Review: Is ‘Halloween H20’ the Blueprint for the Legacy Sequel?

The Halloween franchise is a mess. A confusing mess, too. Even the franchise’s very first sequel Halloween II is unorthodox in that it picks up immediately where John Carpenter’s 1978 classic slasher flick, inspired by Hitchcock’s Psycho and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, ended. The third film, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, proved a failed effort to take the series into an entirely different direction — Tommy Lee Wallace’s overlooked cult classic doesn’t include the now iconic Michael Myers, but instead opts to tell a bizarre sci-fi noir horror story with cyborgs, androids, possession-via-television-and-mask and many more wonderful oddities. It’s a terrific film, almost certainly the second best in the franchise after Carpenter’s (it may, even, be better than the original in some ways!), but without the inclusion of Michael Myers it flopped and those involved in the franchise panicked.

The fourth film brought back the villainous Myers, glossing over the fact that Season of the Witch ever happened at all. Another two sequels of typical Myers slashing after that, and we have Halloween H20. But let’s not ignore the fact that even after this film, there was…