Early on, Halloween H20 seems as if it will succeed as a decent piece of movie-making. Not, of course, that we'd expect it to be a great film, but in the first 20 minutes or so, it appears the filmmakers would pull off a relatively suspenseful thriller.
After a while, however, H20 becomes predictable, as it turns out the movie depends on a limited range of devices to build suspense. In fact, late in the move, it finally becomes unintentionally funny — at the preview screening, the audience laughed in several places that were supposed to be frightening or grotesque.
H20 brings back Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the protagonist from John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween. By now, a middle-aged single mother and headmistress of a private boarding school, she's hiding from her evil brother, Michael Myers, tortured by her memory of his heinous murders from two decades ago, and barely holding herself together with booze and pills,
On the day the film takes place (October 31, of course), she gives her son (Josh Hartnett) permission to join a class field trip to Yosemite. However, he has no intention of really going, but actually has a romantic weekend planned, on which he and his girlfriend and another couple are going hide out in a school basement, drink wine, and have sex. In these films, whenever you have teenage misbehavior, you have a killer (a discipline technique I think Doctor Spock was high on), and Myers comes back, having tracked his sister down.
While Carpenter's original wrote much of the manual for conventions in the slasher genre, the filmmakers here didn't read it — or stopped after page three of the Cliff's Notes, because H20 fails, ultimately, because of the limited ways in which it tries to put us on the edge of our seats or make us jump. For example, over and over, Jamie Lee Curtis will be walking down a city street, across the campus, down a corridor in a school building and the camera will move in on her, ending in a fairly tight close-up. As the camera continues to follow her, then, the audience has no frame of reference. Finally, something will happen a hand will extend into the frame and touch her shoulder, or a character will speak to Curtis, and she'll startle. At first, we do, too, because of the disorientation the extreme close-up achieved. After a while, however, the technique gets old, and our reflexes are ready for it: "Oh, here's that close-up, so something's going to happen — yawn." Then, too, the film overuses false suspense — that is, while ominous music plays, a character creeps into a dark room, and then a figure will appear — of my God, it's — nothing, the boyfriend, the security guard. Sure, it can be effective — but only for so long, then it's almost a relief when the figure is the killer, because, at last something is going to happen in the movie.
More than these failures of imagination, however, the film is guilty of sadism, which is not, of course, unique to H20, but disturbing nonetheless. Several times, it goes over-the-top as Myers kills his victims, hacking them or twisting his knife into them over and over and over again. Yes, Norman Bates stabs Marian Crane repeatedly in Psycho, but compare how Hitchcock artfully handles the grotesque, the way he cinematically expresses our desire to look away but to watch the brutality, all at the same time.
In fact, instead of going to see H20, and giving the franchise encouragement for a Halloween 8, rent the original instead, and remind yourself that there have been filmmakers out there who could sustain a movie for far longer than 20 minutes.
by Joe Schuster
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