10 Things You Learn Rewatching Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
5. The Second Act Is A Waste
Halloween H20 is a film with a strong opening and a great finish but with a middle that positively flounders.
After spending the first act reintroducing audiences to Laurie Strode and her trauma, the second act switches gears entirely to focus almost exclusively on John and his group of friends who have decided to sneak away from the camping field trip to have a double-date at the deserted school.
Michael finds them and carnage ensues while the film occasionally cuts back to Laurie and her vanilla-wafer of a boyfriend, Adam Arkin (doing the best he can with a limp character) as Will Brennan. None of this is even half as interesting as any of the more Laurie-centric narratives of the other acts and it feels jarringly out-of-place because it exists solely to let Michael raise his kill-count a bit before the main attraction.
H20 is only an eighty-six-minute film, which means that when it decides to waste its second act, it leaves the film without much meat on its bones. It is dull, adds nothing to the film, and just exists as a speed bump which viewers must endure to get to the actual thing they came to see.