TWENTY YEARS LATER
Halloween H20 / 7
Directed by Steve (Friday 13th 2 and 3) Minor
Certificate : 18
Year : 1998
Story
The story begins with the ex-nurse of Dr Loomis returning home from work to find her front door already open, and asks a couple of local teenagers to check out the house to see if it is safe. Sacrificing their game of street hockey, one of them enters and the other waits outside with the nurse. Inside, he finds nothing amiss except for some medical records of Laurie Strode are strewn across a desk. The boy exits the house and tells the woman that she can now enter. Later that evening, she is suddenly attacked by Michael Myers and she runs to a neighbour’s house for help. Apparently, the house is empty and she tries to burst in. After successfully getting in, she finds the two youths who had earlier helped her - they are sitting with ice skates shoved into their faces, blade first. She runs again with terror and looks from the window, but Michael Myers approaches from behind and cuts her throat, then as the authorities arrive, he calmly drives away.
Laurie Strode, now called Keri Tate and living in a different region of America is a principal at a private High School named Hill Crest at which her son and friends are 17-year- old students. The black security guard of the school (LL Cool J) sits in the building next to the school entrance and is getting fed up with letting Laurie’s son out at dinner times against the wishes of his mother, but he lets him out again, and the boy is caught by Strode who is out shopping. Meanwhile, a woman and a little girl pull up at a toilet block in the countryside and notice an empty car at the side of the road. Upon discovering the Female’s toilet’s locked, she enters the Gentlemen’s and she with her daughter have a cubicle each. As they sit, the woman see that someone else is in the room and suddenly her handbag with her car keys in it are snatched from under the cubicle door, and she gets outside to see someone stealing her car and driving off. Back at the school, Laurie strode is going out with another teacher and he takes he aside for a kiss and cuddle and she reveals to him that there is some things that she hasn’t told him. She tells that 20 years ago, she was pursued by her demented brother, and to protect her, the police moved her and changed her name. At the end of the day, the students leave the school in three busses and head off to Yosemite National Park, but Strode’s son, his girlfriend and two other friends do not go, hiding in their rooms. That night they have a party in the basement, alone in the school except for Strode, her teacher boy friend and the security guard. During the party, one of them leaves to get a cork screw and has trouble finding it and when he does, he drops it in the waste grinder. Reaching inside the machine, he doesn’t hear Michael Myers coming from behind... Wondering what the problem is, another of the friends looks for his mate, but finds the dead body with the throat cut. Seeing Myers walking toward her, she gets into the elevator and goes up a floor, whilst Myers busily hacks at the cables of the elevator. She is half way out wen the elevator suddenly drops, and it crushes her leg in the gap, but despite the pain, she escapes and crawls along the floor only to find Michael Myers waiting for her. He holds her down and hacks her up, then makes her into a lamp shade. With just Strode’s son and his girlfriend left, they go to see what is wrong, but are chased by Myers who corners them between a fence and a door. Backed up against the door, they evade the swipes of his blade as he reaches through the iron gate and after a minute, Laurie opens the door and lets them in, seeing Myers and getting her Boyfriend, who prepares a gun. After loading, he sees an approaching shadow and shoots, hitting the security guard. Just as he attempts to stop Myers in the school’s corridor, he is stabbed in the side, by the stomach and Michael pushes the blade up until his upper arm is inside the man, who is now dangling in the air like a puppet. Escaping to Mrs Strode’s car, they drive to the gates, but Laurie tells them to go and get out of here. She grabs an axe, then runs back to the school screaming Michael’s name. Confronting him, she gets him in the torso with the axe, but he also stabs her, and she runs away, eventually stabbing him and pushing him from a window. When the police and medical teams arrive, she sees hat they bag up Michael Myers’ body, then she steals a police man’s gun and hijacks the ambulance with Myers in the back. She sees him moving in the rear veiw mirror and hits the brakes, catapulting him into the road, then she drives into him and off the side of a road down a steep hill, where the ambulance is spun many times. Both Laurie and Myers are thrown from the ambulance, and Michael stands at the bottom of the hill against an enormous tree, where the ambulance crushes him against it. She runs to him with her axe, and sees his reaching her for help, but she is not tempted, and she cuts off his head.
Mistakes :
When Laurie looks down at him when he has fell from the window, he lies on his back with the blade stuck in his chest side-ways as you can clearly see with the ariel view, but when we next see him, the knife is pointing straight up - in a different position. Another error was when we see the body of the boy with his throat cut. One second, he has the back of his head against the wall, so he looks forwards, but when the camera cuts to a different view, his head is slumped sideways against the wall.
Comment:
I had high hopes for this movie, and some of them came true, but I was over all let down by it’s performance. I’m sorry, but certain bits were copied from Friday the 13th : A woman is hiding and looking though a small crack and she sees Michael Myers walking from the left to the right, and then he suddenly looks straight at her, and he moves his head from right to left, with the camera behind the crack following his head. This looked nearly identical to the scene in Friday the 13th Part 7 with a woman in a work shed looking through a crack. Another is when a bloke goes looking for a corkscrew. His actions were exactly the same as a certain scene in Friday the13th Part 4, down to looking in the exact same draws for it, then looking around, and the kitchen cabinet looked exactly the same. I am sorry to be petty, but it had to be pointed out. Also, the school basement looked an awful lot like Freddy’s boiler room at one point in the movie. Apart from these complaints and the fact that only six people are killed, it is a fairly solid horror and fits in nicely with the other Halloweens and ties up the loose ends about what happened to Laurie Strode., but unfortunately, Michael Myers is now dead, and so there cannot be any further movies. You might suggest that Jason Voorhees kept coming back, but Myers’ head was cut off so there is no chance.
7.5 out of 10
By Richard Gift
November ‘98