CRAPPY MOVIES OF 1998: Halloween H20

Each week we celebrate the 10-year b-day of a shitty movie and relish in its trashy pleasures.

This week: “Halloween H20″
Release Date: Aug. 5, 1998
Box Office: $55 million
Rotten Tomatometer: 51 percent

“Halloween H20″ is the “Rocky Balboa” of horror movies.

And for a number of reasons.

Like ‘Balboa,’ ‘H20′ pretends that the several abysmal middle sequels never happened.

Like ‘Balboa,’ it brings back a central protag (Jamie Lee Curtis) after a few decades of them coasting through pop cultural oblivion.

And like, ‘Balboa,’ it’s just not very good.

But there’s something so oddly watchable about ‘H20.’ It’s the kind of fine, passably entertaining experience we go to the movies for.

And any movie that opens with Joseph Gordon-Levitt getting an ice skate punched into his face has got to be worth seeing at least once.

It’s been 20 years (if you couldn’t deduce that from the title) since the events of the original “Halloween,” when madman Michael Myers killed a bunch of teens and terrorized little sis Laurie Strode.

Now in 1998, Strode’s become the headmistress of a secluded private school in Northern California. She’s got a different name, a rebellious son (a messy-haired Josh Hartnett, in his screen debut), and plenty of emotional baggage that comes with having a homicidal maniac for a big brother.

So, it’s Halloween again, and evidently private schools in California are big on school trips to Yosemite around this time of year.

And see, Hartnett wants to go on this Yosemite trip.

But, in addition to being an alcoholic and a depressive and kind of a bitch, Strode’s also an overprotective mother. She doesn’t want Hartnett out of her sight because, you know, his crazy uncle might still be out there.

They have this huge throw-down about Hartnett’s independence — “If you want to stay handcuffed to your dead brother, that’s fine. But you’re not dragging me along. Not anymore,” he declares to his mother. And mom decides it’s OK for him to go.

However, ungrateful little shit that he is, Hartnett decides he doesn’t want to go now, instead opting to throw a boring basement party with a few of his friends, including a young apple-cheeked Michelle Williams.

So campus is cleared out, leaving only a few stranglers behind. These include Jamie, guidance counselor Adam Arkin and LL Cool J (as a security guard with aspirations of writing erotic fiction) and Josh and his buddies.

As with the original film, Michael Myers wanders around staring at people through windows for quite some time before he actually slays anybody. The guy’s always been more about the foreplay than the payoff, and at least that’s the same here.

But then he starts slitting throats and picking off cast members one by one.

And the kills don’t really skimp on the gore. Take this one, in which Mikey boy kills the kid from “Little Man Tate” and his hot girlfriend:

If there’s anything grating about ‘H20,’ it’s probably the dialogue. This was, after all, just a few years after the original “Scream” rebooted the slasher genre. And every subsequent splatter flick tried to mimic that Kevin Williamson cleverer-than-thou banter.

This lead to about 20 movies in the late ’90s, all with the same cutesy bullshit wordplay.

‘H20′ was of course made in the Williamson era, and it often comes off like “Juno” but with severed heads. Take this zinger: “God, you are so Renaissance.” Or this one: “Inconsiderate, party of one. Your table is ready.”

Yikes.

But for all its uber-modern verbosity, ‘H20′ is really pretty old-fashioned. Take its use of false jolts (The false jolt is the part in a horror movie when the music goes “DAAA DUHHHH!” and the filmmakers startle you with something that’s not actually the killer). ‘H20′ has at least 25 false jolts in its 86-minute running time. That’s about 23 more false jolts above your average modern horror movie.

Here’s a quick list of things that scare the characters that don’t end up being Michael Myers:

An ironing board.
Josh Hartnett.
Little children in Halloween costumes
Adam Arkin
Little children in Halloween costumes, again
Josh Hartnett, again
A bouquet of flowers

And another loving staple of the horror genre ‘H20′ embraces is the final showdown between good and evil.

Laurie has a chance to escape with her son but instead chooses to stay behind and fight her immortal demon of a brother. And with a flippin’ axe!!

“Michael!!! MICHAEL!!!!” she wails.

He replies. A brawl ensues, resulting in Myers getting stabbed countless times and seemingly dying.

The authorities arrive, declare Eminem dead and put him in a body bag.

But Strode’s not convinced he’s gone. And why should she be? So she hijacks the morgue wagon and takes her monster out to the country and chops his head off.

Moral of the movie: You can never be sure you’ve killed your brother until you chop off his head.

Here’s the climax in all its epic glory, if you’re interested: