(Rob Zombie's) Halloween II

Zombie's first Halloween was so bad, it was almost funny. I mean, I can easily picture it winding up some sort of campy thing. This one surprisingly takes itself so seriously that it doesn't have the color of the first one, which opened it up and gave it a wacky life. There's actually a couple of things about the movie I find interesting, but it's just doomed in Zombie's hands, especially when his heart's just not in these Halloween movies.

But for anything interesting the movie might do, count on Pulitzer Prize-winning Robert Zombé to deliver more of the same shit that made the first one horrible; stupid dialogue, more F-Bombs per second (more F-Bombs than Scarface and Pulp Fiction combined!), lewd characters (complete with a coroner who goes on about how hot a young dead woman's corpse is), and yet again a nude Danielle Harris ending up a bloody pulp. (There's also a completely gratuitous scene of Michael chasing and killing a fully nude stripper. The whole point of the scene is Michael getting revenge on the people who ran the strip joint his mom worked at. Shouldn't he have taken pity on the stripper? If Zombie's goal was to make Michael more "realistic," wouldn't that have been an interesting turn to take, rather than have him killing everything that he shares a scene with, his usual MO?) But, hey, at least he cools it with the shaky cam, right?

The first 20 minutes is a fake-out, a dream sequence in which the only scare is the idea that this sucker's going to be a full-blown remake of the original Part 2, set in a boring hospital. That, thankfully, doesn't turn out to be the case. Although the filmmakers are under the impression that the rest of the movie is "original" material from Zombie, I think it's kind of a semi-remake of Parts 4 and 5 -- Laurie having a seemingly psychic connection to Michael the way Jamie does in 5, and the movie ending up teasing that Laurie will be the franchise's new killer, the way Part 4 teased with Jamie.

I like that Laurie is now living with Annie and her dad (it's pretty surprising that Annie survived the first one), and they're just trying to get back to normal after the trauma of the first movie. Laurie's having nightmares, Annie's become cold. Laurie's picking up those weird psychic vibes from Michael and having the same dreams as the visions we're shown Michael has, and she's fearing for her sanity, even having nightmares of killing Annie. Laurie finding out she's related to Michael gets her to fall over the edge. This is an interesting idea and direction to take the character, but it's an area of psychological drama and emotion that Zombie can't pull off. (And he's certainly not interested in making these characters people, people with heart and soul and emotion.) And it's delicate, tricky material for a performer to handle and I think it's out of Scout Taylor-Compton's reach. She gets to that point again where she's just bawling all of her dialogue (tearlessly) and you're annoyed with the performance rather than feeling for the character.

One of the huge problems Zombie has with writing is that he makes all of his characters be into the same things he's into -- '70s stuff, hillbilly stuff. Which, fine, writers are going to put themselves in their characters and writing, but you also need to be truthful to the characters you're creating. While teen girls obviously don't just listen to fluffy pop junk, how many teen girls do you think are into Zombie faves like the MC5 and Alice Cooper? How many teen girls who survive a trauma like Laurie and Annie are going to have posters of Charles Manson in their bedroom, with "WWCD" written above it? How many teen girls are eager to go to a Halloween party to see a psychobilly band that plays with strippers on stage? Do you think teen girls nowadays really greet each other with a "Hey, dick lickers," or "Wassup, ho?"

Not only do all of his characters act like him, but Zombie makes all of the characters look like him, too. Michael spends a big portion of this movie maskless, and while he remains in the shadows, you can see that he's the biggest dead-ringer for Zombie. It's hilariously ridiculous when he puts the mask on over that monstrous, Zombie-like grungy beard, and the beard's poking out. It makes those dumb neck flaps hanging out in Part 5 seem less stupid.

Another unintentionally ridiculous Michael moment in this movie: repeated scenes of him SLOWLY walking through massive fields. These scenes make it look like he's walking cross country to get to Haddonfield, but, no -- he's already in Haddonfield, and it takes him a year to find Laurie. (I guess because he got caught up in slowly walking through random fields.) It's also funny the way Zombie has Myers teleporting in these movies, it's like he's the X-Man Nightcrawler. He'll actually just appear out of nowhere and get the drop on people. We see a wide shot, an open area with absolutely nobody around but a single character, yet somehow in the next shot Michael just materializes without the character noticing. (In the first movie, a guy's lighting a smoke on the porch of his house, and in the next shot Michael attacks him from the front. The power of editing, because there's no way that guy didn't notice Michael.)

Much has been made about the dream/vision sequences in the movie. A lot of fans find it stupid, a lot of movie critics liked it. I'll give it points for being an original idea Zombie brings to the movie(s), and the questions it raises whether it's all supernaturally induced or a psychotic break. But, really, it's just a shameless way for Zombie to use his wife again, when her character died in the previous flick. He overuses the idea, though, and it comes across like a music video forced into the movie. (And, oddly enough, not a White Zombie music video, but a mid-90s Smashing Pumpkins video.) What I don't really understand is why Deborah Myers represents these visions of evil when...Deborah was pretty much the ONLY member of the Myers family who came close to being normal and kind. It might make sense for Michael to have a fixation on her, and sort of fuel him, but not Laurie.

The major source of life in this movie, though, is Brad Dourif. He not only brings some actual levity to the movie, but warmth and humanity...! The movie is so grim and mean, and while I think that's something that works in its favor and helps the atmosphere and its eventual bleak climax, it really helps to have some genuinely human, honest moments, and those mainly all come from Dourif's performance as Sheriff Brackett. He's an ordinary guy who wants to do right by everyone, he wants to protect Laurie and Annie (even after harm comes to Annie a second time, instead of resigning and placing blame on Laurie, as you can imagine another movie doing, he gets out to look for Laurie).

That he's the one guy in the movie that seems the most normal is something I pretty much attribute to Dourif. It's pretty shocking the amount of reliable character actors Zombie's able to round up for his movies, but guys like Dourif are pros who are pretty much always good and always elevate what they're in. Character actors are taken for granted. Dourif and Danielle Harris are really the main reasons you care about Annie's fate in this movie; it's tragic that she dies so violently after surviving a previous attack, but she's barely in the movie, and Zombie's writing just makes you not care.

Loomis' scenes all play out like something from another movie. Just scene after scene of him being an insufferable ass about his book, while facing a lot of ridicule for writing the thing. He's a little unnecessary to the movie, and has a last minute change of heart, which doesn't feel authentic because of the way the character's behaved for two movies and for how lightly Malcolm McDowell takes everything. Like I said, the movie is grim, and there's a doom hanging over it, and Loomis' change of heart, which costs him his life, COULD have had an impact, providing the character some pathos, but that's just not in Zombie's area of interest.

The ultimate doomed character is Laurie. Whether it's genetics or the trauma of what she went through -- or even supernatural interference -- she snaps and ends the movie institutionalized. She gives a Psycho-y smirk to the camera, as she sees the vision of Ma Myers, hinting that she'll be the next installment's killer. I think that's a pretty interesting idea. Friday the 13th and Halloween had hinted at something like that before, with the Tommy Jarvis and Jamie Lloyd characters, but they chickened out. And it wouldn't have had the same impact since they were kids. Scout Taylor-Compton's Laurie is old enough, and it would have been an interesting tragedy to have a character who was normal, decent, but went through hell twice and came out becoming the same kind of monster who ruined her life. It would be interesting to follow the story of a hero in one of the movies falling from grace and actually becoming a villain.

Not only are female killers rare in slasher movies, but it would have been interesting to see that kind of reinvention, a changing of guard in a long running franchise; a new face representing the franchise, and isn't that what the point of a true remake or reinvention should be? How different would Laurie as the killer have been from Michael? Would she try to fight some of the murderous impulses and deny her bloodline? How would Taylor-Compton play this version of Laurie? What would killer Laurie's look be -- would she have a variation of the Shatner mask? Well, Part 3 was kiboshed, but it wouldn't have mattered -- Zombie's not the writer to pull this off and, again, this stuff's not his area of interest. He just likes gore and F-bombs and extreme vulgarity and '70s references and overpopulating his movies so he can cast his favorite character actors.

John Carpenter has expressed regret at making Laurie Michael's long-lost sister in his Part 2 script. Zombie had the benefit of hindsight, and could have looked over the franchise's lore and history and made adjustments and improvements, creating a truly reinvented trilogy of films that culminated in an original idea of having the star heroine fall to darkness. I'm against remakes, but there was potential there! They could have been good movies! And for as much as he says he's a horror fan, it seems to me Zombie just doesn't have faith in the genre or its fans to try a serious attempt at making a dramatic movie or a movie with soul or a movie with human characters connecting. To put it bluntly: it was a *colossal* mistake to get him for these movies.

THE END...?

The franchise has been dead since Zombie's sequel, with no real sign of where it's headed -- they've announced a new movie and its falling through a few times already. (Sure enough, there's been an announcement recently about Carpenter producing a new one.) And what has this whole endeavor taught me? Not much I already didn't know. This marathon didn't respark my old love for the franchise. Weaker installments didn't seem improved, and I've actually come to like the original Part 2 less. It's still difficult to watch H20 without thinking of truly, terrible, awful Resurrection. I was left with a renewed frustration and anger at the turns this franchise took and the lows it hit. I truly feel like Halloween has the worst sequels of the big slasher franchises, and sequels so bad that they ruin the ones that WERE good or that you liked. I was about to buy Shout Factory's big Blu-ray box set for the sake of these reviews, and I'm glad I didn't.

Rob Zombie's Halloween (AKA Halloween: A XXX Parody)

This movie is so bad it would be laughable, if only it wasn't such a sad, sad abomination. I'd like to leave it at that, but I won't. Zombie's fortunate to follow Resurrection. He must have just had carte blanche -- "No worries about not being able to write dialogue, pal. It HAS to be better than Resurrection!" Well, just barely, and that's for the unintentional laughs, the disbelief you as a viewer experience, thinking "Jesus! Somebody not only MADE this, but they thought it was good enough to RELEASE! Un-fucking-believable!" Zombie thinks he's being edgy by showing Michael's childhood, but it's one horribly written Jerry Springer cliche after cliche, and then the movie becomes a bad cover tune of the original classic.

You watch this movie and can't believe anybody working on it thought it would be good. It's so stupid, they couldn't be taking it seriously, right? But, no, Zombie has plenty of interviews where he talked about making Michael "scary" again, and fleshing out why he does what he does. But, man, does Zombie miss the mark, unless he finds hillbilly cliches, shaky-cam and terrible dialogue to be the scariest things in the world. Everybody is so vile and vulgar in his movies. Who talks like the people in this movie? Who behaves this way? Does Zombie seriously think this is realistic dialogue? What the fuck goes on when he's out on the road, if this shit is what he considers to be a reflection of life?

The movie is full of over-the-top violence (for the sake of it) and trashy, foul-mouthed cliches. Nearly very female character in it acts like the worst example of a trashy groupie you can think of. (Which I guess is what you get when you get a rock star to write movies.) Not only do most of the female characters act like, I don't know, Stifler from American Pie, but Zombie has nearly every actress show skin and lingers on the nudity to the point where it all just feels lewd. Zombie's a fan of '70s exploitation movies, and this movie veers too far into that territory, lingering on the violence against women until it begins to slip into a I Spit on Your Grave level of discomfort. (You'll feel especially uneasy during a lengthy scene where Michael is battering around a topless and bloody Danielle Harris, especially considering her history with the franchise.)

It's like all of the things critics unfairly accused the 1978 Halloween of being -- sexist, misogynistic, trashy -- Zombie made sure his movie actually was, kind of to the detriment of the first movie's legacy. I wonder what the late Debra Hill, co-writer of the original -- who tried hard to make the women characters authentic and treat them fairly -- would have had to say about Zombie's remake.

The whole movie is just Zombie giving the finger to the franchise and its fans. From muddying its name to creating pretty obnoxious versions of classic characters like Laurie and Loomis (who here isn't a heroic modern Van Helsing, but a greedy, uncaring, opportunistic, unlikable shithat). I know Zombie claims to be a horror fan, but it seems to me he doesn't like Halloween, or doesn't respect it. (I think he thinks he's too cool to be doing Halloween movies, yet another problem with getting a rock star to write and direct the goddamn thing. Because P.J. Soles has a story about how hard Zombie was geeking out over a copy of her original Halloween script she gave him.) His two Halloween movies are proof enough, but just look at how he doesn't understand Michael.

Michael was a normal kid from an average, middle class family, who just one night snapped. The unexplainable, unknown reasons he snapped is what's meant to be terrifying. (And I know Zombie's spoken derogatorily about how the original handles this, but he thinks his version is an improvement?!) Why'd Michael snap? It's something only Michael knows. Not even the patient and wise Loomis can break through, so his only conclusion is that Michael is evil. So, to not only give Michael this cliched trailer park background, but also depict him being a psycho well before that Halloween night? That alone misses the mark, in a movie that continuously misses the mark.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

Halloween 4 ends with Jamie potentially a murderer and Michael Myers gunned down by the police like he's the Small-Town Twerp that ED-209 guns down in RoboCop. When this movie picks up from the previous one, what happened with Jamie is really swept under the carpet, and Michael swam away to safety to be taken care of by a hobo for an entire year. Even though these movies want to be (relatively) "realistic," we've seen Michael grow eyeballs back after having them shot out, so I guess a swim in a creek will heal about 3,247 gunshot wounds. Nothing like a good swim in a dirty creek, the care of a hobo, and a year-long power-nap to heal up them bullet holes.

The movie prefers you forget the bit about Jamie and her foster mother, which is written off as Michael's evil influencing Jamie, and the foster mother apparently recovering (off-screen). See, Jamie now has this almost psychic connection to Michael, barely speaks, and is in the care of a hospital. She gets visions of Uncle Mikey and writes really helpful notes like drawing a mouth to indicate that he's near her sister's house and just passed the dog, rather than writing "Michael is at Rachel's." You've got to hand it to Danielle Harris, though, because she really acts her ass off and makes all of this work even though, once again, the script is letting her down.

The characters are even less memorable than Part 4's, though. It was a pretty stupid decision to kill Rachel off so early -- or at all, really. Harris and Cornell were the only two things to help get you through the last one, and without that bond, there's not much of anyone to care about. I don't know the story of why they kill her off, but it unfortunately makes room for the Tina character. I've always just assumed that Rachel's replaced by Tina because Wendy Kaplan is related to one of the filmmakers and that's the only reason she hijacks the movie and is featured in so much of it despite being obnoxious as crap.

Really, how much coke is Tina on? She won't stop moving (she walks the way Adam West runs as Batman, arms jutting out with elbows locked inward) and she either sing-songs all of her dialogue or extends the last syllable of her line. There's no reason for her to survive as much of the movie as she does -- SHE should have been the one killed 20 minutes in, not Rachel. But, hey, why have someone you might like and care about in this movie, right? (I didn't remember that Tina does end up getting killed in the movie, so I kinda felt bad when she did but not for the reasons the filmmakers think you should feel bad, though. She wasn't a good character or likable or tolerable. You don't care about her, but you care that your dislike for her character essentially got her killed.)

Loomis is a real mess in this one. Pretty unlikable. He's always bullying and yelling at Jamie to help him track Michael, like he's able to do anything if he found him. He more than once uses Jamie as bait. I guess you might be able to chalk it up to Loomis finally just going mad in his quest to find Michael, but he just feels so far gone from how he is in the first movie. Pleasence deserves better than a lot of the sequels give him, even if he always somehow manages to rise above it all.

One thing I'll give this movie is that I do think there are at least a couple of tense scenes. While I think it's odd for Michael to add vehicular manslaughter to his M.O., that scene in the field where he's trying to run over Jamie, Billy and Tina always made me nervous when I was a kid, and the whole laundry-chute scene at the Myers house is nerve-racking. (You have to forgive Jamie for being a kid and thinking that hiding in the laundry-chute was a good idea, because it's one of the worst ideas in horror history. Not so forgivable is a tactic of another character in one of the later sequels, which I'll get to.) Despite the Myers house in this one looking NOTHING like it does in any previous or subsequent movie, I kind of like that final segment set there. Because, damn, how did it not screw Jamie up to be trapped in the attic with Rachel's corpse, and the corpse of her dog, and a coffin Michael made just for her?

Another thing I'll give this movie is that it TRIES to tone down Michael a bit. Sure, he heals from thousands of gunshot wounds received in the previous movie, but Loomis' speeches are more restrained. If Carpenter's intention with the first movie was to just be scary by depicting a mental patient's escape and randomly terrorizing a neighborhood, then I feel like Part 5 tries to paint Michael more as just an almost average sounding killer from the way Loomis talks to him, the talk of Michael being driven by rage that he hopes to extinguish by killing. (Loomis mentions the idea of Jamie being able to help him, which Michael kinda considers, until he's like "Fuck that. Rehabilitation doesn't get sequels. Ask Norman Bates and all of those awful Psycho sequels.") And, whereas bullets couldn't stop him, in this one, some chains, some tranqs and a beating by Loomis with some 4x4s takes Michael down.

Now, here's a problem with the movie. It's starting to set up the whole Thorn cult stuff, with the symbol being on Michael's wrist and the appearance of The Man in Black. I kind of question where these particular writers were thinking of going with that, but I know it only ends up in disappointment with Part 6. How weak is the final scene, though, an incarcerated Michael broken out by The Man in Black, who we only see as a shadow gunning down cops with a tommy-gun, looking like The Blank from Dick Tracy, with Jamie stumbling upon the aftermath, the movie fading out like there's a lost reel? Part 5 was released in 1989 and Part 6 in 1995. That's quite a gap for such a disappointing final scene, and an even more disappointing attempt following it all up and "answering" what happened.

And Michael's mask flat out sucks in this one. He has a five-head, his hair's slicked back, and I don't know why they decided to leave such long neck flaps hanging out the way they did. Equally bad? The music, which sounds like it was performed on a Fisher Price piano.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers

For some reason, I notice a lot of Halloween fans think rather highly of this one. I never really understood why. I assume if you're just a fan of Halloween, maybe it was nice to get Michael and Loomis and Haddonfield back after Part 3's weirdness, but I think this movie is overall lacking. It's style-free, tension-free, scare-free, drama-free, and practically gore-free. (And what's with the excessive slow-mo all throughout?) You're never given a real reason to care for the characters, other than Jamie and Rachel, and that's only, completely 100% because of actresses Danielle Harris and Ellie Cornell, who share a sweet bond and make everything work even though the script is really letting them down.

It's only the third true Myers sequel, but it's already smelling of barrel-scraping desperation; the filmmakers want you to forget about Part 3, dammit, so we're bringing Michael and Loomis and Haddonfield back no matter what cockamamie bullshit we concoct! Loomis lit a match in a room filling with gas? No problem, he somehow got away with just a couple of crappy prosthetic burns on his hand and cheek. Michael went up in flames, after having his eyes shot? No big deal, he's just in a bit of a coma. Laurie Strode (and Jimmy Lloyd) is unceremoniously killed off-screen to make room for her newly introduced daughter, Jamie. Michael, who has been a comatose brick for a decade, is brought back to consciousness by just hearing a background conversation between Smith's Grove van drivers that he has a niece. It's...pretty stupid. Michael Myers, being what he is, decides it's a good time to escape and go kill the niece he doesn't know...just 'cuz!

So the movie just meanders through a bunch of low-grade slasher kills until the final act. If you try to transcribe the actions in this movie, it's moronic. Michael is teleporting all over town in order to cause blackouts and kill every diner and policeman and walk-on extra he can find for the sake of upping the body count. Meanwhile, Loomis pisses away the running time by hitching a ride to Haddonfield and running around making his grandioso nonsense speeches instead of being like "It's the fourth fucking movie, you know what Michael does, let's get this over with."

This movie also begins a trend in the series of having what I think of as these lame little laugh moments, these pre-Scream types of cutesy, self-referential moments that they think are cute, but are really infuriating in how they underestimate the audience's ability to be scared or amused. Loomis et al. are surrounded by many Michael Myerseses, only to realize it's a bunch of kids playing a prank. Ha-ha. It's filmed like a scare scene, but ends up a laugh. Well, it's neither.

Also: Michael's mask in this movie is terrible. He has this really dopey expression on his face, really bemused-like, like he just farted and is waiting for it to hit the rest of the room.

The one interesting thing this movie does is end it by having Jamie crack and stab her foster mother, as Loomis looks on in horror at history apparently repeating itself. The Friday the 13th movies did the same thing with Tommy Jarvis, where they hint at the end of The Final Chapter that he's cracked and will become the series' new killer. Neither Friday the 13th nor Halloween had the guts to stick to that plan. Tommy at least becomes the red herring of the follow-up sequel, though, which is more than Halloween bothered to do.

TO BE CONTINUED