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.
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