Review #93: Halloween II (2009)

This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #10- Halloween II (the Rob Zombie sequel)

One disclaimer: Apparently I was watching the Director's Cut, which made a lot of changes (including having a completely different ending). I have never seen the non-Director's Cut version, so I can't comment on it (though I can't imagine it being different enough to change my thoughts on the film as a whole).

I really don't have a lot of positive things to say about this one. It's a sequel to the last one, which was nothing special, and this time it's going off on its own direction and doing its own thing. In theory that could have made it great- nothing wrong with spicing up a series by taking it in a new direction, as long as it's done well- but the end result is a disjointed mess that seems pointless and doesn't even feel like a Halloween movie.

One complaint that was also present in the last movie: All of the characters are awful. EVERY ONE OF THEM. In the last one, Laurie was annoying because she was so bubbly and chipper even when the situation didn't call for it, and in this one she spends literally the entire movie either complaining or screaming (or both). I just couldn't enjoy watching this when every time she's on screen she's screaming about how miserable she is.

Another complaint is the dialogue. The dialogue, similar to the characters, IS AWFUL. There are so many scenes that are obviously meant to sound witty and snappy and contemporary, but instead they just sound disjointed and nonsensical. (One in particular is when Laurie is at work- I swear it sounds like they took a scene, threw all of the lines into a hat, and then edited them into the order they pulled them out. None of the lines feed into the following lines, most of them aren't even on the same subject, and so on. It's so terrible.)

Complaint #3- Michael Myers doesn't feel like Michael Myers, he feels like just some generic slasher villain. This movie leans more into the supernatural than the last ones did (with him constantly seeing ghosts or echoes of his past self and his mother), but to what end I have no clue. Michael doesn't wear his mask for most of the movie, so since he's shown to have been living out in some abandoned shack for the last year, he just looks like a big hairy mountain man. He vocalizes way more than he ever did before (he grunts quite a bit during action scenes, and in the Director's Cut, he even screams "DIE!" at Loomis at the end) and barely does any of his signature stalking. He even throws a tantrum at one point and smashes up a bunch of shelves for some reason. I just don't understand who could look at the villain in this movie and say, "Yeah, that's Michael Myers alright!"

Oh, #4- this movie begins with a FIFTEEN MINUTE DREAM SEQUENCE. Laurie is in the hospital, then Michael shows up and chases and eventually "kills" her and she wakes up. But it was obvious to me right from the beginning that this wasn't actually happening, so for FIFTEEN WHOLE MINUTES I had to just sit and wait for the part where any of it started to matter again. Like, there were times when I started to doubt that it was in fact a dream purely based on the fact that there was no way they would make a dream sequence that was five minutes long, right? Ten minutes? But no, they outdid themselves, all for a stupid jump scare.

And Loomis. Oh boy, Loomis. At times I'd say that this movie feels more like it's about Loomis than it is about Laurie or Michael, but I feel like that's giving too much credit to the creators. Loomis is a terrible person in this film, and they go whole hog trying to portray him as a jerk to everyone around him. That's fine, except 1. the dialogue they use to do so is really stupid, and 2. EVERYONE in this movie is terrible, so there's very little to make his behavior stand out. It also bothers me how (in this film and the last) everyone keeps accusing Loomis of "creating" Michael- in this one a guy even pulls a gun on him for his part in the man's daughter getting killed by Myers- and I get that there was a (very) little bit of that in the originals too. But the difference is that in the originals, Loomis' time with Michael was 100% left up to the viewer's imagination, so when they say Loomis created the monster, we can just shrug and assume he did. But in the Rob Zombie remake, we SAW Loomis' sessions with Michael, and Loomis barely did anything (right OR wrong). So it feels very odd seeing him get accused of "creating" Michael Myers when we saw the "creation" process and there was nothing noteworthy about it. They showed too much and so they couldn't leave enough to the imagination.

I already complained about Michael's portrayal in this movie, but another thing that bothered me is that he is largely irrelevant until the very end. For most of this film, it feels like it's using the protagonists to try to show an exploration of trauma and the life of someone suffering from PTSD after having nearly been murdered by a serial killer. If that was the entire film, I would SO be on board- the scenes where Laurie and Annie were clearly both struggling with what happened to them worked very well, and I viscerally felt the fear Laurie was feeling when Annie was dying on the bathroom floor, knowing that even if the two of them argued a lot they both understood each other in a way nobody else ever would (and in a few minutes, Laurie would have lost this friend she had such an unequaled connection with). But beyond a small handful of scenes, this movie isn't about that. It's about Michael Myers killing people, it's about Loomis making everyone angry for profiting off their misfortune, it's about teens getting killed on Halloween. To this end, every few minutes it'll cut over to some terrible person being terrible and then Michael shows up and kills them. Then, back to whatever else- these people Michael kills never get mentioned, nobody ever finds their bodies propped up in an attic, they never become relevant to the story, ever. But ten minutes went by, so that means we need to show Michael kill someone again. Gotta keep that body count sky high, after all! So the end result is two or three different movies cut up into pieces and arranged in whatever order will get people to buy the most popcorn.

I just don't really see what the point of this movie was. It didn't have a strong message, the characters were all terrible and unlikable, and nobody gave a particularly strong performance. I read in the IMDB trivia that even Rob Zombie didn't want to make this movie, and it shows. It shows in every facet of the movie-watching experience. Good riddance to bad reboots, I guess.

Overall Rating: 2/10 White Horses That Feel Like They're Supposed To Be Symbolic But Come Off As Pretentious Instead

Favorite Moment of the Movie: When Loomis calls Weird Al "Mr. Weird"