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 First of all,
I need to admit my bias here. I'm one of those people who hates the
original Halloween 2 with a passion. I would rather watch ANY of the
other sequels, and that includes part 5. And part 6 (and not the
infamous “producer's cut” of part 6, either, the theatrical version).
Over the years I've heard praise heaped on the original Halloween 2, and
I honestly can't see what people see in that dreck. I've watched it over
and over and can't see it but anything as a good cure for insomnia. So
not only was I excited about seeing the sequel to Rob Zombies 2007
Halloween re-imagining, I was sure that, no matter how bad it might be,
it would be better than the original.
So was I right? Well, there's a lot to like about this movie. If you can
get past the annoyance at having a different actor play Young Michael in
the flashbacks, the opening sequence with young Michael visiting with
his mother in the asylum is sweet, and it's a good opening for the rest
of the movie (it offsets the mayhem that we know is soon to come). The
early scenes where Laurie is found wandering the streets, then later in
the hospital where doctors are trying to patch her up, are brutal and
effective. Hospitals are kind of creepy anyway, so it doesn't take much
work to make these scenes scary (ofcourse, it must take some talent, as
the original Halloween 2 was set in a hospital, and that movie still
managed to bore me into a coma). It's nice to see Danielle Harris
returning as Annie and Brad Dourif as her father. I'm a horror geek, so
I always enjoy seeing actors from some of my other favorite horror
flicks.
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I really liked how Danielle
Harris played her character. She's settling back into her
new life and trying to help Laurie, her friend, cope with
the horrifying things that happened to the both of them when
Michael Myers went on a killing spree one year earlier.
Harris as Annie is down to earth enough to anchor the rest
of the cast even when they explode into theatrics, which in
this movie happens a lot (more about that later). Tyler
Mane, returning as Michael all grown up, is menacing enough
in his role. |
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I'm also one of the few people who seems to
enjoy the new Sam Loomis. Malcolm McDowell doesn't want to play Sam
Loomis as a good doctor crusading to right a wrong, he's a little slimy
and skeezy, and he writes his book to profit off his work without much
thought of the people he's going to harm in the process. It's an
interesting take on the character, and I like the cynical nature of it.
Besides, I think seeing a character growing a conscience as the movie
progresses and returning to town at the end in a last-ditch attempt to
redeem himself is far more interesting as a character arc than watching
a guy who was trying to do the right thing all along. Don't get me
wrong, I love Donald Pleasance, but I'm just saying that I enjoyed
McDowell's take on the character, as well. The showdown at the end of
the movie is ten times more effective in this movie, not only because
the original Halloween 2 was so bad, but because McDowell managed to
wring so much pathos out of his character's transformation.
 Wow, I
don't even know where to begin. Ok, first of all, I'm a fan of
having movies play on people's fears of the dark, and I appreciate
how this movie tried to do this, but I'm not exaggerating when I say
that at least half of the action sequences in this movie were so
dark that I couldn't even tell what was going on. I was squinting
and leaning forward and I STILL could barely see enough to make out
what was happening. That got old really fast. Not to mention the
play of the soundtrack and the background noise was loud enough to
drown out some of the most important dialogue in the movie. I'm a
fan of loud music and all, but when the background noise is
obscuring what your characters are saying, something is wrong here.
Coupled with the fact that I
couldn't see anything, it made for a very irritating movie
experience. The other people in the theater kept saying “What? What
just happened? I can't see anything!” which tells me that it wasn't
just me.
Next, I don't know what Rob Zombie was smoking when he wrote this
screenplay, but he needs to swear it off before he ever writes
again. I'm serious, rehab is your friend, dude. Part of what made
the original so enjoyable for me was seeing how much Michael Myers'
mother loved him, and watching her fall apart in the prequel because
she didn't understand what was going on with her son (the only
family she had left). I don't care what anyone says about Sheri Moon
Zombie, her performance MADE that prequel for me, and so to see her
reduced to a glowing apparition in this movie... it irks me. If it
weren't such a huge contradiction of the entire point of the
original movie, I don't think I'd mind so much, but when your first
movie works so well because it shows evil
intruding upon and destroying a normal family, and then you make a
sequel where you're trying to paint the entire family as a bunch of
raving lunatics, I get snippy. Yeah, I get it, Michael is deranged
and this is all a product of his deranged mind, but I still think it
undermines something that made the first movie so powerful, and for
me, that cheapened the whole story. The least they could have done
is intercut the insanity with flashbacks of what Michael's real
family life was like. That would have made it relatable. By the end
of the movie I was so deluded by watching Michael's mother prance
around dressed like a snow queen that I forgot everything that made
her character in the first movie work for me, and that's sad.
Now let's talk about Scout Taylor Compton. I have to admit that I've
enjoyed her work in the past, so I honestly don't know what happened
here, but she overacts so horribly in this movie that I seriously
wanted to walk out. I'm not kidding, in almost every scene she's
screaming so loud and crying so hard that I can't even understand
what she's saying, and her dialogue is so muddled by her hysterics
that I wanted to punch her. I get that she's terrified and
traumatized by what happened, but Jesus Christ, Annie went through
the tragedy too, and she's not shrieking like a harpy throughout the
entire movie,making my ears bleed. Not only that, but her character
totally fell apart in the end. As much as I liked the showdown in
the final minutes of the movie for how it showcased the change in
Dr. Loomis' character, Laurie's character broke down so completely
that I don't even know what the hell Zombie was thinking. Yes, shes
learned some horrible information and yes, she's going through some
horrible things, but she totally loses it to the point where she
doesn't even seem human anymore, and I can't even begin to relate to
a character like that. I had no idea where she was coming from, I
was confused, I had eye strain from trying to see in the pitch
darkness, and I didn't even know what was going on at that point.
Why does Laurie share a delusion with Michael? Why are she and
Michael dreaming the same dreams (of their mother as Frosty the Snow
Bitch)? Are they both crazy now? If I have no clue what's going on
and Laurie is gripped by a psychosis that seems to come from
nowhere, I get lost, and I blame Zombie for making that
transformation so muddled. Like I said, I know she went through some
horrible things, but so did Annie, and Annie didn't go off the deep
end. If Laurie and Michael are both evil, then Michael's
transformation in the prequel of the first movie isn't nearly as
powerful anymore, is it? Laurie starts having these visions and
dreams back when she's supposedly “normal” at the beginning of this
movie, and it's never explained how she and her
brother now manage to somehow magically share a brain. As much as I
thought Laurie's part in Zombie's take on the first Halloween was
choppy, at least she acted like a normal human being in that movie,
and that made everything happening to her seem even worse. I don't
know what the fuck she was trying to do here, but it's really hard
to have sympathy for a character that shrieks and cries and overacts
her way through a messy performance that doesn't even make any sense
unless you forget everything that made you like her in the first
movie. Rob Zombie, you know I love you, but seriously, what the
hell?
There's enough good to keep me interested, but the movie is dark and
messy and muddled in more ways than one. If you wanted to see this movie
expand on the story of the original, you'll be sorely disappointed.
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