The Halloween Films Ranked: #9 ‘Halloween II’ (1981)

#9 in my ranking of the Halloween franchise.

I…do not understand why fans of the franchise like this one so much. Everything I read says, “Sure, it’s not as good as the original, but it’s still so much fun!” And yet, I find it immensely boring. Just straight up dull from beginning to end. It’s weird because John Carpenter and Debra Hill wrote it while the director, Rick Rosenthal, was trying to go for the same kind of restrained tension that Carpenter maintained in the first one. However, the script is a complete mess (something Carpenter himself famously maintains), and the placement of the action immediately after the first one ends while filling the running time with what amounts to cannon fodder creates this weird series of mundane setpieces that are never, you know, fun.

So, Michael Myers (Dick Warlock) has killed the teenagers but gotten away while Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) continues to run around with his gun, demanding help from the Haddonfield police. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) gets carted to the hospital where she was lay asleep for the next hour of screentime, and we have just this side of nothing to do until she decides to wake up. What we get instead are the employees of the Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, all five of them it seem, mostly Jimmy (Lance Guest), a paramedic and ambulance driver, and Nurse Karen (Pamela Susan Shoop). Jimmy latches onto Laurie once she comes in, promising to take care of her as the head nurse, Mrs. Alves (Gloria Gifford), shoos him out of the room. Karen tries to shoo off Jimmy’s partner, Budd (Leo Rossi), and his sexual advances.

Now, why do I think this movie is just built wrong? Well, it has to do with how much the audience knows about the situation. We actually start with the final moments of the first film (slightly re-edited), so we go in knowing that Michael Myers is dangerous and out there. However, he moves through town without anyone noticing him, and he never feels like a threat as he goes. The film has a specific reason for this (a stupid, specific reason), but watching him just bypass everyone, filmed in the same way that he would stalk the few people he came across in the first film, just doesn’t feel right. It’s not tense.

And that feeling extends throughout every major set piece, helped in no small part by the fact that these characters are all just thin meat for Michael Myer’s knife. The whole cast has gone from these realistic portrayals of older children to slasher meat in a single film. Budd is probably the worst of them, the perennially horny guy trying to sleep with the large breasted nurse, who has nothing else to his character and is only there to be killed in an inventive way by Michael Myers. I’m not opposed to the meat for the grinder approach to slashers, but that doesn’t combine well with this attempt to replicate the slow-burn approach that Carpenter had done so well on the first film. Giving us thin characters who have to unknowingly get murdered…very slowly is just a bad combination.

And, the preponderance of these side characters throws me as well. Laurie really is supposed to be the main character. She’s the focal point of the final act of the film, none of these others matter by that point. Most of them are dead, and Laurie has literally been asleep for most of the film, only to wake up to lost memories of her parents not being her parents and Michael Myers being her brother, a fact so secret that it was even kept from Dr. Loomis. I mean…this is stupid, and it’s all John Carpenter’s fault. Or the beer. Maybe it was the beer.

And the ending is the kind of exploitative trash you expect from an 80s slasher, not from a sequel to Halloween. On that level, it has the kind of explosive attitude one might expect, and I don’t hold it against the film that it’s not in alignment with the first. It’s just that it kind of comes out of nowhere, is tied to nothing that came before it, and it’s built on this completely unnecessary addition the lore that doesn’t make any difference other than to explain why Myers showed up there.

I don’t know if it was Carpenter’s insistence on keeping the action to immediately afterwards or a mandate from the studio, but I think getting distance from the original would have helped give him the space creatively to come up with something more imaginative and workable than this. Set it the following year. Myers has been missing, hidden in the woods and eating animals to recover from the bullets. Laurie is trying to move on. Coincidence brings them together again. Done. Move on from there.

Anyway, the end result here is…not good. It’s mostly boring as we watch cannon fodder plod towards death. The main character disappears for the first two-thirds. The final act has some exploitative fun to it, but it’s too little, too late to save anything. Really, this movie is just kind of dull.

Originally published here