HALLOWEEN H20 : TWENTY YEARS LATER (57)

Directed by: Steve Miner

Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Adam Arkin, Josh Hartnett, Michelle Williams

The Pitch: Twenty years after a certain Halloween, Laurie Strode - now headmistress at a private high school - is still haunted by dark memories of Michael Myers.

Theo Sez: Simple Pleasures Department : a back-to-basics sequel that kicks off with a SCREAM-style prologue, and includes an in-jokey exchange between Curtis and real-life mother Janet Leigh ("If I could be maternal for a moment..."), but generally shies away both from fashionable deconstruction and the cheap gags of HALLOWEEN's gaudy progeny. It goes back to the original, stressing slow build-up over action and psychological nuance over gore - all of which is great, except that HALLOWEEN's power came primarily from the atmosphere around the horrors, Carpenter's eye (as in ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13) for the soulless, underpopulated wastes of suburbia. Miner's eye isn't nearly as good, plus he falls into a rather monotonous pattern of 'false scares' (well-staged mostly, but it gets old quickly) ; the result isn't as disturbing as it should be but it's still admirable, not least for its faith in the material - nowhere more so than in Curtis' knock-out performance, giving a wonderful recital of paranoia as a woman tormented by demons, finally and redemptively having to "face her monster" : she treats it as a serious part rather than a joke, which is why - like the film - it works so well. No masterpiece, not even a potential cult item (it's not really interesting enough - even the familiar sex-as-death subtext fizzles out), but a crisp, commendable, thoroughly professional movie : tense, compact, coherent, to-the-point, intense, and, within its limits, surprisingly exciting.