Trick or Trailers: Halloween H20 (1998)

With horror franchises, there's always another chance to get it right. Even if those chances are continually, routinely squandered they're still there. So just because the Dimension Films era for Halloween got off to a less than spectacular start with Curse of Michael Myers, it didn't mean that the franchise couldn't thrive under their banner. It wasn't time to give up. No, it was just time for another sequel and this time it was going to be everything the fans were clamoring for!  

After all, since Curse's release, Dimension had re-ignited the horror genre with the success of Scream in 1996. Horror, specifically teen slashers, was hot again so the prospects for a new Halloween were looking considerably better than they had when Curse came out. 

Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson had a hand in developing the script for H20, reliable genre director Steve Miner was behind the camera, and Jamie Lee Curtis was making her big return to the series. Halloween was going to celebrate its twentieth anniversary by staging a major comeback. Or at least that's how it looked on paper. 

In reality, when H20 was released in August of '98, it was something of a dud. Yes, it did great business but the movie itself was a pretty limp affair. 

But to look at the trailer, you would have never believed that:

  

The classic Halloween vibes are strong here! Despite the fact that within the course of this trailer, Michael wears about three different masks and the design on all of them raises a concerned eyebrow, this just looks like a Halloween movie that's going to fire on all cylinders. 

It looks fun, right down to the cameo from Janet Leigh. Whenever I watch this trailer, it makes me want to watch H20 again and give it another chance. But I've done that enough times to know that I always just end up remembering what a letdown this movie is. 

I wouldn't say that H20 is the bottom of the barrel but it isn't good, either. If anything, I prefer some of the crummier Halloween's to this just because they have a little more energy and quirkiness to them. They're legit junk, occasionally interesting for their flaws, rather than just being a dull, straight down the middle entry like H20. 

The most notable aspect of H20 is not just that Jamie Lee Curtis is back but that her return triggered the first of the franchise's do overs. While H20 was conceived with the initial idea of keeping the previous films in continuity, in the end it was meant to be regarded as a direct sequel to Halloween II, with the events of 4, 5, and 6 having never happened. After H20, whenever the series reached a dead end, rather than course correct within continuity, the storylines of the previous films would be scrapped in favor of a fresh start. 

4 had been a back to basics movie but it had continued with the established continuity. Here, seven movies in - or technically six Myers-themed movies in - it was deemed easier, and just plain wiser, to abandon the convoluted mythology that the Thorn Trilogy had created and get back to a streamlined Halloween experience. 

You had Michael, you had Laurie, you had a group of teens to be terrorized. Done. Cue the Halloween theme. Somehow, though, freeing the franchise of its accumulated baggage didn't make H20 a better film. 

H20's big moment, of course, is the shocking finality of Laurie and Michael's climatic confrontation. Boogeyman or no, it's hard to come back after a decapitation. Any genre fan, though, could have told you as soon as the credits rolled on H20 that there was no way they were going to just leave it at that. More resilient than the boogeyman is the golden goose. Many may roll their eyes at the cynicism of filming such a definitive end while having zero intention of letting it stand but I'm fine with it. I mean, come on. These things never just end. 

Had H20 been better, I might have been more irate at undoing its most memorable moment but as it stands I would not have wanted this to be the end of Michael. He deserved a better final bow than to limp his way through a banal, late '90s teen slasher. A banal, late '80s teen slasher, on the other hand? Well, speaking for myself, that might have been more acceptable. Either way, I think we all know that the best way to avoid a disappointing end for Michael is if he never dies. 

Trick or Trailers: Halloween H20 (1998)

Oh my god, this is really happening!! I've got my tickets ready for a new Halloween movie tonight! And even better, I've got every reason to believe it's actually gonna be good. Woooo!! As any follower of the franchise knows, that has not always been the case. In fact, it's rarely been the case.

But anniversaries have been good to Halloween. 1988's Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers brought the boogeyman back with style and reestablished the Halloween brand. Then in 1998, after that brand had fallen on hard times again, it was time for Jamie Lee Curtis to reclaim her Scream Queen crown in Halloween H20.

Coming twenty years after the first Halloween, but two years after Scream (1996) had revived the slasher genre, one has to wonder what a seventh Halloween would have looked like without Scream making slashers - and horror itself - hot again. Rather than reboot the series to accommodate Curtis' return, would they have just soldiered on from the convoluted continuity of 4, 5, and 6 and brought back Paul Rudd as Tommy Doyle to have him carry on as the new Loomis? Who knows? I definitely don't think that Curtis would have been attracted to the idea of coming back to Halloween had Scream's success made that prospect suddenly not seem like an embarrassing back step.

When the trailer for H20 was released, it definitely made a new Halloween movie seem like an event again, even though I will never get how anybody ever thought it was a good idea to start putting Halloween movies out in the summer. I mean, come on. When your movie is called Halloween and your tagline is "This summer, terror won't be taking a vacation" how does that not immediately strike you as being wrong?

But anyhow, the trailer:



That trailer is so late '90s it hurts. Everyone looks so young, even Curtis - even though at the time it seemed like so much time had passed where we were now seeing Laurie as a middle aged woman and a mom to a teenage son.

Back then, it seemed that H20 underlined so dramatically how many years had passed since the original (I mean, it was part of the title!) but looking at that trailer now is to really feel the passage of time.

It definitely brings back memories of horror in the late '90s. H20 may be a Halloween movie but it's wholly of the Scream era. That may be why I've never totally warmed up to H20. Even with the presence of Curtis, it felt less like a true Halloween film to me than just another generic late '90s slasher chasing the success of Scream. That feeling was not helped by the fact that H20 was also a Dimension Films production and that its poster was in the same Scream mold of "floating heads" that was the go-to style for horror one sheets then.

And I've gotta say, the big thing that takes me aback watching this trailer is to realize just how freaking white the Halloween movies were. We think back on the '90s as being such a progressive, PC decade but jeez, you'd be hard put to see a movie today with such a lack of diverse faces.

You've got LL Cool J in a supporting role, sure, but yet the main group of teens and the rest of the adult cast are white across the board. Today I think that'd be an instant eye-brow raiser. Times were different then, though - from seeing this trailer, more different than I remembered!

Even though having an experienced horror director like Steve Miner (Friday the 13th 2 and 3, House) at the helm gave hope that H20 would be a better sequel, it hit a competent note rather than an actual strong one. But competent sure beats atrocious, am I right?

It's just a shame that the best part of H20, Laurie's abrupt beheading of Michael, was immediately undone in Resurrection. That last scene in H20 was a legitimate gasp getter, even if the most naive horror fan already knew that it wouldn't stick. I expect the makers of Halloween (2018) are canny enough about the genre to not even pretend that this movie will be the end for Michael Myers. The only thing more undying than evil are horror franchises that keep bringing in the cash.

Retro-Shock Theater: Friday the 13th Part 3-D (1982)

As the summer of 2012 rolls on, tributes to and fond reminisces of the summer of ’82 continue to pepper the internet as that legendary summer – one that arguably yielded the biggest bumper crop of genre classics ever – celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. The most famed titles of that summer are never far from the hearts and minds of genre fans as films like The Thing, Blade Runner, and Poltergeist continue to be obsessed over, three decades after their releases.

But the summer of ’82 wasn’t just about its genre milestones (even if the films that fit that description now weren’t all recognized as such back then). No, there was also a fair share of schlock to be found. In the case of films like Don Coscarelli’s The Beastmaster, it was often golden, grade-A schlock as only the early ‘80s could supply – but it was still schlock nonetheless.

One film from that history-making summer that fit firmly into the schlock category was the third installment of the Friday the 13th saga, with Jason slashing to the same familiar beats but this time doing it in 3-D. Just three films into the series, the limiting nature of Friday’s body count formula was evident. Although initial discussions on Part 3 had involved the idea of continuing the story of Amy Steel’s character from Part 2 as she dealt with her trauma in a mental institution, that new direction never took hold. Instead, a choice was made to stick to the tried and true elements that had proven to be popular with audiences. That meant bringing another group of young kids into the woods to be slaughtered by Jason.

With so little to differentiate Part 3 from its predecessors, though, Friday’s producers felt they needed a hook to draw audiences back for more of the same. Luckily, 3-D was on the rise again and it seemed like an obvious match for a Friday film. This time around, the new batch of kids heading to their doom weren’t camp counselors but rather a loosely gathered bunch of friends looking for a weekend getaway on the rustic grounds of Higgin’s Haven.

You would think that even the dumbest of kids would have second thoughts about partying anywhere near Crystal Lake as, within the timeline of the series, the grisly events of Part 2 have just happened and the killer is very much still at large. But in the world of Friday the 13th, good sense would only get in the way of a good slaughter so this group of fun-loving kids throws caution to the wind with nary a second thought, piling in the van with plenty of weed on hand and heads to their secluded weekend getaway.

As much as the majority of Part 3 indulges in déjà vu nods towards the first Friday (an under the hammock kill that mirror Kevin Bacon’s death in the original, a final dream sequence with another leap from a lake), it isn’t all idle repetition. We’ll get to the addition of Jason’s famous face gear momentarily but first, it should be noted that we learn an essential new “don’t'” in the Friday the 13th universe in Part 3 in addition to the already familiar maxims of “don’t have sex” and “don’t do drugs.” Some might believe it to be unnecessary for this particular “don’t” to be explained but Part 3 confirms that when you survive an encounter with Jason, it’s a terrible idea to test your luck with a rematch.

Teaching us that painful lesson here is the character of Ali (Nick Savage) – a bad-ass biker who isn’t content with living to tell the tale of his brush with Jason. Ali first takes on Jason in a barn and is quickly beat down in what appears to be fatal fashion. But while Jason leaves him for dead, Ali pops up again towards the end of the film in a surprise resurrection worthy of Jason himself, momentarily distracting Jason from his attack on Final Girl Chris (Dana Kimmell).

But having the element of surprise on his side isn’t enough of an edge for Ali as Jason immediately chops off the biker’s right forearm before finishing him off for good. When it comes to Jason, if you should ever miraculously survive Round 1, DON’T challenge the Sultan of Slaughter to Round 2.

Of course, Part 3 is famously the film where Jason established his signature look as his iconic hockey mask was introduced – the most important contribution to the series aside from Harry Manfredini’s Ki-ki-ki Ma-ma-ma score. It’s never been decisively determined who made the creative decision concerning Jason’s hockey mask but whoever did come up with it, they gave Jason one of the most distinctive looks of any screen psycho.

The Friday series pretty much fell ass-backwards into its own mythology over the course of the series’ early films but this is the one where things began to get fully locked down. This was also the first Friday to establish the tradition of bringing in random victims outside of the core group of characters just to put up bigger numbers for Jason.

In the first two films, you needed a harbinger of doom to provide some unheeded warnings so Crazy Ralph wasn’t so out of place and, of course, the law had to get more directly involved eventually so the sheriff in Part 2 wasn’t so random but Part 3 was the first Friday that brought in completely extraneous characters just to have them killed.

If you loved the banana-eating hitchhiker in The Final Chapter, or any of the many ‘walk-on’ victims that have appeared in other Fridays over the years, you can thank Part 3. It was with this film that the producers realized that it was always better to fill screen time with someone getting killed – no matter whom it was or what part they played in the film. Hence, in Part 3 there’s Harold, the luckless shop owner (played by the late Steve Susskind) and his nagging wife Edna (Cheri Maugans) as well as Ali and his two sidekicks in mischief, Fox (Gloria Charles) and Loco (Kevin O’Brien), who all run afoul of Jason.

Screen time that in the previous films might’ve been spent on moments of character development with the main cast were now used to deliver more of the moments that audiences came to see in a Friday the 13th film. No more downtime as we listen to Bill strum his guitar, or a buzzed Ginny theorize at a local bar about the legend of Jason – Part 3 changed the pace of the series.

This practice of shoe-horning in more and more kills reached its apex in A New Beginning with its staggering body count of seventeen (twenty-one, if you count the death of the bogus Jason along with his son’s death and two dream deaths in the pre-title sequence).

As with Part 2, encoring director Steve Miner staged yet another exciting final chase with Richard Brooker’s Jason pursuing Chris over every inch of Higgins’ Haven. With Jason portrayed as a hard to kill backwoods psycho, rather than as a reanimated zombie (as an old-school Friday fan, I continue to prefer this earlier version of Jason), Brooker gets to display some moments of human rage during the film’s climatic chase – as when he throws a frustrated fit in a barn stall when it momentarily looks like Chris has eluded him.

It was moments like these that suggested, albeit briefly, an extra dimension to Jason beyond what was engineered by 3-D technology. Many fans consider 1984’s The Final Chapter to be the quintessential Friday but I think Part 3 deserves that mantle a little bit more. It was where the series became more polished in its presentation and where Jason became a true slasher icon. It made the difference between the Friday films going on to be an enduring franchise or simply closing out as a trilogy.

But even if you don’t regard Part 3 as being the quintessential Friday, its place in the line-up of ’82 means that it’ll always be remembered as part of a classic summer gone by.

Originally published on 7/25/12 at Shock Till You Drop.

The Day You Count On For Terror Is Not Over

The murderous exploits of Jason Voorhees have spread out over so many films over the years that on this Friday the 13th, I thought it was worth remembering a time when the iconic character - and the Friday franchise - was still a fresh presence on the horror landscape.

In 1981, Friday the 13th Part 2 was released - not only was it the first Friday sequel but it was also the first slasher sequel. With its script by Ron Kurz and Phil Scuderi, Part 2 created a mythology that would steer this series into the annals of history as one of horror's most successful and long-running franchises.

Steve Miner, an associate producer on the first film, took over directing duties when Sean Cunningham was reluctant to encore on the sequel. Smartly taking a "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" approach, Miner aimed to deliver more of the same in terms of what made the first film successful (good looking teens and twentysomethings getting slaughtered) while striving to apply a little more craft behind the camera.

Miner shows his directorial chops up front in a lengthy and suspenseful opening sequence that reintroduces surviving Final Girl Alice (Adrienne King), now living alone after the traumatic events of the first film, trying to get her life back together, only to find Mrs. Voorhees decapitated head in her refrigerator. Jason finishes off his mother's killer with an ice pick to the temple and after a fade to white, the title sequence kicks in.

The movie picks up five years later as a new group of camp counselors are gathering for training near the area once known as "Camp Blood." Too near to it for many locals, including the sheriff and town looney Crazy Ralph, who both spread the word in their own way that setting up shop so close to troubled grounds is only inviting that same trouble to return. But do these kids listen? No, for them Mrs. Voorhees' killing spree is old business and any notion that her son might be prowling the woods is ridiculous - the stuff of campfire tales and local superstition. As practical joker and electronic game enthusiast Ted (Stu Charno) dismissively snorts: "five years ago, some girl fell out of a canoe." As the saying goes, those who ignore history are bound to repeat it.

Child psychology student and head assistant counselor Ginny (Amy Steel) is a little more thoughtful on the subject of Jason, seeking to put the legend "in real terms." Her mini-speech about the man-child she imagines the adult Jason to be isn't so flattering - calling him "a frightened retard" just ain't nice - but it's the only time in the series that anyone tries to wax philosophical about the character.

What Miner, Kurz, and Scuderi fail to have Ginny address is how Jason could possibly be out there in the first place. The legend of Jason was screwed up from the start but the original series just glossed over this and kept moving. What happens between Friday the 13th 1 and 2 makes absolutely no sense, however, and when the makers of the 2009 remake tried to retell the story, things didn't exactly fall neatly into place.

The trouble is this: for Mrs. Voorhees to be driven to kill anyone who dares to reopen Camp Crystal Lake, a path of vengeance that leads her to eventually be killed by Alice - which then sparks Jason's own bloody retribution - Jason had to have drowned as a child due to neglectful counselors. That's the event that starts everything.

So...ok. But if Jason did die as a boy in 1958, then how did he become a full-grown man? And if he didn't die, what was he doing in the woods from '58 to 1980? And hold on - if he drowned as a kid, why didn't they ever recover the body and give him a proper burial? The thought that Jason's body would have never been retrieved from Crystal Lake is insane. It's not like he fell off a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean - he's in a tiny-ass lake. Has there ever been a drowning victim in a closed body of water that hasn't been able to be recovered? I mean, hell - what kind of mother would Mrs. Voorhees be if she didn't insist on being able to lay her child to rest? Surely not the kind of fiercely devoted mother that we're supposed to believe she is.

What I'm saying is that the conundrums of the Planet of the Apes and Terminator series look as rudimentary as a child's arithmetic homework next to the brain-exploding impossibilities presented by the Friday the 13th series. But that's what happens when you take a sequence that could have only been a dream (Jason's leap from the lake at the end of Friday the 13th) and try to refer to it as being real.

Audiences at the time went along with Jason's return without a fuss and I think that's simply because the final shock of Friday the 13th was so incredible that people just wanted to see more of that character, period. Realism was not going to get in the way of a good boogeyman. It didn't matter that it made no sense that Jason could be alive and be a full-grown adult. The myth that Part 2 lays out is that Jason saw his mother beheaded and subsequently sought out his revenge on anyone coming into his woods. Simple. Easy to understand. Except if you thought about it for even the slightest micro-second.

But hey, in case you hadn't gotten the memo, there's a frightened retard on the loose.

Look, there he goes now!

Back when I first saw Part 2, I thought the sight of Jason's dilapidated shack was so creepy. Looking at it now, my main thought is that this is an awfully big place for a single dude. And again, by having Jason living in a handmade shack they're playing it as though Jason has been living in the woods for years like some cretin hillbilly but...that...doesn't...make...sense...

Of course, it's the body count that matters in a Friday the 13th film, not logic, and Jason dutifully scrubs as many of the film's young counselors as he can, putting up big numbers to match his mother.

It's well-known that the MPAA clamped down hard on this film, causing most of Carl Fullerton's make-up work (most famously, the scene of two lovers impaled by a spear) to disappear into legend before ever seeing the light of a movie screen. At the time, it was disappointing enough to know of the cut footage but today the lack of graphic kills stands out even more. In '81, gore FX were fighting to be seen across the board so even with its truncated bloodletting, Part 2 still kind of delivered the goods. After all, it wasn't every day that you saw a guy get a machete buried in his face. Today, though, in the wake of a decade where the Saw series, the Hostel films, and any number of other bloodbaths - from The Passion of the Christ to the most recent Rambo installment to the 3-D Piranha remake - all skated by the MPAA with ease, Part 2 looks laughably tepid.

Just as it was difficult in 1981 to watch the films of earlier decades and understand how some of them were ever considered shocking, it's sweetly sad to watch Part 2 now and remember that this was notorious fare back in the day. How is it possible that this movie - and, really, the entire early '80s slasher cycle - has now become an example of more innocent times? That's crazy, is what it is.

I don't have to remind any horror fan that Part 2 is the one where Jason sported a burlap sack before he upgraded to a hockey mask. Count me in among the many sack supporters out there. Everyone always cites The Town That Dreaded Sundown as the inspiration for Jason's look here and, hey, it's a real good look to emulate if you want to scare the crap out of people. The hockey mask is what turned Jason into a slasher superhero but the sack with its one eye hole cut out - that's just creepy. I think he rocked that look better than anybody - even better than Joseph Merrick. But that's a close race, I'll grant you.

I doubt if anyone, even very young viewers, who watch the early Fridays for the first time today finds any of them to be scary in the least but those who saw them when they first came out still remember the impact they had and while I think Parts 3, 4, and 5 all managed to produce some decent scares, Part 2 was the last time that the series was truly frightening.

I mean, just the imagery of Jason's candlelit shrine to his mother was so grandly ghoulish - putting the movie, if peripherally, in the company of films like Psycho and Deranged. The subsequent Fridays never approached anything like it.

As someone who was scared shitless by Friday the 13th Part 2 way back when, it's a curious thing to rewatch it now and see it through much different eyes. Other films of similar vintage still hold up today and even if they don't scare me quite as much as they used to, I can still get a buzz of adrenaline from Alien, Halloween, The Fog or even - to a lesser extent - the original Friday the 13th.

Part 2...eh, not so much.

That said, there's still a lot to like about this entry. The sack fits Jason like a glove, Amy Steel was the best Final Girl the series ever had (and it's had a few great ones), and the climatic chase remains exciting.

Horror sequels were once reserved for classic monsters, like Godzilla or Dracula, or for blockbusters like Jaws, not slashers. Even Psycho, the godfather of the modern slasher, never had a sequel until Friday the 13th kicked opened the floodgates. Once both Friday the 13th and Halloween saw their first sequels appear in '81, it was a sign that a new era had arrived. Thirty years later, it's a kick to watch Friday the 13th Part 2 and be reminded of those simpler days. Happy Friday the 13th!

A Toast To Friday the 13th Part 2

For my Summer Shocks selection from 1981, I went with Wes Craven's Deadly Blessing as I think that's a movie that just doesn't get enough love. However, I have to say that my most beloved film from the summer of '81, and maybe - just maybe - my all-around, all-time favorite horror movie is Friday the 13th Part 2. I know that admitting this it doesn't say good things about me or my ability to appreciate the finer things in life but when it comes to Sack-Head Jason vs. Amy Steel, it's hard not to gush like a BP oil leak.

Part 2 was my first Friday the 13th, seen on late night HBO on a sleepover, and I'll never forget my friend and I daring to sneak a peek at the end of the earlier showing that night, at a time when his parents hadn't gone to bed yet. We already had our plans to watch the 2:00 am show - late enough when we knew no one else would be up - but our curiosity got the best of us at around 11:25 or so and we switched from Madame's Place or whatever to the final couple of minutes of Part 2. We put it on just in time to see Paul (John Furey) open the cabin door to reveal the adorable pooch Muffin and then for Jason to explode through the window behind Ginny (Amy Steel).

After that, we both lunged forward to change the channel. As a taste of what was in store for us, Part 2 looked freakin' intense! Maybe the new plan was to not watch the movie at all. But even though Part 2's opening with Jason exacting his revenge on Alice (Adrienne King) was scary enough to make us again reevaluate our decision to stick with the movie, we made it through to the end. After that, I was a Friday fan for life.

With any long-running series, whether it be Bond or Godzilla or Friday the 13th, I think fans are always loyal to whatever film in the series they first encountered and that's definitely true for me and Friday the 13th Part 2.

Nostalgia aside, I can decisively argue for Part 2 as the being best of the Fridays. Amy Steel is the best Final Girl of the series (I suspect a lot of the appeal of Part 2 stems from the fact that Steel never went on to have the movie career that many thought she should've had); Sack-Head Jason is way scarier than Hockey Mask Jason because he seems like just some real-life psycho holed up in the woods instead of an over-the-top super slasher; the make-shift shrine Jason has with his mother head on an altar and bodies of victims piled around it is a creepier sight than anything the other Fridays have offered (the nasty toilet Jason apparently shits in is pretty hair-raising, too); the Part 2 girls are the cutest of the series; Part 2 has my favorite kill in the series (the machete across the face to wheelchair-bound Mark, followed by his backwards tumble down the stairs); Stu Charno as Ted goes where no practical joker in the series has gone by actually surviving; and director Steve Miner delivers the best final chase of the series, a long sequence that kicks off with Ginny memorably exclaiming "There's someone in this fucking room!" And finally, there's a clever final stand-off being Jason and Ginny as she uses her child psychology education to play with Jason's head - I love that!


Oh, and there's some ambiguity at the end as we don't know quite what happened to Paul between Jason's jump through the window and the arrival of the paramedics and police. I guess the truth is that Miner and co. just didn't film a scene or a line of dialogue that they were supposed to but as a kid it seemed kind of artsy to me to leave it with Ginny deliriously asking "where's Paul?" as she's being loaded into an ambulance. I mean, shit - what did happen to Paul?

Also, Part 2 was the last Friday filmed on the East Coast (not counting the Times Square scene in Jason Takes Manhattan) and as someone born and raised in Massachusetts, I was always attracted by the unmistakable East Coast atmosphere of the first two Fridays. Sorry, but the woods in California or wherever just aren't the same as the woods in Connecticut or Jersey.

I might be too in love with Friday the 13th Part 2, I know. But that's just the way it is. It's a movie as familiar to me as my own face.