I knew, going in, that Rob Zombie’s second foray into the Halloween series was going to be godawful. I’d seen the trailers. I’d read the interviews. It was common knowledge that a sequel almost never outperforms its predecessor and based on how bad the first one was, Rob Zombie was definitely not going to manage to pull off the brass ring of a superior sequel.
I knew it was going to be bad…but just how bad I couldn’t possibly know until I actually got in and watched the whole thing go skipping off merrily to hell itself.
First, of course, we must discharge the duty of a plot summary, as Laurie Strode will learn the truth about her origins and once again tangle with massive maniac Michael Myers. Thankfully, that actually is most of the plot–leaves me more room to actually talk about the movie itself.
I had never left a theatre with such a massive hate-on as I had for this pile of steaming cinematic dung. What Rob Zombie has done to the Halloween series, I would not do to a dead dog with leprosy. He has managed to single-handedly destroy one of the great horror films of the twentieth century by systematically stripping and altering all of its greatest features and then loudly declaring the final work an improvement.
He took one of the world’s greatest nightmares–that one day, a little boy much like any you might find in any small town, would just snap for no clear reason and turn into a gruesome killing machine that would have so little connection to the world that he seems to feel no pain–and reduced him to a white trash child abuse case.
He managed to so thoroughly botch his iconography that he confused and conflated Michael Myers with Jason Voorhees, giving one the attachment of his mother where it was so clearly not supposed to be.
He managed to create an anachronistic time scale so horrendously confused it is impossible to properly tell what era we’re in, as The Moody Blues sing Nights in White Satin on a black and white television show in one scene while we watch a CNN-analogue on a flatscreen only a year later. Is this the seventies again? Are we in the twenty first century? Who knows?
He even managed to thoroughly bungle the characters–Doc Loomis was never a fame-seeking status-chasing glory hound out to sell books. Doc Loomis relentlessly blamed himself for his involvement with Michael Myers; to suggest otherwise is an insult so catastrophic as to be unparalleled.
Let me be abundantly clear on one critical point: Halloween II is a mockery. A sham. A miserable, hollow imitation so pale that the name is not worthy to be attached to it. If I can keep just one person from handing over their hard-earned money to this horrendous con job of a film, I will have done good in the world sufficient to qualify me for sainthood.
I do make one point, though…had Zombie actually made this film, and its predecessor, using his own characters, he might have wound up with something worthwhile. Nothing great, of course, but certainly not something that would inspire the kind of wrathful sorrow that this one does. By attaching the Halloween name and characters to it, a grotesque travesty has taken place. Had he taken Carpenter and Hill’s original title and dubbed his version The Babysitter Murders, I might well have been a little less horrified.
But this is not Halloween. This is Rob Zombie’s ill-conceived, half-baked version that will give little joy to horror fans everywhere, especially those who remember the greatness of the Carpenter work.
Rob Zombie has torn apart the Mona Lisa to make a collage for Mommy.
The Screenhead Ten Scale spits on this empty husk of a great legacy and gives it a full one out of ten. This insult must not go by unchallenged.
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I’m terribly happy about bringing you this chunk of news because it features one of my personal all-time favorite directors, John Carpenter. He’s not as out of it as a lot of folks thought, as evidenced by the fact that we’ve actually got stills, a synopsis and more coming out of Premier Pictures with his new The Ward, which we discussed here some time ago. Here’s the synopsis:
Legendary horror director John Carpenter is