After being somewhat nonplussed by Rob Zombies remake of ‘Halloween’ I decided to plough on and see where he’d take the series in it’s follow up. The biggest draw was that some of the characters who were killed in the original, actually survived in Zombies version, and I was curious to see if they’d been saved for a specific reason, or if this film was going to drastically deviate from the original…and…well…yeh…yeh it does.

This film picks up 1 year on from the events of the first film, Laurie is now living with Annie and her father and the pair of them are rawdogging their trauma and having seizure inducing dreams about Michael coming to kill them.

Dr. Loomis, who in the previous entry was a little bit slimey, but still ultimately had his heart in the right place, is here just a full blown shill, looking to make a buck off the fact that he survived the night 15 people got straight up murdered.

These two plots trundle along without any interaction between the two, until literally the last few minutes of the film. As Halloween approaches, the dreams begin to become more vivid, as it turns out Michael isnt *quite* as dead as the people of Haddonfield would believe. Only now…he seems to be driven by the ghost of his dead mother and a white horse?…and they introduce this concept via a flashback to young Michael in the asylum…but it doesnt fit in with any of the other continuity?…and…yeah…I got nothing this things just too much.

At its core the biggest issue with ‘Halloween 2’ is its total and utter faux pretentiousness. The script reads like a badly made piece of fanfiction.com related narcissim run rampent and when it isnt indulging it’s innermost emo-ridden cravings, it feels like Zombie got bored with making a Halloween movie and instead decided to just…direct several mini music videos and short films which are inserted haphazardly into the already painfully bloated script.

This film sees a reintroduction of a supernatural element (a concept thats teased in the original halloween, and heavily used to disasterous effect in ‘Halloween 5’ and ‘Halloween 6’) In my opinion Michael Myers doesnt need any kind of supernatural evil cult association or murdeorus instinct driven by the ghosts of his stripper parents. To me? Michael is at his scariest when there isnt a specific target…or rather, the target is whoever is in his way. The idea that every Halloween this ‘shape’ emerges and relentlessly kills indiscriminantly until he’s saciated and can dissapear for another year IS what makes Michael as a character so unique and interesting. The idea that the blind evil is inherent to him, its what drives him, is the thing that sells me on him as a character.

Here? he’s reduced to a Jason Vorhees clone, driven by his mothers wishes in a vague attempt to reunite the family in the afterlife. Everything else is just poorly maintained window dressing.

I suppose beyond that, the script faults are numerous. For a start; the films RIDDLED with padding, ABSOLUTLEY CHOCKED FULL OF IT. several scenes turn out to be dreams (the worst fake out a horror movie can do) a lot of it is idle chatter that doesnt add anything to the main plot, NON….NON. Of the characters are even REMOTELY likeable. And i’m not saying that you have to have a likeable protagonist for the film to be successful, a lot of great works have traded on an all downer cast. But here; on top of not being likeable, they’re also just really REALLY boring.

Laurie does NOTHING except have multiple seizures and scream for most of the movie. Dr. Loomis as a character was slightly off putting in the first, but here is almost completely irradeemable. Michael has almost no personality and his goals are messy and unclear, and the film spends the vast majority of its time following these three characters in totally seperate situations, doing basically NOTHING right up until the last 20 minutes or so of the runtime.

The tonal issues that were present in the first film are still present here. It cant commit to what type of film it wants to be and how much it wants to be a slasher, a thriller or a super dark comedy…and as a result it just kind of…flails about for most of the runtime.

The continuity is totally borked too, dont expect any kind of coherency here. Characters can be in totally different parts of the country and shift entire states in a couple of minutes (as illustrated by the 3rd act where Loomis sees a breaking news bulletin about Michael from a hotel room having just given a talk show interview (presumably in LA) and in the very next scene, hes stood in a corn field in Haddonfield. Michael teleporting about is a bit more understandable, but even so; here, it gets rediculous.

Thats not to mention the totally uneven 3 act structuring, where AGAIN we find ourselves idling in a second act thats twice as long as the 1st and 3rd…and the AUDACITY of this film to have TEN MINUTES of credits. Thats a trick usually reserved for SOV films wanting to hit 80 minutes so they could get distribution. NOT the kind of thing you expect to see in a mainstream horror film studio release that’s ALREADY pushing one hour and 45 minutes (which for the record is WAY too long for a ‘Halloween’ film that has almost nothing to say)

Oh…and having seen that the theatrical and the directors cuts both have totally different endings, I checked them both out for completists sake. The theatrical cut ending is poor, the directors cut ending is slightly worse. I like neither, they both end in awful and totally uninspiring ways.

My issues with the direction and cine are the same as the previous ‘Halloween’ only here its quite ampliphied. everything is now even more desaturated than the previous entry, with blues, greens and blacks being about as good as it gets on a stylized colour front, it’s so badly corrected that the blood looks black for most of the films runtime. Everything is low-lit to the point that if you watch this as a streaming copy (as I did) even in HD, it looks compressed and becomes near impossible to figure out what your actually supposed to be looking at for most of the runtime.

The compositional issues I had with the original (chronic use of close ups and extreme closeups) are here compounded by strobing style editing that ‘flicker’ cuts several shots in quick succession creating a dizzying and unpleasent experience.

Theres an overeliance on Zombies love for german expressionism and kitsch vintage halloween fodder throughout. Which for, what must be either 1995 or 1996 within this film universe is just…odd. I know that the 90s did have a bit of a 60s revival going on at the time, but if you believe Rob Zombies take on 90s culture, every TV was playing either Fleischer cartoons or 60s and early 70s pop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. and this, combined with the aforementioned ‘music video esq’ dream sequences which…just feel like Zombies videos for his own music tracks. create a lumpy and tonally uneven experience I really want drawn to.

The edit is messy, has almost no breathing space, uses WAY too many shots compressed into a very narrow window of time. its an ugly movie, theres maybe 3 or 4 arrangements across the whole thing that could be considered ‘defining’ but that isnt necessarily a good thing…

Add into that that the performances continue their slow decline. Im convinced Sheri Moon Zombie is only in this film so that her SAG card could get renewed. She does NOTHING in this film other than stand next to a horse in a white dress. her scenes are incoherent to the main narrative, but to be honest. i’ve seen people try to argue and justify the significance of her role. I personally just see it as psudointellectualism at it’s most pompus.

Malcolm McDowell is easily the biggest waste of talent here, I genuinely believe that with a better character sheet, he could play a phenominal ‘Dr. Loomis’ but here? the characters an ass. he really brings that iteration of the character to life. But when you make someone so unlikeable AND make that character a main and pivitol role…well your asking for trouble.

Scout Taylor Compton, is once again wasted as Laurie. Only here, she has even less to do because…Whereas in the previous entry she at least had a bit of snark to fall back on. Here? she spends most of the movie either crying, flailing, having seizures or incoherently rambling about wanting to party. And thats about it. Shes very good at the physical side of this role…but her total lack of depth or range given to her hinders her wider performance.

And the soundtrack? is actually an improvement on the previous film, a gripe I had was that the scoring for ‘Halloween (2007)’ felt like it didnt include the original ‘Halloween’ scoring, until one of the producers told them they HAD to use it. resulting in a tonally weird experience where you’d get very 2000’s style jukebox scoring that would suddenly snap into LITERALLY the original 70s Halloween OST. it was quite a jarring experience.

With this entry, they’ve managed to all but remove that aspect. barring one or two key scenes, its a quite modern sounding score. it did help to tie things together a bit better. albeit given everything else thats going on in this film…that isnt much praise.

The difficulty I have really with ‘Halloween 2’ is that, had it not been a ‘Halloween’ movie…Had it just been a generic slasher with the killer, main characters and locations changed up. I think i’d have probably appreciated it a little bit more…

But as an ACTUAL ‘Halloween’ movie? its dreadful. It’s everything I hated about the ‘thorn trilogy’ dialled up to 11, but with the added kick to the nuts of all the characters being deeply unlikeable, the script having very little to say, the runtime being absolutely INSANE given what actually happens in the film, and the cine and direction being ugly to the point of near pain.

It makes me laugh really that they sincerely wanted to squeeze a third film out of this that would have released in 2015…the fact THIS movie got made is staggering to me. For the longest time, i’d cite ‘Halloween 5’ as being the worst film in the franchise. But I think by a VERY narrow margin thanks in part to the runtime. This film may have just pipped it to being the worst ‘Halloween’ film made to date.

When even a ‘Weird Al’ cameo cant save your movie…you KNOW things have gone VERY wrong.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/halloween-ii/