...seriously, I don't wanna do this. Not again. I saw it in 2009 and it sucked. I mean, it sucked. Even diehard Rob Zombie fans cannot possibly defend this steaming pile of shit. I said last week it is probably the worst entry in the Halloween franchise, and I meant it. And I still mean it. This film just absolutely, positively, without a single doubt just blows. The first red flag, of course, came when Rob Zombie himself said he felt no need to retain any "John Carpenter-ness" for the sequel.
Do you need any more of a gigantic warning that this film is bad?
But that's really only the beginning of the "Oh, my god, why did you do this?!" train. I really cannot fully express how much I hate this movie. If it were a person, I would gleefully impale it through the chest multiple times with the sharpest implements I could legally possess, then grind up the body to be served to pigs that I would then slaughter in kind before burning them into ash, and then dance around spreading said ashes while gleefully proclaiming aloud to the whole world what I had done and no jury in the whole of creation would convict me.
To commence our trek on this train wreck to nowhere good, we start out with a flashback of Mrs. Myers (Sherri Moon Zombie) visiting Michael (Chase Wright Vanek) at Smith's Grove and bringing him a most curious item - a statue of a white horse. If you're feeling confused, don't worry. I didn't bring it up in my review of Halloween because it wasn't there. In fact, nothing even resembling it was anywhere within the movie. This is a brand new thing that Zombie tries to use to be "artsy".
Still, there's a nice little title card that tells us all about what it is. From the "Subconscious Psychosis of Dreams", the White Horse is "linked to instinct, purity, and the drive of the physical body to release powerful and emotional forces, like rage with ensuing chaos and destruction". A good thing that would have been a neat manifestation of the inner psychological problems of Michael Myers, as Rob Zombie worked to do in the first movie...and that falls so, so flat here.
However, it seems we're picking up right after the events of the last film as Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) wanders forlornly through the streets of Haddonfield before being picked up by Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) and taken to the hospital. However, Michael (Tyler Mane) is once more on the prowl after the ambulance carrying him gets into a wreck, but not before he comes across an apparition of Mrs. Myers in white with a white horse. Then he strikes the hospital in scenes very reminiscent of the original Halloween II but then suddenly just as Laurie is about to get the axe, she wakes up...
...and it's a year later...
...and she's living with the Bracketts and has completely changed her personality...
Now, I'm not going to say that Laurie's trauma couldn't have fundamentally changed her personality. After all, people are rather entirely the same person they were after such a life-threatening experience. However, this is more akin to Tobey Maguire's sudden personality change in Spider-Man 3. This is not "I'm not dark and broody and emo", this "Rob Zombie wanted to put Scout Taylor-Compton in the latest trends from Hot Topic and plaster her walls with posters of his favorite bands". Of course, perhaps this is just to symbolize the fact that Laurie's mental state is slipping...
...what I'm basically saying is, no, her trauma would not have done this.
Speaking of slipping mental states, we see the return of Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell). He's back being a blood-sucking leech as opposed to the Champion of Good and Right that he was in the original films...and that's pretty much it. He's annoying, concerned about his fame, and he only really gets involved at the very end in a way that does not remotely fit the character that we've seen portrayed on scene at any point through this entire duo of movies.
...oh, and he dies. Spoiler alert. But then, if you saw the first movie, did you really care?
And then there's Michael...who is Michael. And constantly having visions of his dead mother in white and a younger version of himself telling him to prepare to bring Laurie home. But he's pretty consistently Michael, so I suppose that is one thing I can't complain about.
Yes, there are kills. Yes, there are even a few surprisingly tense moments if only to be very, very fleeting. But just that does not a Halloween movie make. The attempts to connect Michael and Laurie through a shared mental illness is a neat idea, and the idea of psychic links aren't exactly new to the series (see Halloween 4 and 5), but it comes out as just being insanely pretentious.
Insanely pretentious.
I'm not going to go into how much sense it doesn't make that Laurie has the same hallucinations as Michael near the end, grossly oversimplifying actual mental disorders that real people often suffer. I'm not going to go into how Dr. Loomis making his last minute entry into the plot to try and save the day makes no sense and goes better for the character from the original films than the one here. I'm not going to go into how trying to homage the final shot from Psycho is utterly and completely pretentious in a film that Psycho is embarrassed to be in the same galaxy with, much less the same room.
What I will do, however, is just say that this film absolutely and positively sucks. It sucks so bad. The fact that this film exists is immensely disrespectful to John Carpenter's original film and a gigantic middle finger to anyone and everyone who has given a damn about the series in general. The Curse of Michael Myers was better than this movie.
Hell, Resurrection was better than this movie.
In short, you should just send both of the Rob Zombie films off to the trash heap and settle down to watch the original film for reasons I have already gone over. If you need more convincing, I can't help you. Don't ruin your brain cells on this. If you see this movie playing anywhere, then - in the words of Doctor Daniel Challis - you should. "Turn it off! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!"
"STOP IIIIIIIIT!"
Halloween II is now available on DVD from Dimension Films and the Weinstein Company.
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
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