The Halloween Films Ranked: #13 ‘Halloween II’ (2009)

#13 in my ranking of the Halloween franchise.

Rob Zombie hated working with the Weinsteins on his first Halloween film, so…he came back and made a second one with them. His reasons don’t make sense. However, he did, and he proved once and for all that he doesn’t understand…the slasher genre in the least. Or Halloween. Or, potentially, horror at all. This is, at best, a hodgepodge of misery, something so unpleasant to look at that it makes one wonder how anyone considered it a good fit with the unintentionally goofy nonsense that had come to define the franchise. Sure, they were moving in a new direction, but miserable was never going to sell that many tickets.

The night after the events of Halloween, after Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) shot her brother Michael (Tyler Mane) in the head, Michael escapes from the ambulance taking him to the hospital and then terrorizes Laurie until…she wakes up because it was a dream. Well, that took 25 minutes. Groan.

So, it’s been a year, and Laurie has been pretty much ruined by that night. She’s turned goth, and everything, working at a record store and living with Annie (Danielle Harris) and her father Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) in a remote farmhouse outside of Haddonfield. Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis (Malcom McDowell) has become a completely different person, a huckster almost gleefully taking advantage of the situation he lived through in the first film to sell his second book about Michael Myers. At the same time, Michael is still alive, living as a hobo within walking distance of Haddonfield, killing people who confront him (apparently it doesn’t happen often) and having visions of his mother (Sherri Moon Zombie) and his younger self (Chase Wright Vanek) who talk about bringing the family back together, meaning the acquiring of Laurie, born Angel Myers.

So, repeating the broad strokes of Halloween H20, we get this view of Laurie with PTSD after her victimization and trauma. Where this film probably works best is here. It’s here where Zombie brings in surrealism through visions that Laurie has of her real mother and younger version of her brother, creating this link between her and the psychotic family that she’s unwittingly part of. It’s more of the beginning of an idea, something that Zombie sort of tries to follow through on by the end, but it’s in the middle of such muck and distraction that it ends up not really working very well.

The distractions really center around Loomis. He has absolutely no place in this film at all. He’s out of alignment with his previous portrayal in the preceding film. He’s something like a punchline. He goes through a redemption arc which feels deeply underdeveloped and would have been a distraction from Laurie’s story anyway.

And then you get to the violence. The point of violence in slashers is that it’s quick and shocking, providing a sense of fun to watching teenagers get cut up by a monster. It’s not the best form of entertainment, but I get it. It rarely works because the people making these movies don’t have much of an idea of what to do in between the kills, but the kills end up being the main focus because they are generally the only fun parts. Here, Zombie makes the kills miserable. There’s a kill where a girl gets murdered on the floor of a bathroom, her naked body on display, the room and her body covered in blood, and Zombie just lingers on it. It’s painful to watch. If there’s one movie this reminds me of it’s Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, and it makes me wonder if that was the point. Does Zombie actually hate these kinds of movies and wanted to turn the lens on the audience? Honestly, it’s the explanation that makes the most sense to me.

So, the story plays out as Michael gets closer, zeroes in on Laurie, there are murders, connections as Laurie loses her grip on reality, and Loomis shows up to try and redeem himself to people he hasn’t seen at all in the film up to this point (though, his book is what sent Laurie over the edge about halfway through, so it’s not completely out of nowhere). All of it is ugly and hard to look at. It’s unpleasant, undoing any of the potentially interesting things we could have been getting from the material that Zombie started presenting.

Really, this film is just miserable. There’s not much more to be said about it.

Originally published here