Halloween H20 [AMC Edit]

 

I've definitely spent enough time this month and September (well 2020 since working from home) listening to the Halloween films analyzed and analyzed over and over on podcasts on YouTube. I've done it, and lots and lots of bloggers, critics, and fandom have, too. We can't help ourselves, I guess. I was listening to a conversation about problems seeing Michael's eyes and the use of masks in Halloween: H20: 20 Years Later (1998). You get the criticisms about the "Scream" comparisons (the poster art, use of jump scare and music score, how Michael is essentially Ghostface), how removing Haddonfield completely and setting a majority of the plot in a California private school where the season (the autumnal feel and atmosphere) is practically gone is a crime, and that even the way Michael walks is "off". Each Halloween fan has expectations and desires, can be more than a little fickle, disregard certain films in the series while be very accepting to others. Some do like the Halloween 1, 2, and H20 timeline. Some just don't like "H20", feeling Miner's film is just too beholden to the Scream era of slasher where the genre was "cleaned up", polished, with pretty people populating it with "snappy dialogue". This was when I was 20 so I was that age where the film worked for me well enough. I don't hate it. I continue to feel that the final 20 minutes is the film at its best. I'll always feel that way. Laurie breaks the glass, picks up the ax, and says "Enough!" That is such a great moment that erasing it, while perhaps understandable to be rid of the brother/sister connection Carpenter regrets writing in the script of "Halloween II" (1981), is rather unfortunate. And as Curtis receives criticism for "taking a check", I didn't feel as others that she goes through the motions. I bought her paranoia, the years of fear, although she does seem to have rebounded considering she's a dean of a private school...a very nice private school. But I get why some consider Michael ineffectual and not quite as potent as he was in the past. But I just felt the sequel let Laurie have her freedom. And it felt like a decent end to this particular splinter timeline.

***This was the AMC edit; my daughter wanted to watch some of the Halloween films with me.***