Fanedit of Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, A

Pretty good edit of an already pretty good film. I liked the additional Halloween shots as well as the inclusion of most of the television scenes, and adding John Ottman's score along with pieces of Carpenter's original score was definitely a plus. I also really loved hearing Donald Pleasance during the opening credits instead of Tom Kane, who did a decent job of imitating Pleasance, but is obviously NOT him, and couldn't deliver that monologue as perfectly as he did in the original.

I wanted to give this a perfect ten, but a few shots stood out to me as not being as good as they could have been. Some of the added shots from the television cut could have been left out, including the extra shots when Michael is chasing John and Molly. The biggest issue I had was with Laurie stabbing Michael again after he falls off the balcony. I feel like the television cut did a better job with that scene while still keeping Ronnie dead (Laurie walks down and stares at Michael, then we see the crane shot of Michael lying "dead"). The edit here was quite obvious and felt very amateur, whereas the other edits were much more subtle and blended in very well with the original film.

Overall, this is a very nice upgrade, and definitely worth checking out.

A/V Quality: Very good quality video on the whole. The deleted scenes are noticeably bad in quality but there’s not much you can really do about it. It wasn’t distracting to me though. Audio quality sounded fine. 9/10

Visual Editing: Great quality. Only quibble would be the added footage from The Thing stood out a little too much, not terrible though. 9/10

Audio Editing: Really impressed with the audio editing, especially in the segments with deleted footage. The mixed score sounds a little off at times, but mostly it worked well. 9/10

Narrative: The intention of the edit is to “make H20 closer in style, tone and execution to its predecessors (Halloween and Halloween II)”. This is pulled off well. The movie is much less lame (it was pretty damn good to begin with though) and feels more like a proper The End to the Halloween films. 9/10

(Aside: I highly suggest, if you haven’t already, seek out Kevin Williamson’s original treatment for the film. Even though it’s quite a different story, his love of Halloween 1 clearly shows in the way he structures it.)

Enjoyment: I thought it was good, I enjoyed it about as much as I enjoy the original version. 8/10