Face-Off: Halloween H20 vs. Halloween 2018

Laurie Strode has had a tough time trying to move on from the events of Halloween 1978, when she found out the maniac who killed her friends and attacked her was her long-lost older brother. She is plagued by nightmares and hallucinates the image of Michael Myers. She has tried all sorts of therapy, is on multiple medications, and self-medicates with copious amounts of alcohol. She has made bad decisions and had bad relationships, one of those being with an abusive, chainsmoking methadone addict who left her sometime after they had a son together. She is able to put on a strong face in public, so successfully that she has even become headmistress at a secluded boarding school – a career that makes sense for the Laurie we met in 1978, and one that allows her to live on a gated campus protected by a security guard. She watched Michael Myers burn in '78, but his remains were never found, so she lives in fear that he's going to show up alive some Halloween and come after her again, even after she has faked her death, changed her name, and moved across the country. She's right to be afraid. H20 does a good job of giving an idea of the sort of damage the events of Halloween '78 did to Laurie and Jamie Lee Curtis plays it well, although the character can seem shrill and off-putting sometimes. The film also could have spent a bit more time on her story and dug a little deeper into the character.

The effectiveness of the Michael Myers played by Chris Durand takes a major hit from the film's mask debacle. Most of his scenes were shot with a generic, blank white mask and then had to be reshot with a new mask that looks pretty goofy. The mask from Halloween 6 also makes a return in one scene, and in another the mask has received a CGI touch-up. Beyond the mask, I've never liked Durand's performance very much. He can move slowly and swing a knife, but he didn't bring anything interesting to the role. His best moment comes in a room full of tables, when he starts flipping the tables over two-by-two, knowing Laurie is hiding under one of them.

H20 ignores HALLOWEEN 4 – 6, so never mind Laurie's daughter Jamie from those films. Here she has a 17-year-old son named John, who has had all he can take of his mom's overprotectiveness, paranoia, alcoholism, everything he has had to put up with his entire life. She won't accept that Michael Myers is dead and move on, so he's starting to take control of his life and rebel against her… Beginning with putting together a secret Halloween party with his girlfriend and two other boarding school students who didn't leave on the trip to Yosemite his mom wouldn't let him go on. John proves to be totally worthless when Michael Myers shows up, but he does have some good confrontational moments with Laurie that help us understand where he's coming from.

Only five people died in the first HALLOWEEN, so H20 aimed to keep its body count low as well. After three people are killed in the opening sequence (two of those are off screen, but one of them got an ice skate planted in his face, so that's neat), we have a long wait for the next kill… and it's off screen, too. The fifth kill is a brutal and showy one, but the sixth murder, the last one we see Michael Myers commit, is my favorite – an enhanced version of a classic kill from HALLOWEEN II.

Laurie and Michael are reunited with roughly 15 minutes of movie left, first seeing each other through a window in a door. At first Laurie is just focused on getting John to safety, but once she has done that she decides to turn and face her attacker. She smashes the controls of the school's shut gate, grabs an axe, and goes slasher hunting, calling out her brother's name. As their confrontation goes on, there's a role reversal. We join Michael as he walks through the school, waiting for Laurie to jump out and attack. She actually manages to subdue him pretty quickly, then goes an extra step to make sure she has defeated him for good… But that triumphant ending isn't what it appears to be.