Okay, when I heard that there was a new Halloween movie coming out, and that it had Jamie Lee Curtis in it (who, of course, made her film debut in the original Halloween, and returned for the first sequel), I knew that I had to do a little recapping. In the past few weeks, I rented and watched ALL of the Halloween movies in anticipation of H20. Obsessive? Certainly, but what else do I have to do with my time? (If I was busy, I wouldn't be doing these stupid movie reviews in the first place, would I?)

To bring the layman up to speed, here is my capsule synopsis of the series to date:

Halloween - *****
A classic, good stuff, two thumbs up. Halloween is the granddaddy of the whole invincible boogeyman genre, so you've got to appreciate it from the perspective that you haven't seen it all a thousand times before, 'cause at the time, you hadn't.

A young and impressionable Mikey Myers stabs his sister to death on Halloween night 1963, and is swept off to a posh insane asylum where he is put into the balding and overacting hands of Dr. Sam Loomis. In 1978, he is being transferred to a different nut house (conveniently enough on the fifteenth anniversary of the Halloween when he pureed his sister) when he breaks loose, goes home to Haddonfield Illinois, and kills bunches and bunches of people while wearing a latex mask of William Shatner.

Michael is "killed" by being filled full of bullets from the raving Dr. Loomis.

Halloween II - ****
A continuation of chapter one, taking place immediately after the first movie's conclusion. Also good stuff. We find out that Mikey is so intent on killing Laurie (Jamie Lee) because she is his sister that had been adopted by the Strode family. This movie takes place in the hospital where Laurie was taken after the police arrived at the scene in the first film. Perhaps one of the creepiest things about this movie is that Haddonfield Memorial Hospital has a full time staff of five, no patients, and no lights. In this film we learn two valuable lessons:

1. If it's 1981, it doesn't matter how big an asshole you are, the hot nurse is still gonna want to have sex with you, and

2. Even doped up out of her mind on pain killers, Jamie Lee has a better chance of killing Michael Myers than the entire Haddonfield police force.

This film should have a signpost at the end warning "Caution, entering sequel suck zone!"

Michael is "killed" when our pal Dr. Loomis blows himself and the psycho up in a room full of flammable gas.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch - *
Completely unrelated to anything in the series before or after it. Not only the worst Halloween movie, but one of the worst movies ever made. As if trying to prove that it is not a part of the same story as the first two movies, Halloween appears on a tv screen not once, but twice during the film. The scariest part of the whole film was watching gelfling-like Stacy Nelkin as Ellie Grimbridge get fondled by a creepy mustache guy who is supposed to be the love interest.

Michael is "killed" by nobody, as he doesn't actually appear in the film.

Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers - **
Perhaps named as such just to prove that it is a continuation of part II and not part III. Now Laurie Strode, who was alive at the end of part II, has at some point married, had a daughter, and died in a car wreck since the last film, with no explanation whatsoever. I suppose these events happened in an alternate movie that should have been made instead of Season of the Witch.

The powers that be, never learning their lesson, let Michael escape on Halloween again, this time from the Richmond Mental Institute. He heads back home to his digs in Haddonfield, and this time manages to kill off a whole buttload of police. Laurie's daughter, Jamie, after a fun filled night of avoiding the slashing blade of Uncle Mike, inherits the family madness and stabs her stepmother. Dr. Loomis reappears, with his same old "He's not a man, he's pure evil" bit. He's very badly burned, but not quite dead.

Michael is "killed" by being gunned down by a whole squad of police. He falls into a hole and is presumed dead. Sure he's been stabbed, blown up, and shot several thousand times before, but the ever vigilant Haddonfield police force, after losing so many of their own to this demonic psychopath, assume that Myers is dead and go on with their lives.

Halloween V: The Revenge of Michael Myers - ***
We see that Michael, after falling down that hole, did not die (Gasp!), but in fact was washed by a river, in a weakened state, to the shack of an eccentric bum. At the same time, we see that poor cute little Jamie is to be sent to a children's hospital for the criminally insane. Then we jump to one year later. We see that Jamie is still in the hospital, being plagued by a year of bad dreams due to her experience. In an all out screaming leap off of the pier of chronological logic, AT THE SAME TIME, we see Michael, regaining consciousness in the hovel of the bum, APPARENTLY JUST MOMENTS AFTER HE HAD ARRIVED THERE ONE YEAR EARLIER!

Since it happens to be Halloween again, Mr. Mike goes on another wacky killing spree, apparently using all that energy he had used sleeping off his injuries for the past 365 days. Throughout the movie, we keep seeing a mysterious stranger with a lame triangle symbol on his wrist. Donald Pleasence is back again as Dr. Loomis, reprising the same role, and much of the same dialogue of the first three movies he appears in.

Michael is not "killed" at all, but (get this) ARRESTED! At the end of the movie, the triangle-wristed stranger (who still has not been explained) blasts Haddonfield's favorite freak out of prison.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers - ***
(For some reason this one doesn't get a number, but it's VI for those of you keeping score at home.)

At some point in the six years that lapse since the last movie (the most interesting things in this series seem to take place between films) Jamie was abducted by satanic druids (led by Triangle Wrist from part V), impregnated (by Michael?), and forced to have an evil baby. These same druids also kidnapped Mike Myers (Groovy, baby), in an attempt to harness this "pure evil" that Dr. Loomis is always raving about. Meanwhile, the Strode family has moved into the old Myers house.

Sure.

Why not.

In this installment, our psychiatric pal Dr. Loomis gets a sidekick of sorts in the now all-grown-up Tommy Doyle, one of the kids that Laurie Strode was babysitting in the first movie.

Poor Jamie gets killed after all this time by Uncle Mike (in what appears to be the same barn that her stepsister's best friend's friends were killed in in part V), as well as, at long last, Dr. Loomis. We've seen him apparently die so many times before, but he could actually be down for the count this time. I suspect that the reason for this is that the movie was dedicated to the remembrance of Donald Pleasance, thus insinuating his real life death.

Michael is "killed" by nothing. There is no suggestion at the end of this movie that anything has been done at all to stop the killing spree.

And this brings us up to where we are now:

Halloween: H20
(Part VII for those of you who are still reading this.)
This is without a doubt the best Halloween movie since part II. I think Jamie Lee makes all the difference in this series. Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Jamie Lee.

It turns out that Laurie Strode DIDN'T die in an unexplained car wreck that we never saw after all! She just changed her name to Keri Tate and went on to become the headmistress of a very posh private high school. Now she has a seventeen-year-old son (no mention was made of any kind in this movie to poor abused daughter Jamie at all, who was one of my favorite characters in the series thus far), and a raging paranoia of being killed to death by her cursed little brother.

Sadly, the return of Jamie Lee Curtis also marks the first movie without Donald Pleasance as Dr. Loomis. We do, however, get to briefly reunite with his assistant Marion in the Screamesque opening scene, and we get a nice voice over from the good doctor lifted from earlier films.

If you liked the first two Halloween films, you'll like H20. And if you don't like it, at least it's SHORT! The movie has an insanely brief running time of only one hour, twenty-five minutes.

Michael is killed by (see SPOILER if you really need to know).

So, did everybody catch the Scream reference? Not that Scream II was playing in the dorm room, everybody saw that, loser.

I meant when Keri/Laurie ordered Molly to drive to the Becker's house to get help, just the same way that Casey Becker's dad ordered her mom to go to the Mackenzie's for help in Scream, which was in turn taken from the original Halloween when Laurie Strode told Tommy Doyle to go to the Mackenzie's for help. Maybe I do spend too much time at the movies...

Also, nice cameo by Janet Leigh of Psycho fame (Jamie Lee's real life mommy), still driving the same car from that movie.

I thought it was funny that they kept referring to Michael's last killing spree as being "twenty years ago," as he had gone on several killing sprees since then, with Halloween VI having come out just three years ago in 1995.

The audience is getting too smart for some of the stuff this movie tried to pull. For example, when poor L.L. Cool J. came out of the hallway and was gunned down by the crusty white Guidance Counselor, voices all over the theater immediately were shouting "Dude! The man killed L.L.!" way before the big "revelation."

And just how many people have to leap out of darkened doorways before we don't jump anymore? Personally, I'm going to have to go with "two."

Finally! At long last! The audience of the '90s is too sophisticated to leave us with a killer who has been "killed" through being shot, stabbed, threshed, burned, exploded, buried, or drowned. We grew up on Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street. We know that there is one way and only one way to dispose of an unstoppable boogeyman.

DISMEMBERMENT!

Sure, if the evil is strong enough, there is always a chance that somebody will sew the parts back together and bring it back to life, but the occasions where that happens are few and far between.

I joined the rest of the theater in a round of applause for Laurie as she finally decapitated her superfreaky brother and made damn sure that he would never, ever come back (until the next sequel)!

Vive le Carpenter!