Retrospective Film Review

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) • 25 Years Later — tepid return slowly builds to a satisfying conclusion

Laurie Strode, now the dean of a Northern California private school with an assumed name, must battle Michael Myers one last time…

How could the writer of Scream (1996), the director of Friday the 13th: Part 2 (1981) and Part III (1982), and two of horror’s original Scream Queens somehow amount to a mediocre sequel? Halloween H20: 20 Years Later is sorely overrated. Fully deserving of its middling reception upon release, fandom has since crowned this entry an underappreciated gem. But the whole is less than the sum of its parts, and that includes its development cycle. Multiple pitches and screenplays piled high before one simply had to meet the immovable deadline of the slasher franchise’s 20th anniversary in 1998…

Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) may have pulled through at the box office (grossing $15M from a $5M budget), but it remains the lowest-rated Halloween movie at the time of writing. Daniel…