For me, the best part of Halloween 2 was running into a cousin I hadn't seen in several years. I met his wife, we got caught up and we all vehemently agreed that Halloween 2 sucks. I missed Rob Zombie's original remake of Halloween that came out in 2007 yet I found the plot of the sequel shockingly easy to follow. Rob Zombie's main contribution to the Halloween story is his attempt to do what he did in The Devil's Rejects and give the monster a personality and explain the motivation behind the sadistic killings. Here's what that boils down to: Michael Myers is violently batshit insane and he kills people because that's what violently batshit insane people do. Since we already knew that, this movie is completely unnecessary.
Joining Michael Myers from the original film are Laurie Strode and Sam Loomis. Loomis, now played by Malcolm McDowell, is no longer a psychiatrist singularly obsessed with capturing and killing Michael Myers but is now more of a self centered huckster trying to sell a book about him. Laurie, though, is still Laurie except that she now has the misfortune of not being played by Jamie Lee Curtis and is now being played by Scout Taylor-Compton, an actress whose acting choices range from crying to screaming.
The movie picks up from what apparently was the end of the first one. Laurie shot Michael Myers after what I presume was a massive, bloody killing spree (remember, I didn't see the first one, perhaps it was the story of a tea party that only turned bloody at the very end). She's found wandering the streets in a daze by the local sheriff (Brad Dourif, a guy who usually is the one playing the psycho killer) and then the fun begins.
People in this movie are killed according to the ancient rules of slasher films. The fist two to die are the asshole coroners who apparently didn't bother to check Michael's pulse before they loaded him into their wagon. They then spend the trip to the morgue talking about how one of Michael Myers' victims had been really hot and that they'd love to have sex with her corpse. This makes them degenerates and degenerates always die in slasher movies and die they do when SURPRISE it turns out Michael is still alive. The deaths are chalked up to an auto accident despite the fact that one of the men was completely beheaded. Oh, yeah, MICHAEL'S BODY DISAPPEARED. Everyone still says he's totally for sure really most sincerely dead, you bet.
A year later, Laurie is now living with the sheriff and his daughter and she's having nightmares but it's okay because Michael is like so totally dead it's not even funny even though he's not and is actually on his way back to kill his sister because Halloween is approaching. Did I mention they were brother and sister? And that Michael is being guided by the spirit of his dead mother to kill Laurie so "they can be a family again"? And that this was Rob Zombie's attempt to make Michael Myers into a three dimensional character? I didn't? Well, now I did.
As a guy who enjoys killing, Michael is very lucky that Rob Zombie populated his world with so many people who are killable under slasher movie rules. As I said, he killed the two degenerates who wanted to screw corpses. He also ran into some rednecks, a group that's also okay to kill. After a few more degenerates, Michael finally gets to start killing the prime targets of any good psycho killer, Empowered Girls. Crazed axe-and-knife wielding killers HATE Empowered Girls. It doesn't matter how they're empowered. Being sexually aggressive is one form of empowerment that is sure to draw in slasher killers. Girls are not supposed to actually enjoy sex and, if they do, must die as I'm sure the asshole who was sitting behind me that mumbled, "She's asking for it," when a girl in a sexy Halloween costume agreed to go back to a guy's van would agree. The other, even worse category of Empowered Girl is the one who's smart and liberated. They may as well commit suicide when the cameras start rolling since they're not going to make it to the end anyway. I especially loathe Rob Zombie now since there was a point where I thought he was going to allow a smart, ballsy chick who didn't take crap from anyone to live. She didn't.
Halloween 2 is a huge waste of time unless you enjoy being offended and having your intelligence insulted. If that's the case, call Fandango and buy your tickets now. It was a toss up as to whether I would see this or the OTHER popular horror movie franchise sequel that came out this week. I wonder how they would have killed their smart and sexy girls. I guess I'll never know.
3 comments:
Even better- in the first film, Laurie shot Michael POINT BLANK IN THE FACE MULTIPLE TIMES.
Plus, McDowell's Loomis was grabbed my Michael, who seemingly gouged his eyes out- there was blood everywhere pouring out of his eyelids. Then in the VERY NEXT SHOT, he drags an unconscious, seemingly dead Loomis around AND THERE'S NOT A BRUISE ON HIM.
Oh hell, at one point in the original film series Michael Myers had his damn head chopped off and it didn't even slow him down in the next sequel. Slasher films are mostly stupid neverending stories.
I remember the hilarious excuse they had to get out of that- Michael was devious enough to punch an ambulance driver in the throat to cripple his speech, then undressed himself and dressed up the ambulance driver to look like him so Laurie would think it was him because he couldn't speak.
So after Laurie chopped that guy's head off, she went nuts with guilt and had herself institutionalized, so Michael could promptly kill her off at the beginning of Resurrection.
And actually, Zombie's version is the second reboot, since the last two movies disregarded 3-6.
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