The allegedly final (ha!) installment in the Halloween franchise scores a lot of credibility by having Jamie Lee Curtis reprise the role of Laurie Strode for the first time in 17 years. Laurie is all grown up with a teenage son (Josh Hartnett) and a pretty decent boyfriend (Adam Arkin), but emotionally she’s still the traumatized babysitter, terrified that her supposedly dead psycho killer brother, Michael Myers, is just going to decide to show up one day and wreak new havoc. Wouldn’t you know it, twenty years after their first encounter, Michael and Laurie end up having their own personal family reunion as the masked killer slashes and stabs his way through a new set of teenagers (including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Adam Hann-Byrd, Jodi Lyn O’Keefe and Michelle Williams). Nowhere near the quality of John Carpenter‘s classic original but better than all of the sequels before it by far, Halloween H20 is an amusing, clever and sometimes even exciting ride with a rather satisfying ending (which, unfortunately, ended up not being the ending after all — the film was followed a few years later by Halloween: Resurrection, in which we actually said good night to Laurie once and for all). Carpenter himself was supposed to direct but the producers refused to pay his asking price of ten million bucks… we probably would, too (no offense, JC).
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New On Netflix: Halloween H20