Psycho Killer With a Big Knife? ‘Cheesy’

In “Halloween: H20,” black-eyed psycho killer Michael Meyers hunts his sister Laurie Stroud (Jamie Lee Curtis) at a posh boarding school she heads--20 years after killing another sister on Halloween. (Rated R)

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In this post-”Scream” era, how do young horror fans view a sequel to a movie made in 1978? Mostly with a laugh and a yawn.

Nicole Head, 15, of Newport Beach, summed it up with a dismissive “cheesy.”

Teen-slasher flicks are cheesy by nature. But many expected a higher quality cheese and felt let down that the full-length movie didn’t live up to the TV ads. “The ads showed too many good things,” said Lauren Benedict, 15, of Corona del Mar. “You saw all the good parts.”

Even so, the sequel was an improvement on the original, which she said had “no point.”

“It was just a guy lurking in the background,” Lauren said. “You wouldn’t really know he was the big brother. This one was a little bit better, but they could have worked harder on it.”

As in the original, white-masked Michael Meyers stalks Laurie Stroud and anyone in his way with an oversized kitchen knife. Haunted by bad memories, Stroud is a functioning alcoholic and overprotective single mother of a son at the isolated boarding school where she is headmistress. When the kids leave for a Halloween weekend in Yosemite, Stroud and her boyfriend remain, unaware her son and friends stayed behind. Guess who shows up.

There’s gore aplenty--a sliced neck and an ice skate in the face before the titles--but its fakery tended to elicit more laughs than screams.

“It was kind of scary, but I know it’s fake and funny,” Lauren said. “It wasn’t realistic. The blood was really watery. It should be real thick.” Plus, at 96 minutes, the story played out too fast, she said.

Her friend Megan Reed, 16, of Irvine, was disappointed that she never got to see the killer’s real face.

Hardly any youngster realized Jamie Lee Curtis played Stroud in the original or that the secretary was played by Curtis’ real-life mom, Janet Leigh, of “Psycho” fame.

Even the appearance of rapper LL Cool J wasn’t enough to rival the young TV stars and pop soundtracks in “Scream” and “Scream II.”

Said Becky Overton, 14, of Newport Beach: “It was kind of stupid. It just got old after a while.”

Hani Ahdab, 15, of Newport Beach, couldn’t get excited about any movies in the genre: “They’re all the same.”