At 86 minutes with credits, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later was a highly anticipated movie that divided horror fans as well as fans of the original for years. I’ll admit off the bat the movie seems short even for a horror movie which usually clocked in at about an hour and a half on average. Maybe it was because the first two Scream movies still fresh on people’s minds were closer to two horrors.
Even I Know What You Did Last Summer, a movie that was unrelated to Scream and I had to tell multiple people in college that while they wanted to debate me, was about 100 minutes with credits. It’s been reported that when the movie was shown on FX in 2003, there was additional footage shown that hasn’t reportedly been shown since. My guess is you only have to look at the credits as Harvey Weinstein and his brother, Bob Weinstein, are credited as the co-executive producers. Harvey was notorious for cutting and re-editing movies.
Released through the now defunct Dimension Films (which was Bob’s baby), a subsidy of Miramax when the Weinsteins were still in the good graces with Disney, the movie had come together through the early days of Internet chatter with rumors that both Jamie Lee Curtis and John Carpenter were returning to the franchise. The success of the Scream movies and Summer, all penned by Kevin Williamson, had made slasher horror movies popular again and proof that with the right director, a good budget and an impressive cast, it would appeal to the general public.
But there were problems before the movie even started filming. To get it out in 1998 meant a rushed production in the winter and spring months of 1998. Carpenter was willing to return to the franchise but he wanted $10 million and a multi-picture deal with Miramax/Dimension, which the Weinsteins weren’t willing to do. So Steve Miner was brought in to direct. Miner had a background in horror as he had worked as a crew member on the original Last House on the Left and the original Friday the 13th as well as directing the second and third movie.
However, he had backed away from horror to focus on more family-friendly movies like Forever Young and Big Bully. (Nick Castle who had played The Shape in the 1978 original had gone down the same route as a filmmaker himself.) There had been two scripts floating around before audiences even stepped foot into the theaters for the first Scream movie.
Daniel Farrands who had penned the script for the sixth Halloween, which went through multiple titles (Halloween 666: The Origin of Michael Myers) before just plain Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, had submitted a continuation of the movie. It involved Tommy Doyle, played by a then-unknown Paul Rudd, discovering much of the townspeople of Haddonfield, Ill. were actually controlling Michael Myers. The script went along the lines of The Wicker Man, Rosemary’s Baby and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Yet, production on the sixth movie had been so hectic with rewrites, reshoots and a final re-edit that made no sense since Donald Pleasence had died following principal photography that Farrands walked away from the series.
Robert Zappia, who had been working in TV, had written a script for a possible direct-to-video sequel in which Michael Myers stalks an all-girls boarding school. But this idea was scrapped altogether initially before Williams was hired to write Halloween 7: The Revenge of Laurie Strode which would keep the original continuity involving the Jamie Lloyd timelines of the fourth, fifth and sixth movie. It was to be revealed that Laurie had faked her own death fearing for not just her life but the safety of Jamie. In Halloween 4, it’s revealed that Laurie had died months earlier.
Yet, it was eventually determined to retcon the Jamie Lloyd storylines later called the Thorn Trilogy for how it’s revealed Michael Myers is part of a Druid cult practice. This had proven to be disappointed among some fans of the series. So, scrapping everything since Halloween II proved to be the way to go. And for what it’s worth, it actually does work.
The movie begins in the fictional town of Langdon, Ill., not far from Haddonfield, where Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), who had been a caretaker for Pleasence’s Dr. Loomis, returns home on Oct. 29 to suspect a break-in at her house. Her neighbor, Jimmy Howell (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and his friend, Tony Alegre (Branden Williams), notify the police and Jimmy brazenly walks through the house but doesn’t find anyone. When Marion discovers that whoever broke in was looking through the office of Dr. Loomis, she goes next door but finds Jimmy and Tony killed by the Michael/The Shape, before he kills her.
Taking a car, he’s able to leave the scene while the cops are oblivious and suspect whoever killed all three is heading toward Haddonfield. But he’s actually heading for the fictional town of Summer Glen, Calif. Laurie has become headmaster of a private boarding school, Hillcrest, under the fake name of Keri Tate. It’s revealed in newspaper clippings during the opening credits, Laurie faked her death in a traffic accident, going along with what was referenced in Halloween 4.
And she’s been suffering from post-traumatic stress since then. She’s become overbearing on her son, John Tate (Josh Hartnett), who she refuses to allow to go on a camping trip with the other students at the school. There’s also hints that Laurie is struggling with alcoholism to cope as she is carrying on a relationship with the school’s counselor, Will Brennan (Adam Arkin). However, this is never fully utilized. All we get is a scene of Laurie ordering another glass of Chardonnay while she still has a lot in her current glass.
Curtis has admitted in recent years, she was battling alcoholism in the 1990s, so it could’ve been good character development for a role. And like people who were let down by how the 2018 Halloween, which ignores Halloween II, I think Laurie would be more concerned over a killer who heavily stalked her over the course of one night, especially if he was her brother. The Laurie Strode of H20 is a woman trying to move on but still clinging to the past. The Laurie Strode of the 2018 movie is a Sarah Connor-style woman who has shut herself off from society over an assault that happened 40 years earlier. It makes less sense.
I prefer the Laurie of H20 to the one of the 2018 movie because she’s seems on the brink of letting herself move on. She still gets angry at John when he and a friend, Charlie Devereaux (Adam Hann-Byrd), leave campus even though they’re prohibited from doing so, but her anger is more aggravated than a regular parent. You get the feeling that she may have ruined her marriage and caused John’s father to become more distance. My guess is that Laurie struggled to graduate high school but immediately left town to attend college where she clinged to the first man who showed her attention and real affection. They got married probably after she got pregnant.
The tragedy that Laurie is still struggling and trying to restart her life but Michael tracks her down makes her behavior and later actions more understandable. She opens to Will about her past life and there’s a sense that John knows some of it but not the entire story. This takes up much of the middle of the movie and probably why it was cut because it makes the characters more three-dimensional. Yet it seems more people would be interested in the senseless killing.
For what it’s worth, Miner and writers Zappia, Matt Greenberg and Williamson (who went uncredited) keep the violence at a bare minimum when Michael interupts a party that John and Charlie are having with their respective girlfriends, Molly Cartwheel (Michelle Williams) and Sarah Wainthorpe (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe). But when Laurie and Michael finally do square off, the pace feels too rushed. And when Laurie steals the ambulance transporting what she thinks is Michael’s dead body, it feels like something that was thought up at the last minute.
In actuality, Curtis wasn’t too keen on returning to the franchise unless Michael died. But Moustapha Akkad, who owned the rights to the franchise, had a clause that Michael Myers couldn’t die. And Curtis was close to walking a few weeks before production began before Williamson, who also acted as a producer, came up with a concept that Michael manages to switch bodies with an EMT. So, at the end of the movie when Laurie thinks she chops the head off Michael, it’s an EMT wearing the mask who’s had his throat damaged so he can’t speeak. This is explains why the Shape clutches the mask briefly before extending his hand for help.
This would later be explained in Halloween: Resurrection. Scenes were filmed during production to be used in that movie. Sadly it demeans the arc that Laurie has gone through. She is finally starting to be more open and less scared. But when Michael kills Charlie and Sarah, along with Will and terrorizes John and Molly, Laurie sees murdering Michael once and for all as the way she’s going to get over it. That’s why she hijacks the ambulance.
Despite mixed reviews, the movie made about $75 million worldwide against a budget of $17 million. I feel the Weinsteins cut the movie as short as they could to add additional showing times. For questionable reasons, the movie was released during the first part of August and found stiff competition from movies like There’s Something About Mary, Armageddon, Saving Private Ryan and Lethal Weapon 4. The domestic gross was only about $50 million.
It’s highly likely the Weinsteins didn’t want H20 going up against horror movies, Urban Legend and Bridge of Chucky, which were both released in early Fall. Even though I feel it would’ve made more sense to have a movie centered around Halloween opening closer to Halloween. They rolled the dice and weren’t as lucky. A longer movie with more character development and a bigger showdown might have made it a more thrilling legacy sequel. The 2018 version clocks in at one hour and 49 minutes.
The casting of Janet Leigh, Curtis’ mother, as an office assistant Norma Watson, is a nice wink to Psycho without being too obvious and the short interactions between Leigh and Curtis are some of the movie’s highlights. However, I felt that LL Cool J’s security guard Ronny Jones was a victim of both stunt-casting and the cutting room floor. The likelihood that Ronny is going to be killed is slim to none when we first see LL Cool J. He’s introduced to late in the movie and doesn’t do much except for some tired fake-out scares.
And I guess the $64,000 question is how does Michael drive all the way from Illinois to California in less than 48 hours without having to stop a few places along the way to gas up the car. The technology of using a credit card at the pump was still limited in 1998. I guess with it being Halloween, no cashier bothered to question Michael walking in to make for gas and get a Big Gulp and beef jerky for the road as long as he paid in cash.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 