- Title: Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
- IMDb: link
Released 20 years after the original Halloween, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later brought back Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode while retconning much of the franchise becoming a direct sequel to Halloween II (which, until H20, marked Curtis’ last appearance as the character). After an initial sequence showing Michael Meyers (played here by Chris Durand) back on the hunt, the movie opens with Strode having faked her death years earlier and now living as Keri Tate, the headmistress of a private school that her son John (Josh Hartnett) attends.
Directed by Steve Miner, after John Carpenter proved too expensive for the project, the sequel lacks the look of the early Halloween films feeling much more like any other generic 90s horror flick. We also get LL Cool J in a role of school security guard, Adam Arkin as a love interest for Laurie, Janet Leigh as the school secretary, and Michelle Williams, Adam Hann-Byrd, Jodi Lyn O’Keefe, Branden Williams, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as teen monster fodder for Michael.
The film features teens, and Laurie, being hunted down by Michael with all the expected characters meeting a gruesome fate, while playing on the idea of how her past still colors Laurie’s view of life (always believing Michael would return). Halloween H20: 20 Years Later would itself be retconned 20 years later, with the release of 2018’s Halloween which shares many similarities to this film in an older, and still haunted, Laurie and her family being revisited by Michael Meyers. The 2018 is a more successful, and certainly more stylized, version of what we get here. It also avoids the awkward final moments involving Laurie stealing the body of Michael from the police and decapitating her brother (which didn’t stop anyone from making a best-forgotten direct sequel to this film).