Rob Zombie’s Halloween II

• Written, Directed, and Produced by Rob Zombie
• August 28, 2009

Laurie Strode is dealing with her own issues in the aftermath of Michael Myers rampage and comes face-to-face with him once again.

Rob Zombie’s Halloween II is flawed from start to finish and is a prime example of bad filmmaking. Unlike the first of his Halloween reboots, this is a completely original story save for the dream sequence which opens the film.

An issue is that Rob Zombie turns everyone but Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) into a complete and utter jerk. He certainly knows how to make every character in a horror movie completely unlikable to the point you’re happy they’re dead but you don’t care enough how they died.

Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is a complete asshole. Loomis in particular is also a bit of a sexual predator at this point using his newfound fame to hit on women and get any piece of strange tail he can. He’s gone from a concerned doctor to a jack hole.

Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) is a wreck and just generally nasty to everybody. Her lashing out is supposed to be because of the events of the last film but she’s just comes off more as nasty because she wants to be nasty. That just covers two of our three main characters.

And everybody in this movie is a serious pervert. Not an occasional dirty joke but rather just gross to the point you think they might be a sexual predator in the way they talk. This is a common trait in Zombie films. Then again he usually focuses on the bad guys so that is okay but this story does not. Is the message everybody is terrible?

Rob Zombie’s Halloween II attempts to parallel Laurie Strode having mental issues much like Michael Myers does. I applaud him for the idea but there is no hint of it prior to this. She was a pretty together teen in the first movie. This is an abrupt change in the character with nothing to hint that it was to come.

At least to me it seemed that the famous Michael Myers mask was missing from a good chunk of the film. It’s an important part of the character. It’s part of his look and it helps to keep the character mysterious and dehumanize him. By having plenty of shots with his face exposed he seems more like a real person than anything.

The kills are very slasher film appropriate but with the whole hallucination of Michael’s mom (Sherri Moon Zombie) and his younger self (Chase Wright Vanek) it feels like Rob Zombie was trying to be artful. Seriously artful in fact. This is not something for art houses. At least not this particular slasher universe. Our characters, both real and imagined, expound with these speeches on this or that and all it really amounts to is babbling.

While giving an insight into his mentality once again Zombie continues to humanize the character. Don’t humanize Michael Myers! He works best when you don’t know why. You can’t humanize him too much otherwise you alter the character.

Michael Myers made noises. He doesn’t make any sounds. He’s silent. That’s part of the reason he is referred to originally many years ago as The Shape. He wasn’t a human being but rather a thing that killed.

The worst sin of all is the movie is so slow. I mean it just plods along. This is the slowest and most pretentious Halloween film ever made for the franchise. The only thing that alleviates the boredom are the kills but it takes so long to get from one to another that they are rare respites from boredom in a stretched out story.

Rob Zombie’s Halloween II is not really that good. With a slow story and unlikeable characters, it is just not watchable yet it holds you because you are curious how much worse it can get. I say skip this one because it’s just a waste of time.