The Weinstein Company, too busy counting their favorable notices following “Inglourious Basterds'” mighty weekend atop the box office, chose not to screen “Halloween II,” Rob Zombie’s slasher sequel, for critics. This was most certainly a defensive move, echoing last month’s decision by Universal to keep most critics out of the loop for “G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra.” Still, a select band of merry L.A.-based critics got to see the film, and that’s it. We went as early as humanly possible, call us a fan.
Two years have passed since Rob Zombie unleashed his version of John Carpenter’s seminal classic. That film was neither fish nor foul, and spent a good 2/3rds of the movie exploring what it must have been like for young Michael Myers to grow up in a mental institution. (Not that anyone really wanted to know that back story. See also: “Hannibal Rising.”) Why Zombie felt the need to explain Michael Myers’ youth is never really elaborated on, especially when the character is the same killing machine, from tot to full-grown man. Also perplexing was why Zombie would go far afield of Carpenter’s original film, only to remake his original, almost scene-for-scene, and cram it into the final act.
Still, there was still reason to be excited for this sequel, primarily the huge artistic leap Zombie made between his screechy debut “House of 1,000 Corpses,” to the elegant exploitation of “House’s” pseudo-sequel “The Devil’s Rejects.” Zombie really let loose on the second movie, and there was every reason that, unencumbered by having to actually remake Carpenter’s original film, he would go crazy again.
And he did. Sort of. It’s just that the results are as baffling and half-baked as the original installment.
“Halloween II” starts off with a sequence directly following the end of the first film. (Actually, that’s not true, there’s a brief flashback to young Mikey Myers in the loony bin getting a toy horse from his mother. More on that in a minute.) The battered Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton), one of the first film’s survivors, is taken into the hospital and repaired after her brutal run-in with knife-wielding psycho Michael Myers (Tyler Mane). Michael Myers escapes the coroner’s van (everyone thinks he’s dead of course), and comes after her in the hospital, in sequences that are eerily reminiscent of the original sequence to John Carpenter’s film. Right as Laurie’s about to take an axe to the face – shock cut – she wakes up, and it was all a dream. But what part was a dream, exactly? She must have been in a hospital and Myers did escape the van… The movie is littered with these jarring dream/fantasy sequences that not only disrupt the flow of the movie but also leave you confused as to the geographical/chronological placement of key people and events.
Anyway, from there we flash forward a year. Strode has become a grungy goth queen haunted by visions that we have to suffer through too. She’s living with Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) and his daughter Annie (Danielle Harris) and working at a coffee shop. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), who treated Michael Myers as he was growing up and attempted to stop the carnage last time around, has been transformed into a slick media whore, with a new tell-all book about the killings slated to be released – you guessed it – on Halloween. Halloween rolls around and Michael Myers, who has spent the past year as a homeless person (we get to see him kill and eat a dog, for crying out loud) is spurred on by the dreamlike vision of his dead mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) to commit tons of brutal murders.
And that’s pretty much it for the plot of “Halloween II.”
The killings this time around are even more arbitrary and absurd. While many of his peers in the current horror field are interested in the physiological details of murder, Zombie is content to simply show an extreme close up of a knife coming down, and then a body drenched in blood. Rarely do we see what actually happens during the killing, and thus much of its power (emotionally, narratively) is robbed. Much of the film feels listless, with Zombie moving from one murder to the other, one bizarre dream sequence to the next, without much feeling one way or the other.
While some of these images and sequences are striking (there’s a great scene where a couple of the kids enter a room that’s been trashed and he edits in the details of the attack as they search for a body), but they don’t really add to much. Is Zombie attempting to detail the psychological ungluing of Michael Myers, or of Laurie Strode, or both? Are we supposed to get the impression that, since they’re sharing the same visions, they’re psychically connected or just share a familial bond? (Michael Myers is, after all, her brother, even though how, exactly, he knows this, is never really explained.)
Also, if the idea that his dead mother, caked in kabuki make-up and leading around a white stallion, was the impetus for his very bad deeds, why wasn’t this ever mentioned in the first film, which spent so much time dwelling on the young Michael Myers?
At the end of the movie there are some clever moments, and you come away with the feeling that you’ve seen “something,” but what that “something” is, you can’t quite address. Maybe it’s just disappointing because Zombie showed so much promise with his stylized, hillbilly-in-hell “Devil’s Rejects.” “Rejects” climaxed in an epic, Peckinpah-ian shootout set to “Freebird” — all nine minutes of it — for crying out loud. This, by comparison, seems rote; a waste of his considerable imagination. It’s been there, slashed that. [C-]