Although Rob Zombie has written and directed four feature films,
it’s more accurate to say that he’s remade two films twice. He’s a
moviemaker who’s clearly interested in nosing around his imaginary
universes, but he doesn’t find anything very special or noteworthy in
Halloween II, a film that struggles mightily to add greater
meaning and significance to the Michael Myers legend but collapses into
an overlong, bloody mess.

My expectations for Halloween II were about as high as they
could be for the ninth film in the franchise, because even when
working within genre constraints, Zombie frequently underscores his
brutality with jarring, sardonic verbal and visual humor. Plus, The
Devil’s Rejects, the 2005 sequel to his auspicious 2003 debut
House of 1000 Corpses, is easily his best work, a scalding,
uncompromising blast of savagery and mayhem. For that film, Zombie
resurrected the bloodthirsty Firefly family and loosed them on a dirty,
sun-baked landscape stinking of sweat, blood, and other bodily fluids
and crawling with garish, prickly white-trash parasites. A supremely
uncomfortable film, The Devil’s Rejects is also an intelligent
treatment of the way vengeance warps the avenger, and it contains one
of my favorite opening-title sequences of the decade, an expertly paced
escape from the law set to the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider.”

Like Rejects, Halloween II tries to explore its
characters in greater depth than typical horror films allow. The film
is as concerned with trauma and grief — specifically the
soul-destroying nightmares of the 2007 Halloween “Final Girl”
Laurie Strode (a crazed Scout Taylor-Compton) — as it is with the
slasher film’s body-count requirements. (If you’re keeping score,
though, Myers kills a dozen people and eats a dog.)

Zombie also sends Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) on a rocky book
tour that details the exploitation and glamorization of true-crime
stories. In a world where even the strip club where Myers’ mom worked
now caters to his legend, an exploration of the way the “original”
Halloween tragedy was transformed into a cash cow is promising.
Unfortunately, Loomis’ story doesn’t add up to much more than a
sideline doodle and a Weird Al cameo.

Anyway, back to the dead teenagers. As a homicidal maniac, Michael
Myers is not as creative as the outlandish contraptions and
thingamajigs awaiting the teens from the Final Destination
franchise. Myers is a silent, unstoppable stabbing and strangling
machine whose capacity for gruesome invention is limited at best.
Which, again, is not to say that Zombie doesn’t try. For long
stretches, Halloween II is an unstinting series of blood and
gore that lingers on shots of surgical reconstruction, car accidents,
and stomped-on faces. Not surprisingly, though, the most affecting
slaying is not shown but tactfully suggested through some slow-motion
camerawork and the canny employment of offscreen sound. That
scene — and an iconic shot of Laurie Strode running through the
woods during a full moon— belongs in a much better movie.

Halloween II promises an ending to this deathless tale, but
if there’s any truth or logic in the last few images, it looks like
Michael Myers will never, ever, ever, ever, EVER die.