As long as I've been into the franchise, there were only three Halloween movies that mattered to me -- 1, 2, H20. The Laurie Strode Trilogy. I used to enjoy a couple of the sequels, like 4 and 5, but even before I turned on them, I always knew they were nothing compared to The Laurie Trilogy. That said, I always liked Halloween II the least of the three. When I'll think back on the movie, I'll always just feel a negative dislike, so I was surprised when I just rewatched it and found myself enjoying it. But I realized the problem -- I'll enjoy the first half hour, which is tying up the events of the first movie, but the movie comes to a screeching halt when all of the action moves to the hospital. To say it drags is an understatement. I find this section, which is most of the movie, to be interminable.
Even though John Carpenter and Debra Hill returned to script the movie, it's in a weaker director's hands, and it just always seemed to me like Carpenter and Hill didn't really know what to do with a follow-up. Michael Myers kills a lot of people he doesn't need to, but he also kills a lot of motherfucking time. Segments, which I suppose are meant to be suspenseful, just DRAG, and you don't care about most of the people featured, and the man behind Michael's mask in this movie (Dick Warlock) is the slowest Michael of all -- it's like watching slow-motion footage of a mime performing on the moon -- so the movie becomes even MORE sluggish seeming. It's torturous!
And it's just too similar to the first one -- albeit diluted and excised of what made the first one good -- that if you watch it too close to the first one, it becomes even more torturous for its similarity, especially the soundtrack. Yes, I know Carpenter's music is classic, but it's practically the same three pieces that plays throughout the movie, and here it's the same three pieces again. (The music in II is even worse, though, for sounding about as the same quality as the Atari game's music.)
It's a mistake to have Laurie be so incapacitated for the movie (it's practically a silent performance on Jamie Lee Curtis' part), and Loomis is already descending into parody. Rather than the driven Van Helsing of the first one, here he just sounds like an idiot or a lunatic in his obsession, ready to gun down or kill anything that he thinks looks close to Michael Myers. (Indeed, he gets Laurie's crush from the first film, Ben Tramer, killed for wearing a Michael-like mask. Laurie just can't catch a break. And, besides, Ben was swinging a trick-or-treat bag. Really, Loomis? You thought Michael was walking around Haddonfield with a trick-or-treat bag he was swingin' around? And you didn't notice that this "Michael" was a good two feet shorter? And walked FAST?!)
Then the action moves to the hospital, filled with characters we don't give a shit about, as we're forced to watch Michael pick them all off. Now, the first movie's victims seemed randomly picked, but there was a weird kind of logic to their selection. Michael saw and heard Laurie and little Tommy Doyle at his house, so that put them on his radar. He sees Laurie and her friends taunt him as he passes by. He kills a guy for his clothing, and Linda's boyfriend for possibly being an obstacle; he kills one dog for food and another because it was drawing attention. In Halloween II, he's just killing anybody who has the misfortune of being in the script, and it's just dull and becomes one of the lesser, routine slasher movies. (The most unnecessary kill of the entire movie is the teen on the phone at the beginning; there's absolutely no reason for Michael to kill her, and his springing into frame as if just launched from a jack-in-the-box looks silly as shit.) The movie is inconsistent with Laurie's state of recovery, Loomis is lost twiddling his thumbs until it's time to wrap the movie up, and characters have random Bouts of Stupid happen to them that makes Michael's job easier. Why is the hospital so damned empty anyway? Just Laurie, an infant and the kid with the razor in his mouth as patients, but way over-staffed in favor of Michael's kill list.
If there's one segment of the first movie I don't like, it's the scene(s) with Annie babysitting. They just linger on too long, her talking on the phone, locking herself in the laundry and so on, all while Michael walks back and forth in the background. It's meant to be suspenseful, but it's not interesting enough to maintain your interest and you're just bored. Well, Halloween II is practically that scene stretched for an entire movie. Take the scene with the security guard, where we're following his every move as he's supposed to be investigating the source of the dead phone-line. (We're even treated to him searching the dumpster -- searching the dumpster? -- and a ZINGING JUMP SCARE as a cat jumps out at him. The old cat jumping out and scaring a character/not scaring the audience was a cliche even in the '40s.)
One last thing: the character of Jimmy Lloyd, who takes an interest in Laurie even though she's a teenager and he's well out of college and it's OK. We know nothing about this guy, but we're meant to care about him. He's also a total bonehead and later on gives Laurie's location away to Michael by passing out and falling onto the horn of the car Laurie's hiding in. That's the last we see of old Jimmy in the movie, folks. Well, unless you've seen the movie on TV with the alternate ending where he joins Laurie in the ambulance and a budding romance is hinted at. That's weird and all, but not as weird as Halloween 4 picking up on this alternate/deleted scene and having Danielle Harris' Jamie Lloyd be the daugher of Laurie and Jimmy, something you'd NEVER know if you hadn't seen the alternate ending or heard about it. Why'd they do that? Reminds me of the way Superman Returns was built off of the then-unseen Richard Donner cut of Superman II.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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