Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. Believe it or not I went into Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN 2 with an open mind. I was pretty vocal about my dislike of the first film’s script and, eventually, the finished movie which didn’t change what was wrong at the core of his reimagining.

But hearing Zombie talk about this new film, how he decided to shake loose any attachment to the original films and just make his own movie had me curious and then seeing the trailers with Kabuki theater Sheri Moon Zombie had me a little excited that this movie was going to be so crazy random and ridiculous that I might just enjoy it.

Let me say right off the bat, HALLOWEEN 2 is just as shitty as the first movie. The same horrible girl dialogue is there, but instead of Scout Taylor-Compton and Danielle Harris calling each other “bitch” over and over it’s now Scout Taylor-Compton and Brea Grant and Angela Trimbur calling each other “dicklickers” and “dude.”

I’m no prude. Bring on the foul language as far as I’m concerned. But I have to say it’s comical how many times people say “fuck” in this movie. I wasn’t offended at all, to be perfectly clear. I use the word regularly. What was happening was I was getting bored by the laziness of just using that one word over and over again.

There’s literally a scene early on when the ambulance carrying Michael Myers crashes and one of the paramedics is hurt and just repeats fuck over and over and over and over again. Nothing else, just “fuck” in different inflections and emphasis. For at least 30 seconds.

I would love a “fuck” count on this movie. Zombie uses it so often that I started to wonder if he somehow trademarked the word and was getting a quarter every time someone said it onscreen.

On top of that the same character problems from the first one return and Zombie turned them up to 11. If you thought he mishandled Loomis in the first movie you’re just going to shake your head in disbelief where he takes the good doctor here. Not only is Loomis capitalizing on the murders, but he’s a douchebag boss to his publicist, acting like a pampered rock star instead of a psychiatrist.

At this point I’m all for further separating Zombie’s HALLOWEEN’s from Carpenter’s original, so I’m not all that upset that he changed Loomis in this film… that damage was already done in the first movie. What upset me is that there’s not point to it. At all. He sets up an arc for Loomis that is, no bullshit, summed up with one random shot of Loomis sipping wine at home and saying to himself, “I’m an asshole” and just afterwards finding out Myers might still be alive.

It is interesting that Zombie makes Laurie and Annie switch personalities in reaction to the events of the first movie, making Annie more conservative and Laurie a party girl, but to be perfectly frank Taylor-Compton couldn’t pull it off and Zombie’s writing didn’t supply her the ammo to give her a fighting chance.

The movie’s all about her inner torment, the shit she went through chipping away at her sanity bit by bit every night. She has constant nightmares, which includes the opening at the hospital. Sorry, spoiler… but it’s pretty obvious at a certain point that the movie’s not going to be set at the hospital like the original Carpenter follow-up.

Now, Laurie’s nightmares gave Zombie an opportunity to really go cerebral… If he Jasoned Myers in the first movie he could have created a Freddy-type atmosphere here and he does succeed in one particular scene that features pumpkin-faced people sitting around a dinner table.

The midnight crowd I saw this movie with, an odd selection of gangbangers and suburbanites, didn’t buy into the nightmare stuff at all. When Laurie wakes up screaming from the hospital dream there was a shout of “What the fuck is this?” It’s been a long time since I’ve seen an audience viciously turn on the movie, but I witnessed it tonight.

Surprisingly, I’m not with them on that. I wish the movie had been more Ghost Mom, recast kid Michael Myers and shiny white horse weirdness. Yes, it was stupid. Yes, it got laughs every single time they were onscreen, but it was so out there, so ridiculously retarded that I couldn’t help having fun with it. If the whole movie had been nightmare imagery and batshit insane dialogue scenes with recast kid Myers and Ghost Mom with Horse I would have been with Zombie 100%.

Instead it’s about 7 minutes of that stuff spread evenly across the runtime of the movie and the rest of it is that horrible late-teen back and forth.

And, of course, random hillbillies. One of the gangbangers behind me shouted out “Honkey Tonks!” when Mountain Man Myers (which is when Myers is just traveling the earth in between the events of the first movie and Halloween the following year… mask off, little sleeping bag on his back, and a full Grizzly Adams beard) is confronted by Skynyrd listening rednecks driving a truck with a dozen deer antlers attached to the grill.

The violence is what you’d expect from Zombie: brutal and bloody, but not terribly inventive. There is one really good effect early on that’s a non-fatal slice through a face that takes a moment to really start bleeding. I liked that one.

I will give Zombie credit in casting older genre actors that don’t get much screentime. He successfully cast up his last few movies with icons and he does it again here. We get Margot Kidder, Howard Hesseman and the M-O-O-N spells moon guy from Coach (Bill Fagerbakke). We also get a Weird Al Yankovich cameo, but like all the other missed opportunities in this movie we get no Halloween Weird Al song at any point, even though he reuses “Love Hurts” from the first movie for no reason during the end credits. C’mon! That’d be a perfect place for a Weird Al Halloween/Michael Myers song!

With all that said, the main problem lies in Zombie’s execution of his already shoddy script that had enough solid ideas to make a decent movie, but they weren’t taken advantage of.

Zombie made some really odd choices in the editing room, picking really awkward and random takes. Maybe he didn’t get enough coverage, maybe some of his actors didn’t work out and this was the best he could get or maybe he just didn’t realize how crappy some of these moments come off. Especially with Margot Kidder who seems nervous at first and delivers a pretty decent performance later in her one-scene cameo… but man, it’s rocky at the start, her hand randomly moving across her face when she’s talking…

There are a lot of moments like that.

I don’t consider this sequel worse than the original, but I can’t say it’s much better. It’s a little more fun because of the random insanity peppered throughout, but that’s essentially me just saying the shittiness in this movie was more fun than the shittiness in the original.

I didn’t have the vocal displeasure that the rest of the audience had as the credits rolled, a myriad of “I want my money back,” “that was retarded,” “Boo,” and others. Like I said earlier, it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen an audience turn on a movie like that. Will that affect the financial success of the movie? I have no idea, I’m not a box office analyst. I’m just making an observation about my particular ticket-buying midnight audience.

Enough with the remakes, though. Seriously, Zombie needs a remake intervention. I’m not interested in Zombie doing his thing to random horror movies (he’s now lined up to remake THE BLOB. It’s unclear if he’s remaking the good ‘50s schlocker or the good ‘80s schlocker… or both). I’d much rather watch him explore his own material instead of shaping pre-existing mythologies to fit his mold.

That might not be realistic these days in the movie industry and I realize the dude has to pay the bills, but just speaking as a horror fan I’m getting very, very tired of it and judging by my audience tonight I’m not the only one.

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
Follow Me On Twitter