Movie Review
"Halloween: H20" delivers a suspenseful thriller despite having trite themes of teen-age angst.
In the opening scene, the masked serial killer Michael Myers slashes up a psychologist's wife and two neighborhood children to find out the whereabouts of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Myers' sister. In the scene, Myers murders his victims in his usual way - with a knife - and in a bizarrely creative way - with an ice skate. The scene gives the viewer a sample of the graphic murdering to occur later in the film.
After finding a file on Strode's whereabouts, Myers steals a car, leaves Illinois and drives to northern California, where Strode has lived as Keri Tate ever since faking her death more than 10 years ago in Illinois.
It is Halloween 1998, 20 years since Myers tried to kill Tate for the first time. And Tate, now a head mistress at a private school, is having nightmares and daydreams about a vengeful Myers who has came back from the dead to kill her. Her son John (Josh Hartnett) and her boyfriend (Adam Arkin) notice her unpredictable moments of shaking and screaming.
The entire private school is going on a camping trip, except for John and three friends, who are ditching the trip to throw a Halloween party of their own at the empty school.
With his knife, Myers enters the school. A slaughtering ensues, and knife fights between Myers and Keri Tate soon follow.
The ending of the movie is suspenseful and spine tingling, characterisic of "Halloween," the first of the seven movies in the series. And just when the viewer thinks the movie is over, another heart-accelerating scene arises.
Unfortunately, the middle of the movie was more like "Scream 2" in that it was filled with irrelevant conversations seemingly meant to pass time.
The arguments John Tate has with his mother are boring, irrelevant to the plot and thematically unoriginal. The teen-angst element drains some suspense from the flick. At one point while watching the movie, I was not sure if I was watching a horror flick or an old "Party of Five" episode.
But the production style of the movie was lively and original enough to get the viewer through the stagnated middle. Director Steve Miner uses shadows, darkness and dramatic close-up shots to create a sense of fear and uncertainty. Accompanying Keri Tate's hallucinations of Myers, sudden rises of screeching music startles viewers just often enough to keep them awake.
Another strong point in the film is the cast.
Curtis once again convincingly plays the Scream Queen. And though Tate drastically goes from fearing Myers to wanting to kill him, Curtis gives the change plausibility by showing mixed emotions and instablity throughout the film.
L. L. Cool J removes his hat for the flick, but the viewers should be the ones removing their hats. Cool J gives a charming and intellegent perfomance as Ronny, the security guard at the school.
Making their on-screen debut, Jodi Lyn O' Keefe, who plays Sarah, and Hartnett give an accurate and believable portrayal of their characters, without coming across artificial while trying to act as teen-agers.