“Halloween H20” is the worst film in the series, and for one reason… its distracting plot holes.
If you’ve seen the first two “Halloween” movies, which were released in 1978 and 1980, I can’t imagine why you’re reading this article. They are staples of the American horror film genre, from John Carpenter’s storytelling to Donald Pleasance’s anchoring performance as the brilliant and heroic Dr. Loomis. His character is sorely missing from this chapter (it was released in 1998, three years after he died).
Set twenty years after the events of those two films, both of which were set on Halloween 1978. Laurie, who was 17 at the time, survived her psychopathic serial killer brother Michael Myers’ rampage in her suburban Illinois hometown, although she was nearly murdered her too. When we meet her in this film (which ignores the previous three sequels and starts its own timeline twenty years after the two movies set in 1978), she lives in California, uses an assumed name to avoid the presumed dead Myers (his body was never found) and runs an elite prep school where she keeps a close eye on her son.
Here are the main plot holes that I listed while re-watching it to write this review:
- A woman knows she is being stalked by Michael Myers and sees the bodies of two of his victims, people she knows. The police arrive, but instead of asking them for help (they have guns and can call for back up, you know), she attacks Myers herself. Nothing is stopping her from crying out sooner, but she only tries to get help after it’s too late.
- There is a shot of Michael Myers driving away from the scene of a murder while wearing his iconic mask. How does it make any logical sense for him to do that? He stands out like a sore thumb and it obstructs his peripheral vision. The visual just looks silly.
- The scene in which we are introduced to Laurie Strode, played by the iconic Jamie Lee Curtis, raises more questions than answers. It shows her son John Tate (Josh Hartnett) comforting her as she wakes up screaming in the middle of the day. The PTSD element of the Strode character (who goes by the “Tate” pseudonym) is barely explored. She deserves sympathy but is instead depicted as an annoying killjoy to the character with whom we’re supposed to identify, her neurotypical and agonizingly basic son. I would have been 13 when this film was released, not too much younger than the 17-year old John, and I would never have been able to identify with him. The 2018 version directed by David Gordon Green (which I reviewed here) does a much, much better job realistically and sympathetically depicting the experience of mental illness. Here it is at best poorly written melodrama and at worst cheap horror padding.
- A woman apparently needs to use a disgusting, ominous, clearly unsafe bathroom so badly that she gets herself killed… but isn’t so desperate to release excrement that she can’t walk slowly. At one point she even slowly crouches down to move a rock in front of the door, taking several seconds that a person whose bathroom needs were truly urgent would not waste on a frivolous task. What’s more, why doesn’t that woman call out to her child when she thinks someone has stolen her purse?
- At one point a character approaches Laurie from the shadows at a fast, menacing gait while not saying a word to her. It turns out that it’s her love interest, Will Brennan (Adam Arkin), and not Michael Myers as she feared. Why would Brennan approach her like that, especially considering her PTSD-related fears of Myers?
- About halfway through the movie Laurie reveals to Will that she has been using the pseudonym Carrie Tate. It seems a little absurd that she would not have told him, given that they’re in a relationship. There were allusions to her being emotionally distant, but nothing about her hiding her true identity from him. Then again, even when she does tell him, he is awfully dense about it, so maybe she had a good reason. Later he declares his own death sentence by urging everyone to calm down despite obvious red flags and nearly killing LL Cool J (who plays the only interesting character in the movie) by accident. When a character is that dumb and inept, you know the writers will punish them in the story.
- For that matter, which characters know the truth about Laurie Strode’s identity and which ones don’t? The movie tells us that Laurie faked her own death, but at the very least her son knows the truth, and it’s implied other characters (like LL Cool J’s security guard) do too. What are the rules?
- It took Laurie Strode until her son was 17 to think about how she had been 17 herself on the night of the Halloween when she was attacked. If I had been attacked on Halloween 2002, when I was 17, I would have remembered it, and would have certainly warned any relatives of mine on the Halloweens when they turned 17.
- Why do all of the other characters who attack Michael Myers fail miserably but Laurie, her son and his girlfriend manage to stop him when they do so. Is it their main character powers?
- When one character closes a gate to keep Michael Myers away from her but then drops her keys on the floor before she can close the door, why does it take Myers so long to think of using the keys to open the gate?
- Spoiler alert: The movie could have been partially redeemed by its surprisingly tense and moving final sequence, but its sequel “Halloween: Resurrection” (2002) wound up retroactively ruining that.
It also doesn’t help that this movie was co-executive produced by Harvey Weinstein. One has to wonder what real-life horrors were going on at the time he made this film. Every Weinstein film is tainted by its association with him, although this one is marred by the fact that it came out the same year Weinstein was at the top of his game (he produced “Shakespeare in Love” as co-chief of Miramax and ran a legendarily successful marketing campaign to get it an Oscar for Best Picture).
The horror movie elements in “Halloween H20” are all lame: Each kill is forgettable, each character is bland, and each jump scare is insulting to the intellect. The plot points are joylessly shoved into a standard ’90s genre narrative formula. Its only redeeming quality is LL Cool J’s performance as the aforementioned security guard, Ronald “Randy Jones.” Between this and his equally funny schtick as a side character in 1999’s “Deep Blue Sea,” LL Cool J can honestly say he was a fan favorite of two classic late ’90s horror movies. (Although “Deep Blue Sea” is much better.) Does director Steve Miner, who made the second and third “Friday the 13th” movies (albeit in the early ’80s, not the late ’90s when “H20” came out), has done better work on major horror franchises, but didn’t seem to grasp the Michael Myers mythos as well as he did that of Jason Voorhees.
The movie also has an annoying habit of referencing pretentious intellectual thing like Sigmund Freud’s Oedipal complex, the depiction of women in Renaissance paintings and the classic 1818 Mary Shelley novel “Frankenstein.” This could work in a smarter movie but here just feels like a half-hearted bid at seeming substantive. The one exception are its references to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie “Psycho,” which works because Curtis’ real life mother Janet Leigh has a cameo in which she drives the same car that appeared with her own iconic character.
Other than, though, as with Strode’s possible PTSD, the intellectual content is never explored with any depth. They’re random, uninteresting segues instead of anything relevant to the plot.
I didn’t hate “Halloween H20,” but if you want to see Jamie Lee Curtis play an adult version of the Laurie Strode character from the original “Halloween” movie, check out the 2018 reboot. Its only flaw is that it ignores the 1980 “Halloween” sequel, but at least it has well developed characters and good scares. If you have to choose a “Halloween” movie in which Laurie Strode is a grown up, pick that one.