Halloween H20 (1998)

Welcome to Varus Dead Eastland, a zombie apocalypse actual play. Yeah, run, go. Yeah, I start shoving the old man towards the back door like, let's go. His hand reaching forward as he is screaming your name. I'm just there mouthing the words, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Join our family of survivors as they trek across Iceland on foot in winter during a zombie apocalypse. Search Varus RPG V-A-R-U-D in your podcatchers of choice. Then I'm gonna use my accent to die. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Movie Mastery Horrortoberfest Edition. Woo!

That's the podcast where normally we would watch the movies that you tell us to, but not during October because that's when I take over and just watch horror movies and force Jeff to watch horror movies. It's not like we don't watch horror movies constantly throughout the rest of the year, too. Eh, not so much. I mean, if we do, they're like horror movies. So very similar to this one. Eh. I have a feeling this is definitely going to be a differing end point when we do our scores on this one. Perk up Scorigami, folks.

This is going to be a wild ride. So we watched Halloween H20 20 years later. I have been doing for the month of October Horrortoberfest where I watch a horror movie I haven't seen every day for the whole month. And this time I've been going around doing franchises I have not done before. So I've gone through the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, which gets real weird and real bad and has almost as many timelines as Halloween does. I don't remember which one I watched, but it was real bad.

And then we watched The Next Generation for that. Also watched the Friday the 13th series, which I had never really gotten into, which also gets real weird and real bad. And I'm very sad that the way I planned this, we ended up watching Halloween H20 because it is sandwiched in between two of the worst Halloween movies that exist. Because on the other side, you've got Halloween 6, The Curse of Michael Myers. Yeah, the one that's all spookified because of Supernatural crap. Yeah, so it ends up being like, oh, Michael Myers has a druid curse and they're going to try and...

put the curse onto a new kid, and also he's got to kill his great nephew. At a certain point, Michael Myers just gets turned into, like, the Batman villain abattoir, doesn't he? Where he just has to kill, like, even the most extended relative possible. Yeah, they're like, oh, we have to explain why it is he actually gives a shit about murdering his family that he's never met and doesn't know about most of the time. Yeah. And it's because the curse is, oh, druids curse you to sacrifice your family for the safety of your community. Those horrible druids are the true villains of the Halloween franchise, speaking of someone who has watched two Halloween films.

I gotta tell you, the fact that they don't tie in Curse of Michael Myers to Season of the Witch is the biggest crime that the Halloween movies ever perpetrated. Yeah, they really should have. The two of them were druid-themed. Right? You're like, oh, man, you made an entire movie that was like, oh, yeah, we decided to have, like, druids try and murder people with Halloween masks. And then later in the series, after you're like, that was stupid, let's get back to Michael Myers, went to, anyway, druids caused Michael Myers to murder people, and you didn't go, also, here's these masks. Yeah, you know what? You couldn't even just put the masks in the movie. Right, you totally should have. I'll tell you what, though, Season of the Witch may be a very stupid premise.

It's a really good movie. Yeah, and that was the problem with Curse of Michael Myers. I was like, man, if you had leaned into this, this would be amazingly stupid. But instead, the franchise got picked up by Dimension Films, and the Weinsteins hated the idea. So they just went like, no, you're not allowed to do that. But we have already filmed so much, and they're like, don't. I mean, this movie does have a very strong Back to Basics vibe to it, the one that we're about to watch. And again, seeing as how this is the first time I've ever seen Michael Myers on screen. The only Halloween film I've seen before this is Season of the Witch. But it still had that vibe of like, we're just getting back to our roots. Michael Myers is just a creepy...

Dude who wanders around in a mask and slashes at people with kitchen knives. Hell yeah. So this movie, Halloween H2O, starts the first timeline split. In the first six movies, I mean, well, five, not counting Season of the Witch, you have a timeline where Laurie, Jamie Lee Curtis' character, is the star for the first two, which take place one right after the other in one continuous Halloween night. Did she play that character in the first two as well? Yes. Okay, yeah, that's right. And then in four, we pick up with her daughter, and Laurie Strode has died in a car crash, and her seven-year-old daughter...

is an orphan and is picked up by someone else. Is her name Jamie? Yes. That is what made me confused, or just a second ago, because I read a bunch of stuff about, like, Jamie got chased around and murdered, and I was like, yeah, she's always the star. Yeah, so Jamie is the name of the child, because they're like, ah, we'll do a nod to her, except that just makes it really confusing to talk about. You know what? Don't do nods. Horror movies. Stop it. No more nods. No, I'm going to tell you right now, and I have a lot to say about that when we go after the break, but yeah, so the original timeline had Jamie Lee Curtis's daughter, Jamie, be the star for four and five, and then in...

Six. Yeah, she gets killed immediately. She gets killed immediately because they wouldn't pay Danielle Harris, the actress, an actual rate that she wanted. And they just went, all right, fine. We'll get someone else and kill her immediately. Right. And then we get Paul Rudd in six. Yeah. But this, they went, all right, fuck that. We're going to make this a sequel to the first two. And it should be noted that the Halloween reboot, not the Rob Zombie stuff, the new stuff, the new Halloween, Halloween kills and ends is then a direct sequel to just the first movie instead of the first two. The difference being in this movie, we keep the timeline. In the second movie, they decided.

that Laurie Strode is actually Michael Myers' sister. In the newest reboot, they said, no, we're not going to go with that. And so we only get a sequel to one instead of one and two like this is. Oh my God. Okay. The timeline for Halloween is fucked, people.

But yes, this is, as Jeff was saying, very much a, we've done way too much dumb horse shit. Let's get right back to basics. Michael Myers, stocking and killing. That's all we're doing. And by that, I mean, we're going to show that to you after about an hour in. Yes. Yeah. We get a nice intro, a couple of offscreen kills. I was a little disappointed with this as a cold open set of random kills, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which was great to watch. Very young Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Oh my God. Spoilers. We should save this. Oh, you're right. We'll talk about that after the break. I mean, saying who's in it is different. Yeah. Anyway, I'll go ahead and say for no spoilers.

If you actually like slashers, this is very much a back-to-basics standard slasher, but with the caveat, this was made post-Scream, and every slasher post-Scream has a lot of Scream in it. Yes, there's a lot of Scream here. Scream revitalized the genre and then poisoned the well on its way out. Yeah, there's some definite scream influences here. And hoo boy, I have a harder time separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to slasher movies than I think John does. I think John, you're probably much better at being like, oh yeah, you need this. This is the foreplay to the slasher. The hour of useless jump scares. You gotta have it or else you're not in the mood for the real slashes. Because the thing is, if you watch a slasher movie and it's like...

Just from go, it's a dude murdering folks. You're like, this is boring. I don't care. Make it shorter. That's all. I don't need to watch this much of this. She bumped. We'll get it on the other side of the break. It's fine. It's fine. All right. We are going to play a little music. We are going to get into the full spoiler blow by blow of everyone that runs into Jamie Lee Curtis. Yep. And we will review all of Halloween H20. We're back and it is time to talk about.

Halloween, H2O, 20 years later, here it is, 1998. So the opening is actually my favorite part of this. I really like this little sequence of Levitt being overconfident and the little connection to the existing Halloween franchise by like, well, Donald Pleasance probably died. I don't know. He might even still be alive. I don't fucking know. No, he very much died before the sixth one managed to make it to theaters. Oh, okay. So instead they kill off his nurse from back in the days when he was, she used to work for him as his nurse and now she was like his home nurse? Yeah, so this is the nurse from the first two, the same actress and everything that was his, you know, nurse at the psychiatric hospital that he was at. Yeah, that's neat. And they were like, oh yeah, in his dotage, he stayed at this house and then his old nurse who worked for him just took care of him. Yeah.

And she arrives home to find that her place has been broken into. And it's weird to me that she thinks it's broken into because I was like, oh, I would just assume some asshole kid smashed my light. Yeah, they were out there one or two days before Halloween and they decided to just pull a Halloween prank anyway and smash her light. But then again, her door was unlocked and open. Yeah. So it was definitely for her, especially because she knows. It's not like she doesn't know who she worked for and what the whole fucking situation. Well, yeah. When it's the day before Halloween and some shit happens, you're like, nope, no, no, no, no. It's just weird to me that people who are in that situation were like, full on Michael Myers aware.

Jimmy Lee Curtis, fucking go to Barbados for Halloween. What the fuck are you doing staying at your fucking house? See, that's the one thing that I actually like about this being a sequel to the first two and not any of the other ones existing, is you're like, it's been 20 years. And if you were like, yeah, for the first five years or so, every Halloween, you were like, no, fuck it. I go to somewhere ridiculous and away. Yeah. But he's not going to get on a goddamn plane. What's he going to do? Buy a ticket? He's just going to stand there doing very slight head sales like a German shepherd. No, man, he'll just murder some boat captain and then pilot a boat out there. Gordon's fisherman his way across. Maybe he'll pause to do a little I knowing what you did last summer. I knowing what you did last summer.

But yeah, I mean, like the moment she's like, fuck, one day before Halloween, house broken into, I'm going to a hotel in a nearby town. Like, just do that. I do like that this is also the first Halloween Myers film that does not ever take place in Haddonfield. Oh, that's true. Yeah, there's no Haddonfield in there. They mention Haddonfield. Yeah, this is Langdon, Illinois, where she is. And Jamie Lee Curtis has since relocated to California for the rest of this. Yeah, she's the headmistress of a posh private school in Northern California. Yes, indeed. Now, of course, you know, I like that.

part of the whole Scream influence is they try and make characters not be idiots. So when she's like, oh, someone broke into my house, shit's fucked up, it's the day before Halloween, I am leaving. I see the back door is open, and I'm just like, nope, fuck this. Exactly. But she doesn't take it to the natural conclusion, which is to get the fuck out of that block, go to a fucking Denny's, go someplace very public, and just be there. That's what Denny's is fucking for. That's the only reason there's Denny's. Denny's exists to get away from serial killers. Serial killer's stalking you, and he will only kill you when there's a strobe effect or it's really dark or some shit.

Denny's is always open. Come on in. Have a Grand Slam serial killer can't get me special $7.99. It's for that and emergency Denny's if you've had too much to drink. Yeah. If you've got to gruffle some Denny's because you're too fucked up, then great. Otherwise, you're only there because of serial killers after you. Exactly. Next time that you walk into a Denny's, at least 50% of the people are being pursued by serial killers. Yep. Walk in. Take a look around. And if none of them appear to be pursued by serial killers, I've got bad news for you. You're at Denny's. Bad news, friend. Now.

She goes across the street so we can get a very brief Jason reference as her neighbor, Jimmy, is in the hockey mask for a second before he pulls it off. He's like, oh, hey, what do you need? And she's like, oh, someone broke in. And they decide, well, Joseph Gordon-Levitt decides, fuck it, I'm going to go in there and look around like an idiot. He calls the cops for her, which is nice. You know, he calls the cops. They're sitting around at, you know, the neighbor's place. And he's just like, oh, it's fine. We'll call the cops. We'll hang out. But he decides, I want to be, you know, a dumb, brash teenager. Yes. So he goes wandering around the house, his friend who looked like but was not Devon Sawa.

His friend who was definitely also in a bunch of these teen movies and I don't know his name. Oh yeah, for sure, for sure. He's exactly the kind of character you put in for one background gag in like American Pie 2. Yeah, Brandon Williams. He is definitely a dude who has shown up in a bunch of this type of shit. But yeah, Levitt puts on his brash's face and brings a hockey stick with him and wanders around her house yelling that he's a badass and stealing her cookies and fucking up her kitchen. Just all the basics. I do like that in this we get the whole like, oh, he's walking through the house and we get the idiot thing of like, he never attempts to flip a light switch. Yes, we get the standard don't turn on the lights. Which...

At least later on when the nurse comes back, she can't turn on the lights. The power has been killed. And I was like, okay, but that doesn't explain why he didn't at least attempt to flip a light on. It's more badass if you're wandering around your house in the dark and he is full of teenage bravado. However, the light in the fridge still works when he goes to steal beer. So, you know, that's dumb. He hadn't cut the power yet. He was relying on the first person coming in to be a teenager. Yeah, first person comes in. Teenager doesn't turn on lights. Second person comes in.

Tries to turn on lights, gets killed. I gotta say, I did not, I don't know that much about Myers as a character. I was expecting a lot more of him just being like grimly, like basically a zombie. Just grimly implacable, just does nothing but walk forward. And in this movie, he is actually very cunning. He spends a lot of time like planning his angle of attack and stuff. Yeah, the whole thing with Myers is he walks a very weird line in the whole implacable murderer thing. Yeah. Where he is very much like this inhuman force, but he also isn't, like you said, just like brainless. He does actually go like, oh, I'm gonna stalk people, figure things out.

have plans, set things up. Yeah, like as far as I can tell, he's there to ransack her house to get information on wherever the hell Laurie Strode went. Yeah, we can see that when, you know, the nurse went in, the Laurie Strode file has been emptied. Yeah, so that's what he's there for. But then while he's there, he's just going to indulge in a little recreational slashing because... Yeah, and I mean, it's been 20 years. Michael Myers has been wandering the fucking Illinois countryside for 20 years and I am like, what have you been doing? You get some odd jobs? What's going on, my man? They mentioned at one point that he was burned at the end of the last one. Yes, in what he was supposed to because they were going to go to Anthology. And this is Halloween 2. At Halloween 2, they show him...

Like, literally burning to death. Like, on the floor, body on fire, burns to death. Yeah. Now, just be clear, there are no sequels to this one, right? This is the end of a line? No, this will go to Halloween Resurrection, and then we'll start over with a new timeline. Okay, thank you. Just checking to see how they're going to explain the final kill. Apparently, they do. Oh, you know what? I bet I know what it is. Anyway, we'll get to it when we get to it. But yeah, at this point, after the Leavitt sequence, she goes back to her house. Although, I do want to mention the fact that it's... I love the teenagers in this film.

Leavitt and his friend included, also our main cast that we will get to. Yeah. The idea of him like stealing two beers and he's like, man, we're going to get messed up. The teenage idea of getting messed up on one beer each is so good. Yes. Who knows? They're little. They ain't got much body fat. Maybe it'll get to them without a lot of soaking in. They're like, oh man, we're going to get fucked up. I got one Oduels each. I got some old Milwaukee and a brain full of the ability to believe that I'm drunk. Yeah. I have so much placebo in my heart and I'm ready to go. Because we've seen those like college studies where like they give them a crate of near beer and they all act drunk for the full night.

So anyway, she realized the nurse goes back in, realizes, no, this situation is fucked because all the doors are open. Shit's bad. She even sees a shadow moving around. So she runs back over to the other house, only to find that Myers has already been there and has done some sadly off screen, although the visual effect isn't terrible. Oh, yeah. Probably the best murder in this thing is spinning the lazy boy around to find Joseph Gordon-Levitt with an ice skate stuck halfway through his face. Especially because all we know about him is he wears a hockey outfit. Yeah. He has a hockey stick. So we're like, yeah, we'll get him with an ice skate. It's an ironic killing. Fuck yeah. I'm like, it's barely. But sure. The effect of an ice skate.

in a dude's face. I'm like, that's great. Good job. Yeah, the reason you can say they did it off screen is because the effect of an ice skate on a dude's face is that they sawed off a face-shaped part of an ice skate and then glued it to him. But still, I would have rather seen him get it rather than find him later. A lot of the kills in this are very off screen. Yeah, there is...

There is definitely a toning down of the gore. Yeah. Which, I mean, again, harkens back to more of the original Halloween, which was not very gory at all. No, it's just like I've seen the first Friday the 13th, and that isn't especially. It's just, they took a while to ramp up. Yeah. Unlike Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which comes out swinging. Oh, yeah. So anyway, the two dudes she saw earlier have been brutally murdered. She tries to run, but unfortunately, he's already in the house chasing her. She starts screaming out the widow to the cops who were investigating the other house.

Doesn't work. She's murdered. Great. We've wrapped up all the Donald Pleasence related characters. Hooray. He steals a car and starts driving for Northern California. Which I do love that Michael knows how to drive a car. But he knew in the first one how to drive a car when he had been from seven years old onward in a mental institute. Yeah. Yeah, that is a little weird. He's just like, well, I've never even seen a car in my life past seven, but I got this. He also switches cars at one point because he steals like a sports car, but the next time we see him, he's in like an old Studebaker truck. Yeah, because he has to steal someone else's because he's like, oh, this car broke down. Well, he might know how to steal cars and drive them, but he certainly doesn't know how to fill up at a station. No, he's not going to go to the station and sit there and be like, well. I also enjoy.

There are so many nods to other Halloween films in this. One, the car he steals in the original Halloween is the nurse's car. So him stealing the nurse's car in this is great. Yeah, I only got one of them, and that's just because of cultural osmosis. So, I mean, it was a pretty obvious one. It was probably the most obvious and definitely the most inserted one of them.

I don't even know which one that would be. Is it the instructions? No, it's the one where her mom shows up and bumps into her, like her real life mom. Oh, not a reference to Halloween. No, I know. It is a reference to Halloween. She says the line from the first Halloween after she bumps into her. So yeah, her mom, Janet Leigh, who's like the main character in Psycho. Which we'll get to. We'll get to, yeah. Anyway, so we get the credits now. And again, we get a lot more stuff for Halloween things where we find out that Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode faked her death in a car crash, which is a nod to the Halloween 4 where...

Laurie Strode actually died in a car crash. Christ, okay. I just figured that actually happened at the end of two. No, we get the introduction of her kid in four is just like, oh, I'm an orphan. And then you get like, oh, she holds basically a headshot of Jamie Lee Curtis. And then we get a quick like, oh, it's so sad your mom died off screen anyway. Okay.

But yeah, we get a whole bunch of references to everything that happened in one and two. And then a few little dots of things that, you know, reference some of the other films. And then we get to go to Northern California at a boarding school where Laurie Strode is now Kate something. No, Carrie Tate. Yeah. Yeah. Carrie Payton, the voice of Cyborg. Yep. Uh-huh. Yep. So. Yep. Yes, and. So. Booyah. So anyway, yeah, she's now the headmistress of a school, and she has a son who was attending the school, played by a baby face to Josh Hartnett. Yeah. An introducing Josh Hartnett role. Yes. Uh-huh. Just like the last one was an introducing Paul Rudd. And it is his 17th birthday two months ago. Mm-hmm. That's right. Yeah. And they're having a big old fight, because he wants to go to Yosemite for a big old class trip. And she's like, you know what fucking day it is?

Okay, one, I get it. You have PTSD. Two, what school is like? And we'll all leave on Halloween day. No, you don't. No one's doing that. No one would go to your thing. They're high school students. They have parties and shit. The second you're like, hey, we're going to go on a school-supervised field trip to Yosemite. It leaves on Halloween. You'll be on a bus for the whole time. You'd be like, how about you go fuck yourself? Also, another thing, you see a lot of people in this movie on the street running around in little Halloween costumes here and there. Not one high school student ever is in a Halloween costume in this film. Yeah, apparently this is a...

Like, in the way that you have college towns, this is a high school boarding school town, in that any high schooler that lives anywhere near here is at that boarding school, and so is not in town. Yeah, it's weird because it's an extremely posh high-end boarding school, so you gotta think there's a local public school for the poor kids, but no. No, this is just like, what is this? It is an affluent small town in Northern California where the only thing that exists is a boarding school and a place for the people who do not want to see their children live. Yeah.

But yeah, Josh is mad at her. Sorry, I remember his real name. It's John. John. John is mad at her because she won't let him go on this trip, obviously. Although it's weird to me that I guess she has at some point between Halloween 2 and now internalized that Michael Myers is after anyone related to her.

not really, she's just sort of, like, terrified that anyone, like, she's like, oh, Halloween is murder time, and she didn't die last Halloween, but everyone she loved did. That's fair. So it's like, oh, I'm worried that Michael will come after me, and I'll live, but you'll probably die. And we get a lot of backfill here that I have to assume is references to yet more unrelated Halloween films, where we reveal that three years after the incident in Haddonfield for Halloween 2, she married, like, a meth addict, and had a kid who turned into, like, a horribly abusive guy that she divorced a long time ago. Yeah, we never get any backstory for, like...

who her kid in the other series, like her dad was. It was just, oh, your mother was Laurie Strode. And also your dad was in the car when she died. So, but yeah, in this one, he's alive, but he's out of the picture entirely. Yeah. So Hartnett's kind of throwing that against her because he's like, I'm just trying to talk my way into getting to go to the Yosemite trip. Your dad would let me. Yeah. Well, your dad's a drug addict and a terrible person. And yet you married him. How did you attract that kind of a monster? Also, he's the one who dumped you. How does that feel? And she's like, I like that she turns around and goes, you went too far. Yeah, that's pretty, that's pretty nice. It's her kind of acknowledging him a little halfway as an adult to be like, that's too far. Like that's too much. Yeah. Instead of being like, go to your room or whatever.

But yeah, he's trying to basically badger her into letting him go on the strip. And she's like, no. And he's like, I'm an adult now. I'm going to go. You can't stop me. And she's like, I'm the headmistress of the school. I literally hold all the cards. I'm definitely one of the very few people who very much can't stop you. So they have this big fight and he's just grumpy. And then they kind of just end it to go to a school for the day. Yeah. And, you know, it turns out that his friends, his girlfriend, Michelle Williams here, and his two other just here to be bodies friends are like, oh, well.

Michelle Williams can't go because apparently her dad didn't send in enough money for her financial support. So she isn't allowed to go. And the other two are like, oh, if neither of you are going, then fuck it. We'll just stay here and have a party. Well, those two seem to be like very much like all we want to do is fuck. We want to drink blood and fuck forever. So the two of them are like, yeah, we're going to stay here. Just fuck the entire time they're gone. We're going to have a roaming orgy. We're going to wander from house to house fucking in that house. Which you got to love. You got to love the horny teens. It's a horror movie. You got to have them. Yep. I got no problem with those two. They're great. No, those two I am.

fine with. I'm like, yeah, sure. Horny teen and his horny girlfriend, and they have a great relationship. They do. There's that great point where she's getting all the food. Yeah. She's just like, oh, man, all I want to do is eat. My goal in life is to get super fat. I hope you're okay with that. Yeah, she's like, I hope you're going to love me when I'm all dumpy because that's a life goal. And he's like, well, there are certain attractive qualities to obesity. You know, the renaissance man. And she's like, oh, for God's sake. You know what? No, she's like, oh, you are a renaissance man. Yeah. She is into it. He's into it. I love them. Yeah, they're fine. It's obviously they're horny teens who want to but never do have sex on screen, so we know they're going to both die. Yeah. Now, of course, at this point

get some stuff for their roaming orgy or, you know, we're the only, weird that they're the only people that stay behind, but whatever. They're having a little party and they need to sneak off campus. But before they can sneak off campus, they'll need to get past the gate guarded by LL Cool J. Who, as far as I can tell, fucking lives there. Because later he's just there in the middle of the goddamn night. I'm like, how long are this guy shifts? He appears to work like two to three straight days at a time. Like a lighthouse keeper. He is there at the start of the day. We're like, okay, we see LL Cool J. He is a security guard and aspiring romance novelist. Yes. And...

He is, as I said, there at the beginning of the day, like when classes start and then is there. all night as well. He's just like, I'm just here. He just lives there. He's the crusty old lighthouse keeper of a small private academy. Yeah, he's got a three-on, two-off kind of deal where he just lives there for three days. It does look like that setup that they have him in. He's got a gatehouse to open and close the gate to the school. And it's big enough that he's got multiple rooms in there, doors and windows. It's not like a little booth like you'd give someone to normally be running a gate. It's a fucking house. Yeah, he has his own little place. So I'm assuming he literally just does live in there. He might have a cot in there. Who knows? LL Cool J, though, is there to...

Add a little bit of LL Cool J to this movie. Yes, and I think in Resurrection, there's a sequence where it turns out that Buster Rhymes knows Kung Fu. Yes, Buster Rhymes, the LL Cool J replacement, because we needed a different rapper. Yeah, so in this movie, I'd only heard of that, I'd vaguely heard that a rapper, in agreement to be in the film, was like, I'll be in the film, but only if I can bust out sweet Kung Fu moves on Michael Myers. So I kept waiting for LL Cool J to do that, all the way through this, and was endlessly disappointed. Yeah. Look, I understand if...

You give this movie a bad rating because going in with the expectation that LL Cool J will do sweet karate moves and then he doesn't would definitely change my opinion on things. It's not about that. He's fine. You know, people are always complaining and they're right to do so about how in cartoons black people are always being turned into animals or something so they don't have to put black people on screen for too long. Well, here's a great way to do it. Just have your only female black character in the entire film be entirely on the phone for the entire movie being all sassy and yelling shit. You never got to see her. Hey, you don't know she's black.

Oh, there's one part where she says, I'm a proud black woman. I am definitely black. LL Cool J, please turn to the screen and tell Jeff I'm black. She said in the movie. He turned around and was like, Jeff, she black. Of course, I was very high at the time, but I'm pretty sure that happened. I watched this two hours ago. If I was very high then, I'd be asleep.

But yes, they have to sneak into town. And so, you know, Ronnie, the security guard, is just sort of nice. He's just a good dude. He's like, I do my job. I write smut on the side, which I, like, tell to my wife over the phone in order to get her going. Yes, yeah. Although she spends all of her time belittling him for doing it and saying it's a terrible idea until he starts reading it to her, in which case she gets all, like, you know, loose in the gene buttons and so on. Yeah, loose in the gene pool. Yeah. She just starts melting. You know, like that guy in X-Men.

Yeah, Senator Kelly. Yeah, he just kind of turns into a puddle. He turns into a bag of water and then falls apart. God, I haven't seen that movie in forever. And that movie's newer than this one by two years. But yeah, he lets them out because they talk him into it so they can go buy booze or whatever. Yeah. Now, they go down and they aren't of age, so just his buddy shoplifts a bottle of something. Some hooch. Some hooch. He's a corkscrew, though, so you know it's some fucking wine and he's still doing it wrong. Yeah. And meanwhile, we get Laurie Strode or Carrie...

Let's just call her Laurie. Her stupid fake name goes halfway out of the movie anyway. Yeah, it doesn't really matter. So Laurie has a relationship with the guidance counselor of this school, played by Adam Arkin. Yeah, he's fun. And he's great. I love him. He's mostly there to bump into her over and over again from behind and scare the shit out of her. I mean, everyone in this movie is there to bump into Jamie Lee Curtis as the moment when we start this film and get to her. I would give it...

every five minutes someone like stumbles into her and she's like it's her fault for fucking walking around backwards everywhere just stop it that's not what you should be doing I know they turned her into like Sarah Connor for the last couple of movies but in this one she spends most of her time being you know she's clearly suffering from PTSD she's introduced to the film screaming and waking herself up from a nightmare but she bumbles around backwards into people so fucking much in this movie also people sneak up on her alive oh yeah there's a lot of like she will either walk backwards into someone or someone will just walk up and be like I know the best way to get your attention grab my arms around you real fast and you're like no dude say Hey. Hey, Carrie. Hi. Hi. As far as I can tell, the standard greedy at this part of Northern California is to sneak up behind people and put your hand over their eyes. Yeah. It happens. I had a running tally of who did it the most. She gets two jump scares from LL Cool J bumping into her. One each from almost every other major character and three from her boyfriend, Adam Markin. Yep. Which is too fucking many. I mean, she even basically has a, oh my God, are you Michael Myers? No, you're my boyfriend. Twice in this. Yes. Because she also is hallucinating Michael. Yes. Anytime she sees something in a reflection. Yeah, so. But he's fun. He's dating her. He knows she's got some kind of dark secret, but he's being very gentle and patient and quietly waiting for her to tell him. Yeah, a very...

good, supportive boyfriend, we don't get the whole, like, I'm an asshole and I'm machismo or whatever. It's like, no, man, he's a good guy. Which I get, because, you know, it's Jamie Lee Curtis in, like, her 40s. She doesn't, she clearly doesn't need that shit. No, that's, that's what she already left behind in her off-screen relationship that produced Josh Hartnett. Yeah, the moment he would have tried something like, you gotta tell me whatever the fuck happened or I'm leaving you, she'd be like, great, there's a door. Cool, I don't care. This is a mature Jamie Lee Curtis, it's fine. So, yeah, he comes to meet her and, uh...

more or less tries to help talk her into letting Josh Hartnett go to the fucking Yosemite trip. Cause he's like, you're being ridiculous. You gotta just, I don't mean the whole thing is he's just like, you gotta, you gotta let me know at some point what is going on with you because I know something is going on with you and has been since I've known you, you've never talked about it. And she's like, look, I have tried everything. I've done self-help. I've done group therapy. I've done meditation. I've done a lot of drugs. I have done anything I could possibly think of. And you know, I've tried seeing other crazy serial slashers in true smug counselor fashion. He's like, well, you haven't tried everything. You didn't talk to me. I'm like,

Get out of here. Fuck you. You tried psychologists, you say? Have you tried a school guidance counselor? I think you'll find I'm very good at what I do. Yes, I mostly tell teenagers that they should go into the box industry, but for you, I'll make an exception. Mostly, I tell teenagers, go into the military, because they pay me to.

But yeah, nice boyfriend. And he does have a great rapport with the students, too. We have a scene where he meets up with the two young teenage girls that are kind of our ingenues of the movie. And he has a great conversation with them. It's nice. Yeah, because they're like, oh, hey, we're planning on having an orgy that goes house to house down the town. We're just going to fuck everyone we find. And they're like, hey, you want to come? He goes, oh, man, I wish I could, but I'm getting my nipples pierced. Yeah, that's great. They're like, yeah. He's like, what are you doing here? You're going to be stuck home for Halloween. And they're like, oh, we thought we'd go pick up some dudes, put some roofies in their drinks, have a date rape situation. What about you? It's great. He has this whole friendly rapport. He leaves just being like, hey.

I can already tell that you're clearly dolled up to go out. So you're definitely not staying in your dorm room for the night, but you know, be good. Bye. Yeah. Hey.

Be safe. I like to think he's been to Kinds Council long enough that he knows that teens are going to be teens. There's no way where he would be like, oh, look, you got lipstick on. I know you're about to have the sex. He's like, I don't give a fuck. There's no way I can stop you. She's like, bitch, I'm Michelle Williams. I have never not had lipstick on. My cool lips are like my defining thing. I do like in that scene as well, on the TV in the background for that scene is Scream 2, which means the Scream series exists in this universe. In Scream 1, Jamie Kennedy is watching Halloween, which means Halloween exists within the Halloween universe.

Which can also mean, then, that because in Season of the Witch they're playing Halloween, that Season of the Witch could exist within this universe. If you'll just listen to my weird guide where I tie every Halloween movie together. That's right, if you would just consider John's teenage guide to unpopularity. Yep. Be too obsessed with dumb horse shit. I mean, ultimately, if you were to take the nods that horror movies do to fucking other horror movies, then all of them are connected, because every one of them has Romero Street. Well, I mean...

All of them show Night of the Living Dead on all of them because it is, you know, public domain so they can get away with it. And that's not, it shouldn't be, right? Like, it's got some fucking cock up in the rights. The original title for Night of the Living Dead was not Night of the Living Dead. I forget what it was. But when they went to go, like, redo the whole, well, we need to do the rights for this under that title, they fucked up. And so the actual rights for Night of the Living Dead never got processed. And so you can play that as much as you want and never pay a penny for it. Yes. Anyway, we also get a secondary scare sequence where I guess...

Michael Myers decides to stop off at a roadside bathroom. You know, I get he's very, very cunning and he moves around for his murders very efficiently. I still figure he was a pee-his-pants kind of serial killer. You know, like, I don't think he's stopping to take that whole fucking onesie off. Of course he is. Well, you know, when the mother and child get to this roadside rest stop, the women's bathroom is locked. And I have to imagine it is because he is full onesie around his ankles peeing. But he does not want anyone to come in there while he door-open pees. Must be. He just pulls his entire thing down and take a little... Yeah, just fully make the mask on.

I guess that's fair. Although it does make me want to consider the peeing habits of all of the major slashers. Like, obviously, I'm going to go ahead and say, Freddy does not need to pee. He's a nightmare creature. He's a dream monster. He'll pee if it makes sense for him to pee. Jason, I'm going to say, definitely is a pee-his-pants kind of villain. That is not a guy who's going to stop long enough. Oh, for sure. Before he turns into a zombie, Jason is 100% A, I am wandering around the forest murdering people and just peeing when I gotta. Leatherface, on the other hand, I assume is dainty about the whole process. That dude puts out, like, scented candles. He has a whole routine. He has me time, and God help you if you interrupt his me time.

Anyway, so... Yeah, he scares, but does not kill a mother and daughter who are in a row. It's a really good sequence. Very, like, nice, high-tension thing of the mother, like, seeing that someone is in there and having this conflicting, like, I do not want to get murdered, but also my daughter is alone in the stall next to me. Like, it's a good sequence where he doesn't murder anyone. Yeah, because he does steal her purse, but then he just scatters it all over the walk back to his car. Yeah, he's just like, all right, what do I need to get this car going? There we go. Also...

Why is this car so goddamn ancient and why is this random mother and daughter dressed like Danny Torrance from The Shining here? It's a reference. You see, it's a nod. You see, Scream came out two years earlier and... After Scream came out, all movies, all horror movies from that point forward were constructed of references to other horror movies for forever. God, man, Scream, again, just poisoned the fucking well when that came out. But yeah, he doesn't kill either one of them, he just steals their car and we do get a big Scream shock ending because the entire first half of this movie is just jump scares because the daughter, like, the mother hears a scream, darts out, goes to the daughter's stall and she's just patting her head and going, spiders! Spiders!

I assume imagined. But yeah, so that's a great sequence because Myers, he's just going through the motions. He's not there to kill them. He doesn't need them for anything. No, Myers is very much a single-minded murderer who's like, if you were to get out of my way as I went towards my target, I wouldn't give a shit to pursue you because I'm just here to do some murdering on very specific people. But if you're there...

Yeah. I mean, there's a sequence where he stalks briefly LL Cool J and then just walks away. Yeah. Because he's like, I don't need this guy for anything. Yeah, he's like, all right, this guy, is he going to stop me in any way? He even tricks him a little bit. There's a part where he knocks on the window and hides to get LL Cool J to look out that window. Is he going to come out here? Because if he comes after me, I'm allowed to kill him. And then he doesn't. He's like, ah, man, all right, well, fine. I got to go do the thing I was going to do. Well, that's enough fucking around for me. So. Michael Myers, total prankster. I also like the conversation at the beginning of this movie where one of the cops investigating the nurse body is like.

Wait, you say Michael Myers did this? That was 20 years ago. We got an APB out for someone, a serial killer, and a walker, and the other cop has to be like, dude, he'd be younger than me. I was 15 when this dude was six and killed his sister. Come on, man. Quit being ageist.

Anyway, this movie's very loose here. Basically, it's just a bunch of Laurie Strode bumping into people. Yeah, there is, I mean, like we mentioned, after that beginning opening kill thing with the nurse, you get a good 40 minutes of just like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, it's just this soupy oatmeal of her bumping into people and talking about how she's scared. It doesn't really become a movie again until like the last 10 minutes. Yeah, I mean, basically the harbinger of this turning into a horror movie again is the Janet Leigh.

interaction. And so she's scared because she thinks that she's allowed her son to go to the Yosemite trip as an attempt to kind of build peace with him because she does catch him going off to steal booze. She's like, what the fuck were you doing? You know what day it is. You think you can just wander around town? And he's like, yes, that dude hasn't come after you for 20 years. He's dead and I'm not going to live your horror movie. Just because you have handcuffed yourself to your dead brother doesn't mean you have to drag me down with you. And again, the interactions between those two, every time after Hartnett just lays into her, she's like...

Goddamn, alright. Yeah, so here she's trying to build peace with him, she lets him go on the trip, and then she immediately freaks out that she did that, goes outside of the college, just sort of generally flustered in work, high school, and bumps backwards into her real-life mom, Janet Leigh. Yep, and of course we get to like, oh, if you'll allow me to be motherly for a moment, you're like, haha, because you are, you see. It took me about ten minutes, still in the movie, to go, oh yeah, that's your mom! Because I was just like, what the fuck is Janet Leigh doing here? Are they that desperate for nods that they're just like, we've got a lady from Psycho! And then finally I was like, oh wait, that's her real, okay. That's her actual mom. And she does get a Halloween reference in, because she...

out of nowhere, says the most busted line from the first Halloween 2, which is, she goes, well, it's Halloween. I guess everyone's entitled to one good scare. No one's ever said that outside of these two movies. That is not a real saying. And, you know, she's just like, well, you know, hope you have a happy Halloween. Of course, while she walks to her car, we get a clip of the psycho theme going on on the underneath in the soundtrack. And I was like, all right, yep. I know you have to. There you go. I'm glad you paid for the rights to do that. Wasn't she in a bunch of Hitchcock movies? Couldn't we have gotten like some Vertigo or North by Northwest or something? No.

That's pretty scary. But we also get the sort of the impetus for what Laurie will do towards the end of it is there's a scene with Michelle Williams in her class where they're talking about Frankenstein and it is another one of those. A very on-the-nose like, well, you see, Victor waited too long to confront his monster after it had already killed everyone he loved. He should have confronted the monster that was chasing him. And then things would be okay. Yeah, I mean, that's- Laurie Strode. I know. It's amazing that Strode hasn't heard that specific reference before. Anyone who's even read the original Frankenstein already knows that Victor Frankenstein or whatever is just a rank, tiny little bitch man. Yeah, he's a little scared man who's like, ah, this thing's yellow. I'm mildly inconvenienced and that's the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone. I'm a rich white man. How dare this?

Yeah, like, he fucking sucks. It takes the movies to fix Victor Frankenstein, generally. We also get a nod to the first movie as Michelle Williams looks out the window, sees Michael Myers, and then gets called on by the teacher, who then, she gives the perfect answer for what she is called on, looks outside, and Myers is gone, in an exact rip from the first movie. But yeah, I love that, where she's like, well, the problem for Victor was he didn't confront the monster soon enough, and I was like, no, the problem wasn't that. The problem is that Victor Frankenstein didn't have the balls to build a fucking man, and he just shouldn't have. That's where the book should have stopped right there. Like, he should have been like, hmm, should I give life to dead tissue? No, I suck too much. No, I'm terrible.

That or, you know, when he sees the thing he made, he's like, oh, this guy looks like he's got jaundice. That's terrible. I don't like this guy. If he'd instead been like, hey, dude. Hey, man. Sorry, you're jaundiced. And then Adam or whatever he names himself, that would have been like, that's cool, man. Hey, man. It's all right. I've always just assumed that the monster put himself on ice because he was like, dude, my dad sucks so bad. This is the worst and I'm done. I'm out. I want no point. If anyone else is like you, I'm done with it. I figure there are two people in this world, the blind guy and you. So there you go. Yes. So now it is time for actual Michael Myers. Much like.

in this podcast where we're most of the way through it the movie is most of the way through it and now Myers it's time for him to start murdering and of course he'll start with the two just friends that are there to be murdered the random teens we get a really neat sequence where we establish that the building is old enough to have a still working dumbwaiter in it hell yeah that's not just a like pulley that you pull but an actual like elevator system yeah it's an electrically pulley powered dumbwaiter it's neat and basically the boyfriend we don't know his name he uses it to get up to the top floor because they're looking for a corkscrew to open whatever hoochie stole Again, some fucking Chardonnay. These kids do not know how to drink. Of course. You know that when he went in there, he was like, what's the nearest bottle I can get and get away with it? Did not look at it. Just grabbed a bottle. He's running back out like, look, I fucking scored. I got a bottle of Barefoot Cabernet Sauvignon. I heard it's a really good vintage. No, you didn't. The wine in this movie is great. There's also a scene where Strode, who's just now convincing herself to tell her boyfriend the secret, orders an extra glass of wine and we get some snooty ass like small town waiter looking that she still currently has a full glass of wine.

She's like, today. It's a great line. She's like, dude, fuck you. Don't judge me. I'm going to get drunk on Chardonnay in this bitch. Yeah, well, it's one of those...

she is a functioning alcoholic and she's like, I will sip my wine while my boyfriend is here. And when he gets up to go to the bathroom, I will have them bring me another glass of wine while I chug this one and then drink the new one down to where it was. So it doesn't look like I'm an alcoholic. And I'm like, God damn, there's a little touches in here that are so good for her character. It's a great sequence, especially how she doesn't take any shit about it. Like she doesn't retract or go inward when this snooty little waiter man is like, you clearly already have a drink. How shameful. She's like, no, fuck you. Bring me a goddamn glass. I'm the hedgerist of the only building in this entire town that fucking matters. You're wearing an apron. Bring me a goddamn wine.

So in a fake out for Charlie, the not Josh Hartnett boyfriend here, he drops the corkscrew in the garbage disposal and has to go get it. And there's an entire fake out sequence of like, ooh, is Michael Myers going to put his hand in there? No, he's just going to. I love that for Michael Myers because he's like, no, I'm just going to slate your throat. I would never do that. I'm not a torture killer. I'm a very workmanlike murderer. Gimmicks are like the other two guys. I don't. That's not. That's the sort of thing you get from someone who cracks jokes. And he would have a pun about putting your hand into this.

food processor or whatever, he would be like, yeah, I've got something to say about that. I, however, already have a knife in hand. Why would I put that down just to butcher your hand? I do like that his, I would have killed Charlie at this point too because he drops the corkscrew down the garbage disposal and his first thought is to turn the garbage disposal on to see if he can get the corkscrew to point up a little more so he doesn't have to reach in as far. And I'm like, dude, I have to maintain a fucking garbage disposal. Eat a dick. Do not run metal through that thing, you tiny shit. I hope some giant golem man in a William Shatner mask murders you. And indeed he does.

I do like that I thought when I was watching that scene, I was like, God, I hope this is a fake out and he just slashes him with a knife because that's the kind of thing that he would do. And when he did, I was like, God damn it, movie, you've earned points from me. You did exactly what I wanted you to do. I guess that's fair. Although he is one of the people who just, like, you get Michael Myers looming at him and then the next time you see him, he's already dead. Yeah, he's dead in the dumbwaiter when his girlfriend goes to find him because he's been gone too long. Yeah. And then, you know, she has to essentially ride up with his dead body in the dumbwaiter to get away from Michael Myers, which is, you know, a good fucked up sequence. And then when she goes up in the dumbwaiter, we get a reference to, I believe it's...

I think Halloween 5, when he does the looks up the shaft towards her, is a direct shot from part 5. I do like his... He cuts the rope to the dumbwaiter so that she'll fall back down to where he can get her, but she's already gotten out. She just breaks her foot in it. Yeah, just, ooh, real nasty break on her leg there. Yeah, nasty leg break. But then he checks when it comes down, and he just kind of looks back up like, shoot, I guess I gotta go up there. Oh, man. I thought this was gonna be easy. All right, here we go. Admittedly, this is just me being like, oh, I always thought Michael Myers was a mindless zombie man, and I'm kind of pleased to see that he isn't. Yeah, I mean, there's...

a scene in this where he straight up hides on the fucking ceiling and comes down like a goddamn ninja. Oh, that's neat, where he just sort of lowers himself with one hand because he has to have the other hand for the knife. Yeah, you're like, goddamn, you are strong. Well, the fucking, like, role-playing game sneak past the guard sequence where he parks the broken car in front of the school, hides outside, and then when LL Cool J goes out to investigate the car, you see him just walk by behind him to get back into the school. Yeah. You're like, oh, hey, look at that, he thought of something. Yeah, they're like, oh, how do we explain that he got into this gated community? Oh, well.

He just tricked the guard. Yeah, the other thing I didn't see a single thing of in this movie, which I've always heard is a big complaint about Michael Myers, is he never teleports. There's never a scene where he's just somewhere. No, that's Jason. Oh, okay. Jason is the one who teleports, although there is at least one point in the later Halloween things where he starts becoming so much more supernatural that you're like, goddammit. But no, that's one of the things I actually really like about Michael Myers, is he's sort of like the killer from It Follows, and then he's like, no, I'm going to go at a steady pace towards you. Yeah. If you stop, I will murder you. But I'm going at a regular pace. If you can get into a vehicle and drive off, you're fine. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so.

Now he's, now he's stopped. He's killed those two. Josh Hartnett and Michelle Williams find them and freak out. They're running. This is the point where we get a little bit of a love scene between Laurie Strode and Adam Arkin's character where she's telling him the secret. And for the most of it, they're like making out and he just straight up doesn't believe her. Oh yeah. Like everyone in the world has heard the story of what happened in Halloween and Halloween 2. Oh yeah. It's a very famous thing of like, yeah, dude, some fucked up masked killer murdered a shitload of people in Haddonfield on Halloween. It was a very famous thing. And when she first starts and they're like making out.

there's a part of me that's like, this was bad for both of you because you're in the middle of like making out and having sexy times and she just out of nowhere goes, my brother killed my sister when she was 17. And he's like, well, that was sucky then. And you're like, oh, you don't believe. You think she's just fucking around. It's just Halloween makeout jokes. And she's like, yeah. I'm Laurie Strode. I'm the survivor of that. He's like, yeah, sure you are. Take your clothes off. And she's like, no, seriously. And he goes, oh, fuck. Are you serious? That's actually you? She's like, no, I faked my own death because my brother was a ridiculous murderer and I have PTSD. And he's like.

Fuck, that is heavy. No wonder you didn't tell me this shit. Take your clothes off. No. Sorry, it's just that, you know. Has True Lies come out yet? Because I'd really like to see a striptease. Yes, it had. Great. I'm surprised you didn't just be like, hey, I've seen True Lies. Take your clothes off.

So yeah, we get that whole, you know, reveal to Adam Arkin's character. And so it's just like, oh, well, that's fucked up. And while they're having this conversation, she freaks out. Well, she realizes, because he's like, oh, damn, that's fucked up. How old were you when that happened? And she looks up, she's like, oh, I was, and realizes he killed her other sister when she was 17. It tried to kill her when Laurie was 17 and sees, oh shit, my kid is 17. Which is hilarious because like, how does he even know that she had a kid that is 17? The Laurie Strode file. Yeah, but she doesn't know someone found the Laurie Strode file.

Yes, but she is a hyper paranoid anyway. And she's like, oh, he's killed someone who was 17 in my family twice in a row. So here we go. Yeah. So she's like, have they gotten to Yosemite yet? I should call them. And I'm like, what fucking phone number are you calling in Yosemite? I guess it's some cabin building that they have for the kids. I would assume the ranger station. What are you doing? Because it's also like, you know, none of these people have cell phones. It's fucking 98. Also, no, they have not gotten there yet. I know you're in Northern California, but you are not that much in Northern California because if you're within a 45 minute drive of it, you're also in the hills. And this little town is flat as the fucking Kansas deserts. Oh, yeah.

My grandparents live in Sonora, which is a good 45-minute drive from Yosemite. And yeah, it looks like Yosemite. Yeah. So yes. Then she freaks out, looks in Josh Hartnett's room, finds the unpacked camping gear, and is like, what a rookie move, by the way. If you're telling your parents to go on vacation and don't, you hide your camping shit. Yeah, you take that shit, you put it in your girlfriend's room. Yeah, what the fuck? I'm just saying, Hartnett, you know your mom's a paranoid investigator type. You need to take that shit out of the house.

And yet. Look, young teens, this is a young teens listening to this. This is a service announcement to you. If you lie to your parents, you've got to really build the background statement because they will check. All right. All right. Now have fun. All right. You too. Now go out and have fun. Just go out there and have fun. Not going to Yosemite. Hey, wear a rubber. I don't recommend going to Yosemite myself. I've been there twice and I broke my arm there twice. Wow. I've been there, I think twice. And I, uh, I think I shit myself once. So, uh, don't have, I guess, food poisoning there is my takeaway. Okay. So.

That's what you listen to this for. The many and very times that we've shit ourselves. Yep. Hey, do you want to know the bad experiences we've had at Yosemite? We're adding a new Patreon tier. The Pantshitter Chronicles. So, yeah, Michael just very slowly chases after John and Molly are the two characters' names. Yes. And, you know, we get the very famous scene from all the trailers and everything for this where they end up getting into a room and then...

Michael and Laurie look at each other through like a porthole in the door. There's like a little cage that's around the doors, like a security cage around the doors of the school. And Michelle manages to get them, sorry, Molly, manages to get them into that cage, but not into the school. She drops the keys. And so Michael Myers is just standing there swinging the blade at the two of them through the gate, but can't quite reach them. And eventually he's like, wait a minute, you dropped your keys. Let me just get those keys. And that's when Laurie Strode lets them in, but then looks out at him. She looks down to pull a gun and show him she has a gun. And by then he's gone. Yeah. Now...

I do like, again, they have scaled back the supernatural thing in the previous movie to this. He was able to just sort of push down a solid iron gate with his bare hands. Yeah, he's very much more of a, he's not even huge in this. He's never been huge. They're like, yeah, man, Michael Myers is just basically, I have a whole thing on Michael Myers where his power comes from the mask and that he is not an actual person while the mask is on. His anonymity imbues him with supernatural power. If you were to take his mask off, then you would be able to kill him. In fact, in the first movie, when Laurie manages to...

take the mask off of him, he freaks out and stops and has to go put the mask back on before he can continue, because that's the only time when he is truly vulnerable. Yeah, he's basically just like a slightly less evil version of Rorschach. Kind of. Yeah, so, so anyway, yeah, now he's gotten away from them, but they're wandering around the school, obviously we have a yelling confrontation between Laurie and John about why he didn't go to Yosemite, and then out around the corner comes a shadowy figure with what might have it be a mask on, and Adam Arkin flips out and puts six bullets in him. Yeah, just steals the gun away from Laurie, and he's like, fuck you, guy! And then it's fucking Ronnie. It's LL Cool J. And he...

It appears as though he has murdered this man. He has not, though, because LL Cool J almost certainly in the contract was like, no, you don't get to kill me. It's fucking ridiculous what happens with LL Cool J. They put six bullets in him. He lies in a huge pool of his own blood. They talk about how they shot him for about two minutes while they gear up for Myers to sneak up behind them. And then later on near the end of the movie, he just walks by in the background. Yeah, walking past the camera, he goes, no, it's fine, baby. I just got grazed by a bullet. And then walks off movie. And you're like, nice. Hey, man. Nice. That felt about as contractual and inserted as the Janet Leigh scene. Yeah.

But yeah, Adam Arkin, he has a moment where he's like, fuck, I just shot a friend of mine and a person who, I'm a murderer. Doesn't matter. Michael Myers gets him right there. Yep. And the scene where he stabs him in the back and just sort of lifts him up by a knife. Also a reference to Halloween 2 where he does that exact same thing to a nurse. It's disappointing it's a reference because it's like the only good kill in this movie. Oh, it's one of the best kills in Halloween 2 as well because we also get like when he lifts her up by the knife in there, her like shoes fall off because she's kind of going limp from being held up that way. It's a real good kill. The fact that they do it here is like, okay, if you're going to reference a kill, at least it's a good one. Yeah. Yeah.

So now they run away from Michael Myers as he's standing there with a twitchy Adam Arkin on the end of his big old knife. I don't think... Does Laurie Strode go home? I can't remember if that last scene takes place at her house or at the school. No, everything's at the school. Okay. She goes into a kitchen where they just have endless kitchen knives. They don't...

We didn't mention it, but when Molly and John were running away originally, he almost got them and John got stabbed in the leg. Oh, that's right. So they get into fucking Lori's car and go to drive off. And she has that, oh, I've got to be Victor and confront my monster thing. And does the entire line from the original movie where she is talking to Tommy, the kid she's babysitting and says, I need you to go down two houses to the whoever's. I need you to call the cops and call an ambulance. Do what I say. Now it is that full line repeated again, just for Molly's character here. Fucking dimension films and fucking scream. Yep. 100%. They were like, well.

we gotta do it. I'm drinking this poison water from this well. This movie is like 80% by weight jump scares and references. Yeah, which is also sad because the Halloween series has never been about jump scares. It's been about the fact that, oh shit, there is a dude behind you. Not that he jumps out at you, just, oh my fucking Christ, this dude. So anyway, she goes back into the school and confronts him. He does that dropping from the ceiling thing that's pretty cool looking. She goes into the school kitchen, which apparently just has big boxes full of carving knives, just endless piles of them. She pulls a drawer full of knives out and the fact that her reaction is, I better throw these knives at him. I'm like,

Who does that? Why did you not just pick up a couple of knives and stab this guy? Instead of being like, I know what's perfectly weighted for hucking at a dude, some random kitchen knife. He seems almost embarrassed that this is happening because he just casually dodges them. He watches a knife fly by, missing him by like three feet, and he's like, come on. Laurie, you're better than this. I know we never really got to know each other. Sis, come on. Pretty sneaky, sis.

But yeah, one of them does stick into a wall, so at least she got one of them to do that. But yeah, she's just flinging knives at him and it's just stupid. Yeah, I mean, we get the full final girl circuit here where she just runs around the whole fucking campus with him. We go to the kitchen where the dumb waiter was. We go to the hallway where fucking the guy got shot. We're all over the place. And the movie's primary nod to him being like an implacably invincible murder man. She puts an axe in his chest and he just sort of pops it out and tosses it on the floor. Yeah, he gets an axe basically to the like shoulder slash pectorals and is just like, hey. Hey, come on now. There's also a scene where Michelle Williams fucking takes him out with a big rock. Yeah. He's like, dude.

that's that's impressive but I'm not going to comment on how slasher movies always end and finish the job yes but it was it was a great moment where you're like oh he can just get taken out you just need a pretty medium big rock yeah the big thing with him is he's basically takes all of the damage you would normally take he just doesn't care because He gets knocked down so he can do the whole, you know, Michael Myers, I sit back up move from the first one a lot. So he'll get like, oh, I get knocked down a flight of stairs. And it looks like I'm unconscious for two minutes before I get up. You can hit me with a fucking fire poker. You can hit me with whatever. And I'll go down, but I will not stay down. He's got like a respawn timer. Yeah. He's like, oh, I've got enough hit points. And if you go through all of them, I'm down. But I do regen. Yeah. Eventually, he confronts her in some balcony awning area. She puts a knife in his chest. Stabs him a shitload of times. And then kicks him off the banister. So he falls down like two flights of a building and smashes into the floor. And when she goes down.

Very intelligent. She's like, I don't believe you're dead. I'm going to continue stabbing you while you're on the ground here. But Ronnie's alive and stops her. And I would have been like, turn around. Ronnie, I will stab you. Let me go. Do you want to lie down with him or do you want to let me finish this? You're going to take it in the gut or I'm going to finish this guy. He's even doing that like, no, you don't need to. He's gone. He's dead. Then you won't mind if I ventilate him a little.

This dude has murdered students and other people. It's fine if I mutilate the body a little. No one's going to be like, oh, hey now. Except apparently Ronnie. He's like concerned for her moral, like her life. No, you shouldn't. No, a step too far. It will change you and in ways you would not expect. Trust me, I have seen the abyss. I have stared ere long. Ronnie has seen such things. I cannot allow you to stain the purity of your white soul. Know this, Ronnie has opened the lament configuration. And they popped up and were like, we have such sights. Oh shit, LL Cool J. Oh shit, dude, what up? And he's like, hey.

So yeah, we get the scene where he gets wheeled out in a body bag and put into a stretcher in an ambulance. And again, Laurie's like, no, fucking horse shit. Goes and grabs a cop's gun and an axe and is like, everyone fuck off. I'm doing this up proper. Put him in there and then close it. And they do it and then she just drives off with him. It's weird that she doesn't drive off a little way and then go back there and hack him up with an axe. No, she's like, I think she got like a...

In her head, she was like, oh, I don't need to do. Drive off a cliff with him. And I can jump out of the car. And then, like, even as she's, like, watching the bag ride around back there, she's, like, already got it in her head that she has to do this cliff thing she thought of. She's got the yip. She can't just stop and stab him. She's like, no, no, wait. I got to stick to my original plan. Drive off a cliff. All cool. Well, yeah, because we have to have this sequence where he tries to get her and then she breaks hard and he flies out through the windshield and then she hits him with the car because it's a reference to Halloween 4. Oh. So, again. It's a dumb sequence. She watches him go, like, yeah, he starts seeing the bag move and she's looking back to the rear view. We were all freaked out. Eventually, he just sits up, gets the bag off, reaches down to try

get up, you son of a bitch. And I'm like, you were already very happy to stab him when he's down. Just run him over a couple of times. What are you doing? Yeah, but no, we have to have, because when he got hit by the car in four, he was standing up, so he has to be standing up for the exact same shot. And then she rams him off a hill where she, except for the part where she should have killed him hitting him in the first place, she very clearly is in a much more dangerous situation than him.

Yeah. It's silly. She goes in a car, goes flipping over and over and over again down the hill. No seatbelt on, just bouncing around. She gets tossed out of the car as it is going down. You see, when she starts going down the hill, he just falls off the front of the car and kind of just rolls gently down the hill, but he's fine. He gets fucking pinned to a tree by the van. Yeah, the car lands on him, but in the beginning, it's like very clearly a bad plan. Yeah. So both of them thrown from the car, him gets pinned, and the car, you know, doesn't have the standard movie, I went over a cliff and explode thing. It does catch fire, but...

She knows better. She survived Halloween 2 and knows he can't just burn to death. She picks up the axe and decapitates this motherfucker. We have a little, like, vaguely brother-sister moment. She's been calling him Michael the whole time. Oh, yeah. No one ever calls him The Shape. Yeah, I know. But he is officially called The Shape. I don't know why that's that. That's the case. Well, that's what he was in the credits. Oh, okay. I guess that's what... Yeah, it's weird that they wouldn't just call him Michael Myers. But yeah, he's The Shape. But he reaches out for her. She, like, briefly touches his fingers. I guess it's like a little brotherly-sisterly connection. Like a weird thing, which also kind of harkens back to a couple times where he has had that moment with other characters. And they're like, oh, he wants something. And then he's like...

No, I'm trying to murder you. My hand is outstretched because I want to grab you. I just can't quite reach you. And then she, yeah, like John said, she just whips around and bonks his head off with an axe. Yep. And that is the end of the movie. And let me tell you. I love that the, your sirens in the distance and then the credits start. You're like, oh good, no day no one. That's what I wanted. Yep. I love that. And honestly, if they had stopped the franchise there and not gone on to Resurrection, this would have been a very, for someone who has watched all of it, a good, satisfying end to a franchise. You're like.

oh, the, you know, the return to Laurie in the final death and she's very smart about all the things. That's great. And I know they try and redo that in the current movies, except, you know, making her an ultra badass instead of like, I'm a school teacher. Yeah, the old Sarah Conarder. Yeah, which is not exactly what I would watch. I'm sure that's just how they lured Jamie Lee Curtis to keep fucking making these. Oh, you can, you can, in this one, you can be a badass in a tank top with like a bandolier of bullets and shit. She was like, oh, fuck yes. Yeah, I know you're like almost 70 or whatever, but we'll let you be a badass. She's like, all right, fine. You know, I do dedicate a lot of my time to making yogurt commercials about my poop health, but yeah, fuck yeah, there's bandolier of bullets involved.

I mean, I kid. She's in everything everywhere all at once and is phenomenal. I also love when they were taking him away that they just didn't take the mask off of him. They're like, let's put this guy in a body bag. Mask on. Does that make sense? And you know, I hate to spoil Resurrection for you, a film I have not seen, but that's just not going to be him. That's what I assumed. Mask on, tape over his mouth, just trying to stop the car because he's scared. Instead of what he would do, which is stand up back there and go, hands up. It's not me. I'm not Jason. I'm not Michael Myers. Well, yeah. Well, tape mouth. That's why he's like, oh, I'm going to reach out with my hands. What he would do is just stand there with his hands up. He'd be like.

Or at least go, mm, mm, mm. Yeah, the fact that he doesn't make any noise. Well, that's important because that's a Michael Myers thing. That dude makes no noises. Yeah, that dude in like six movies has grunted maybe a couple times. Yeah.

So there you go. There's the end of Halloween H20. Let's go ahead and get into our bests and worsts. What is the best thing from this movie for you, Jeff? The Adam Arkin kill. It's the only kill that's on screen and cool looking. It's the only good slash in the slasher film. Yeah. So for me, that's it. I mean, a lot of this movie's filler. I also did like the opening sequence because it felt very much more like the kind of slasher I was expecting. But yeah, I'm gonna go the Adam Arkin kill. Yeah, good. I mean, I think I'm probably gonna go with...

The ending that should have been the ending of the franchise? I mean, I really do love that she just straight up decapitates him. The fact that Laurie in this movie gets to be extremely intelligent and savvy and not like, I'm doing the classic slasher movie, like, oh, I assume I am safe thing. But they also didn't make her a badass. She's like, no, she is just a school teacher. Like, it is very difficult. When she initially tries to attack Michael, he straight slashes her a couple times. Like, she's fucked up at the end of this movie. Oh, yeah. So I love the way they did Laurie's character in this. It was a very great characterization and a great way to bring that character back to the series.

Worst thing in the movie for you? I mean, I can't just say it's like the middle hour of the movie where everything is just jump scares. I mean, if you want to just say the... The bump into people jump scares? Yeah, the fake out jump scares? Yeah, I'll take that. This movie, when I was watching it, I sent John a message that was like, they should have called this movie the many people who bumped into Jamie Lee Curtis. Because most of the movie is that. The final sequence is great. It's fun watching Michael Myers chase her around. He's a neat slasher villain. He's not what I expected. But so much of this movie is just boring. Oh, yeah. And I assume that's just an expectation of the genre. I get it. That's probably why I don't like this genre. I mean, the original Halloween is so much...

better on presenting Michael Myers. It's one of those ones where you're like, oh, it's not just like, oh, this is a seminal work and so people like it because of that. You're like, no, it's actually a very good template for slashers that everyone else would try to fuck with. And you're like, oh, there's a reason you do the stuff from this movie. It was very good. But yeah, I'm gonna go with the jump scares that go nowhere. They're not interesting. They only add stretching to this film, which I felt like it totally didn't need. And also the fact that I watched it, thus ruining my streak of having only seen the one that didn't have Mike Myers in it. Yeah, I love ruining things for you. It's fine. That's what this podcast is about. My new streak is just that I've never seen Loomis. Ah, that's fine. That's, again, a good thing.

A terrible thing, though, because he's the best part about these movies. I'm sure. His absolute fucking buck wild nonsense horseshit where he, like, shakes a seven-year-old and is like, tell me where Michael Myers is! He's evil! You're like, goddamn, dude, you are nuts. I fucking love him. He's one of those guys, like, he's like a Cameron Mitchell type or whatever. You're watching some Z-grade shit movie and he shows up, you're like, well, at least there's that. You're like, when you're watching, like, fucking Puma Man and Donald Pleasant shows up as the villain, you're like, ah, good, okay, there's something. Ah, good, someone's gonna be trying. And he turns into a pig at the end and it's fucking crazy. So, yeah, there you go. Yeah, I would say...

Probably the worst thing for me in this. I mean, honestly, those fucking fake-out jump scares are probably the worst thing in this, if I'm being honest. There's so many of them, and they don't add anything but time. Yeah, as much as Scream really poisoned this genre to be, oops, all references. Yeah.

they don't do a terrible job in them. The ones that you show up, you have to have been like, oh, I'm a fan of the series. So it is fan service references a lot of the time. Yeah. You know why I know the everyone is entitled to one good scare? Yeah. It's because another movie podcast uses that when they do their Halloween special features. Oh yeah. It's part of their like, they have a song they work up and that quotes in it. And I was wondering where it was from. So I looked it up. I haven't seen Halloween. So, so yeah, that's a, so there you go. That's why I know it. But yeah, if I hadn't, if we hate movies didn't exist, I would have been, why is the psycho lady here? Oh, right. So mom. Yeah. That would be the full extent of it. Yeah. I, the references in this weren't terrible. Uh, but the.

God, those fake-out jump scares just so annoying. I don't think that's a Scream thing. I think that's a shifting cultural allowance of gore in films that, as people are like, oh, well, not even cultural, but just PG-13 films sell better than R-rated, and even R-rated, soft R sells better than hard R, which means you have a lot of off-screen kills and a lot more... This sat in the in-between zone after Scream and before Saw. Okay. There's a point where you had this, like...

basic horror movie thing where everyone was like, well, we need to emulate the genre savviness of Scream, but the MPAA had really cracked down hard on a lot of horror stuff in this time frame, so most weren't even, like, they wouldn't even, like, shoot scenes that were gory just to get scaled back. They're like, fuck it, we already know that we're not gonna get away with it, so we just won't bother. God, Saw's another one of those franchises where the first movie feels like it has virtually nothing to do with the rest of them. Pretty much. But once, like, Saw and Hostel came out in the, like, 2001 era... That was when I officially was like, no more horror for me, because I don't really like unpleasant gore porn. Yeah, and that was, again, in the same way Scream was one of those...

We absolutely changed the genre and poisoned the well on our way out. So too did Saw. And then for the next, you know, 10, 15 years, you had a shitload of Saw-alikes. I mean, when did The Ring come out and turn everything into a Japanese ghost scare-teen or a 20-something girl? I mean, that wasn't everything. That was just a, we had a string of, we need to remake Japanese horror films. The Ring, The Grudge, The Pulse. There's plenty of them. Yeah, those three. Oh, hang on. I can do this. Hold on. Let me Google real quick. No, that was 2003, I want to say. Yeah.

But yeah, that was, it was interesting that this sits within those two borders. Yeah. So you haven't hit the point where they're going to go full on gore, but you also are very much like, well, we have to do all the like hit jokes and savvy things. You got to reward the horror fans. Exactly. So there you go. Let's go ahead and give this a rating. Each of us is going to give a rating from zero to five. So we get a total rating out of 10. Jeff.

I'm going to go two and a half. Okay. And the reason I'm going so high for something that it sounded like I hated at the start of this is because there are a lot of highs here. There's a lot of great actors in this. I love Jamie Lee Curtis. I love Josh Hartnett. I love Michelle Williams. I love Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's a good collection of good people. But the middle part of this movie is so fucking nothing that I pull it way down for that. But then the final sequence is great. The opening sequence is great. I was surprised by how much I liked Michael Myers as a character. Yeah. So I'm going to go as high as two and a half, but it just fucking drags. So there you go. Good. I'll probably give this a three and a half. The absolute filler that is the middle half hour of this.

stops this from being a four, in my opinion. That's what's really shaving off that extra half point. It just spends too much time with that. But, I mean, like you were saying, the characters in this are all so well acted. Everyone they got in here does a great job of being like, yeah, you're believable teens. I don't see you and go like, Jesus Christ. Every time something comes out of your mouth. The closest you get is the scene where Adam Arkin confronts the two girls in their dorm room and they are dolled up beyond what teenage girls normally get to doll up as. They're like...

we're ready to go work a night at a suicide girls theme dance resort. And he's like, he's like, yeah, just be good kids. You're like, I don't know. Okay, sure. I get it though. You know, it's heightened realism. Yeah. I was, if there was any one character I was like, this guy feels a little too silly to be here. It'd be LL Cool J, which I hate saying because I love him. Yes. LL Cool J's character 100% feels like, oh, we needed some extra jokes in this. Yes. He is here to lighten things up and be the like.

Deputy Dewey from Scream. And it certainly doesn't help that his ending in the movie is just walking by at the end and being like, hey, you see that part where I was obviously dead? I'm not. I'm like an extra Michael Myers. In fact, I would prefer it if a bunch of movies just followed him from now on. He became the secondary Michael Myers. He's not dangerous or anything. He just keeps getting up after he gets killed. People keep accidentally murdering LL Cool J and then later he sits back up and is like, damn, you almost got me. The way I died is going to change the kind of novels I write going forward and that's my story. Shark-based romance. That's what I'm all about now. We're going to call the film Death Becomes LL Cool J.

All right. So there you go. A six out of 10. Not bad. Not bad for someone who doesn't like horror. That's fair. Yeah. So thank you so much for joining us for this Horrortoberfest review of Halloween H2O. We will, of course, be back in another couple of weeks with a non-horror movie this time, almost assuredly. We'll see. It's random. Yeah. It's always random except for October. And maybe December. I'm thinking about affecting a takeover. Maybe.

If you want more, we are, of course, still doing our TV mastery. If you head on over to patreon.com slash system mastery, join us at the $10 per month level, and that unlocks everything. We are now at a monthly instead of per episode rate, so it's just a flat 10 a month, gets you all the content we do. That's the TV mastery where we're still going through Auto Man. It gets you our expanded, expounded universe where we go through all the dumb stories from Star Wars, and you get the bonus content where we make characters in dumb RPGs that we have reviewed. And our monthly QA session, Afterthought. That's right. If you want...

Just a looser conversational style where you can also ask us questions. You can go ahead and get that on the $10 as well. You also get the afterthought. You should join us on Discord. If you go to Twitter at System Mastery, you can find a permanent link to our Discord. Join us there. If you're a patron, you automatically get access to all the private rooms. You get a free, fun color system. Oh, yeah. All integrated. Yeah, that's where you can ask us questions. We are there all the time. Oh, yeah. If you want to be like, hey, actually, you forgot dumb shit and I want to yell at you. You know what?

at me. I don't care. And if you don't want to at me on Discord, you can at me on Twitter, at Gurgle Spasm, spelled like it sounds. And I just use the System Mastery Twitter because it has a lot of followers. Yeah. So there you go. I don't know why John doesn't just do that. I want my own brand with way fewer people. So thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back in two weeks. You all have a good one.

Hey heroes, James D'Amato here. Did you know that the current and former host of one of your favorite podcasts released a book together? The Ultimate RPG Villain Backstory Guide is a resource to help you develop more complex and memorable villains for your role-playing campaigns. It was co-authored by me and Dylan Appelian, the host of this very show. We combine our decades of experience as storytellers and game masters with our game design abilities to provide you exercises and mini-games that make developing villains as characters easy and fun. It's available right now everywhere books are sold, and if you have a copy, we would really appreciate you leaving us a review on any major review site.