. What's more, most of the murder and mayhem is served up in murky corridors and dimly lit anterooms - hardly the best of circumstances for witnessing the geyser-like spurting of blood or the gruesome wriggling of a suddenly impaled victim.
Still, more than one apologist rationalises that this latest rendition is the, ahem, intellectual representative of the series. But no matter what kind of a face you carve on this jack-o'-lantern, the gratuitous gore in Halloween H20 still looks like the same old pumpkin.
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