H2 has moments that attempt to be artistic - particularly in the multiple dream sequences - but all of them left me bored rather than visually engrossed. Yes, H2 has some massive failings, but none more tragic than Zombie's failure to maintain suspense. He telegraphs each intended shock so far in advance, there is simply no element of surprise. No jumps, no startles. You see it coming a mile away and all you have left is the mechanics of the method of dispatch. I think the only genuine startle I got in this film was to see Margot Kidder as Laurie's psychologist. It was shocking to see Lois Lane looking like a weathered leather handbag after 20 years in a combination meth lab and psych ward.

The the thing about Michael Myers that has made this character (and this franchise) endure for over 30 years lies in the simple fact that he IS the Boogeyman. He's the thing we fear most. He's the monster in the closet. He is pure evil. In this story, he's been reduced to a mama's boy with some deep emotional scars. What's most scary about H2 is what Rob Zombie has done to the boogeyman.

Fortunately, there IS hope for the franchise. John B.DeHaas has written a camp, parody MUSICAL version of Halloween that is premiering in Orlando in October. This musical may be the only thing that will remove the bad taste that Rob Zombie's film has left in my mouth.

Zombie's H2 has none of the redeeming qualities of his H1. This is a mishmash. An unfocused, Headbanger's Ball video, chock full of jumpcuts, wrapped in a paper thin screenplay that bears little or no resemblance to the original H2. It turns familiar characters inside out and makes them unsympathetic, abrasive and flat-out annoying. The one absolute in the horror genre is that you must truly have some sort of empathy with the characters. I found myself rooting for Michael Myers. He's the only character that truly elicits any sort of pity. Why? Because Zombie is making a futile attempt to continue his backstory that he created in H1. While you should feel sorry for a child from an abusive home, it's rather difficult to feel anything for a 7 foot behemoth lurching around and hacking everyone in sight just because the world has been unjust and unfair. That's predictable and uninteresting. In an effort to explain and perhaps justify Michael's actions, Zombie brings back his wife, Sherri Moon Zombie as Michael's mother Deborah Myers. This time, she's not the tortured mother wondering where she went wrong. She's a guardian angel of death, dressed in white satin and perpetually accompanied by the young version of Michael and a white horse (???) She exhorts Michael to kill for her, as killing his sister is a surefire way to bring their broken family back together. The "Kill for Mommie" tactic totally emasculates Michael. It robs him of his malevolence and makes it seem as if Zombie couldn't come up with anything better than a redux of Jason Voorhees' old M.O. from Friday the 13th. Yes, you might feel pity for Michael in this state.. but for the totally wrong reasons.

Another huge misstep is the moral judgment of good and bad that figures into the majority of horror films. Most horror films have stock characters that you intuitively know should and WILL get their comeuppance. In H2, Zombie's screenplay makes it difficult to feel one way or the other about the people who are on the receiving end of the brutality. The wholesale butchering of the ancillary characters are largely unmotivated and seem like nothing more than a gore quotient filler. Zombie has always had a fascination with grotesques. Characters in all of his films seem to have some sort of grunge or physical oddity, H2 is no exception. It's practically a toothless redneck-fest at times. When those characters make Michael look almost normal, something goes terribly awry.

Scout Compton Taylor's Laurie is ostensibly supposed to be on this tortured emotional journey of survival. Taylor seems to stay on two levels throughout the film - she cries and screams or alternatively acts like a spoiled brat. The only moment in which you feel as if her character might have an epiphany is when she discovers that she is Michael's sister. In that moment, you hope she will find that Jamie Lee Curtis survivalist spunk - but she never does. Instead, she goes back into her established pattern. I won't spoil the half-assed ending, but Zombie's fate for Laurie was basically ripped from the finale of Halloween 4 - and it's just as unoriginal as Michael's "Kill for Mommie" directive.

The most horrific error in the screenplay was to turn Dr. Sam Loomis, once again played by Malcolm McDowell, into a huge punchline. Loomis is no longer the benevolent doctor, relentlessly pursuing the inner workings of Michael's mind. He's now a comic figure that has been transfigured into a media whore, selling sensationalist books on Michael and behaving like a diva. It's a pathetic attempt to inject humor into the script and it fails miserably. Loomis was always the moral compass of the Halloween franchise. He was the one factor that was a necessary constant. He knew that Michael was the personification of evil, and he was the only person who could remotely stop Michael and make him think. Now that Zombie's backstory voided the pure evil mythology, Loomis becomes extraneous. The screenplay does give Loomis a halfhearted attempt at redemption towards the end of the film, but it's too little, too late.

I'd like to take the sound effects editor for this film out into a field and horsewhip him. Every murder is punctuated by Foley overkill. I fully expected each slice of the knife or crunch to be accompanied by a 1960's Batman-style title card (Kerplunk! THUD! SHWAP!) There's also a massive failure on Zombie's part this time around with the film's scoring. The iconic Halloween theme and the Laurie's theme are nowhere to be heard until the last 60 seconds of the film. Carpenter's score is an essential element that makes or breaks any Halloween film. Even the most mediocre of them all feature that music - or variations thereof.

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I posted my review last night.. If anyone might be interested:
It was widely reported that Rob Zombie had no interest whatsoever in making Halloween 2.

It shows.

Yes, Mr. Zombie didn't want to do it. But he did it. Some sources claim that Dimension Films was going to go forth with their reboot of the franchise with or without Zombie's participation, so in the name of continuity and artistic integrity, Zombie caved and decided to complete his "extreme vision" of the Michael Myers saga.
As evidenced by the film I just saw, it's painfully apparent that they threw a shitload of money at him and he ran with the paycheck - artistic and franchise integrity be damned.

I am a Halloween purist. John Carpenter's iconic 1978 film is my all-time favorite in the genre. There is a "Hitchcockian" quality about that film that has rarely been surpassed. It is a stylish example of just how frightening a film can be with the right score, the right cast and the notion that what truly frightens is what you don't see - rather than what you do see in gruesome and gory detail. Halloween is a film that holds an audience in the throes of suspense - with a bare minimum of blood and gore.

Halloween is widely considered the granddaddy of the slasher genre. It was the film that launched a thousand maniacs - some that succeeded not on imitation, but in their ability to reinvent the wheel. However, in the face of new franchises, new masked and/or burned and deformed psychos, Halloween stood alone. In 1981, Halloween fell victim to it's own trap. It was inevitable there would be a sequel and as far as sequels go, the 1981 Halloween 2 was quite good. In fact, many franchise fans consider Halloween 1 and Halloween 2 to be one long film. After all, there is a seamless continuity to both films. H2 picks up right where H1 ends. Stylistically, it worked. H2 had far more gore than it's predecessor. It was almost a necessary evil. After all, from 1978 to 1981, the horror genre had begun to become more about upping the ante in the gore factor. More blood, more guts, more bucks.

When Zombie's H1 was released, I went into it with a great fear that we were about to see a total train wreck. Much to my surprise, it wasn't. Zombie had written a relatively cohesive backstory for young Michael Myers, showing a cycle of abuse, abandonment and dysfunction that led Michael down the proverbial "Psycho Path." Interesting? Somewhat. The only major flaw in that backstory is that it takes the mystery away from the Myers mythology. It's more frightening not to know what makes him so relentless rather than chalking it up to a textbook case of abuse. The main problem that Zombie encountered in making H1 was when the story moved from the original backstory to the remaking of Carpenter's film. The familiar characters became stilted and uninteresting. The storytelling became rushed and truncated. Moreover, the ending became too quick and far too much of a cop out. However, I actually found myself enjoying Zombie's new take on Halloween. No, it would never replace the original, but it wasn't a total failure. I knew it was going to be a difficult balancing act to remake such an iconic film, but I thought that Zombie put his spin on it and managed to be respectful to Carpenter and make the second half of the film more of an homage.

I wondered how long it was going to take for a sequel to rear it's head. I read Zombie state in multiple interviews that since Laurie had blown Michael's head off, there would be no H2 from him. I knew damn well that was a disingenuous statement. Few horror films have endings that are final or absolute. If there is gold to be mined from the masses, they'll find any way possible to resurrect the dead.

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