Well, as promised, I'm going to give you my opinion on how the Halloween movies should be ranked. The Halloween movies have been a big part of my life since I started watching horror movies. Obviously as the flagship series of its kind, it started a lot of trends, and we're here to both salute them and mock them. So let's get started.
DISCLAIMER: Obviously, it goes without saying that if you disagree with me, this isn't an official list.
#10 - Halloween II (2009)
"WHITE HORSE (noun): The inclusion of something vague and mysterious in an attempt to be original when really it comes off boring and stupid and serves no purpose on a movie that was doomed from the beginning."
Halloween II was 2009's sequel to Rob Zombie's Halloween that came out in 2007, just short of the franchise's 30th anniversary. It's interesting because Zombie also directed this one, amidst maybe a slight twisting-of-the-arm from the studio powers that be. Because of the pressure to perform, the rushed one-year production schedule and script that was inspired by an acid trip more than a creative spark, Halloween II is a giant mess of nothing. After watching it the first time, I didn't even know what I was watching. I couldn't even comprehend it. It was like each and every scene was made up on the spot and then when it came time to edit the movie, they couldn't figure out what fucking order the scenes went in so they were just tossed in a blender.
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| Michael Myers |
Saying "the story is a mess" would be an insult to the BP oil spill. Instead of one solid flow with intertwining character arcs, we're treated to a series of side-plots that "tie together in the end". By "tie together in the end", I of course mean "confuses you to the point of demanding your money back". Laurie's an emotional wreck because of the events of the first Zombie film. She moves in with the Brackett's because her parents are dead, which Annie can't cope with because "Laurie's weird", which is really something nice to say about your friend who had the same traumatic experience you did. So Annie goes from Laurie's best friend to Laurie's disgruntled roommate who's fed up with her looney tune attitude, all while Sheriff Brackett let the events of the previous film roll of his shoulders like a bad day at work. Meanwhile, Sam Loomis (you know, the lovable doctor from the first films) is rewritten as a dickheaded book salesman who's literally profitting off of the deaths of innocent people. Did you feel that? That was the tremor of Donald Pleasence rolling over in his grave. The only normal character in this movie is Brackett. There's even a dinner scene where he acts like insane Brad Douriff-Chucky and still he seems more normal than either Annie, Laurie, or Loomis.
So yeah, Laurie and Loomis pull the biggest one-eighty as far as how they behave, As I said, they're both traumatized by the events of that Halloween night in Halloween (2007) and both are dealing with it in their own weird, twisted ways. Laurie, for example, went from preppy school girl with post-high school dreams and a bubbly personality to literally being the understudy of Vampira. She wears dark rags, her hair's all greasy, she's clinically insane, she shouts obscenities at her shrink, and when she finds out she's Michael Myers' sister, she goes into a total "I don't care" attitude and starts partying like she wants to die. Loomis is a giant asshole, on the other hand. After the events of the first film where he was almost killed, he wrote another book discussing the events. The book was released and, in it, Laurie learns that she's the younger sister of Michael Myers, which sends her into her mental downhill slope. Loomis tries to redeem himself at the end of the movie, again trying to reason with Michael before he does something bad, but also trying to keep Laurie from going insane (even though he's a little late to that party).
The biggest character fuck-up is Michael himself. Michael Myers not only walks around without his mask on most of the time, but also talks (in the unrated edition). What more do you need to hear? They fucked him up. They bent him over a barrel and shoved the folklore right up his ass! Oh, and the white horse bullshit? That's where it comes into play. The movie opens with a young Michael telling his mother that he has a dream during his stay in the looney bin where Deborah, his mother, comes to rescue him from his stay, dressed in all white and leading a white horse down the hallway. For something as simple as a dream, they sure play it up the rest of the way because for the rest of this misadventure, the white horse is referenced...constantly. Older Michael sees visions of his ghostly mother, his younger self, and a white horse everywhere he goes. As far as his iconic mask, it survives the first portion of the movie, in Laurie's dream in the hospital (they're really playing up the dreams, aren't they?), but in the regular world, Michael's mask gets torn up by some stripper he tries to kill, leaving his face half visible. Let me ask; if the point of Michael in this movie was to be groundbreaking and show his face, why did you bother keeping half the mask? If the point was appease the fans by keeping the mask, what was the point of having it get torn up and show part of his face?! You can't have both!
Including Deborah Myers in this movie was a huge mistake. In the first movie, she's a struggling mother dating a horrible, abusive asshole and trying to raise her slutty daughter, her nutcase son, and her soon-to-be crazy newborn. She really had it rough in the movie, and you sympathized with her when her will-to-live took a dive off a cliff, forcing her to kill herself. She was a well-rounded character and done very well. Then when you turn around and include her as a ghostly witch-lady vision of Michael Myers beckoning him to "go home" with her, and "bring Angel with him" (Angel being Laurie's Myers name) and having zero to do with her past-self was shown as nothing more than story cancer and a blatant attempt by Rob to include his wife in this movie. Rob, we get it, you love your wife. She's a sweet woman and beautiful, but even she isn't worth ruining your movies.
The death's are stock and can be over done in the attempt to not look stock. The thing with Rob Zombie is that he likes his gore, which is fine. Gore isn't necessarily the root problem. Let's face it, there's only so many ways you can do gore and have it be fresh and original. Michael slamming the stripper's head into a wall repeatedly? Hilarious! Michael stabbing a nurse repeatedly (and I mean repeatedly) even as Laurie's escaping in her dream? Tedious. Looking at gore over and over again gets pretty dull. Having blood everywhere no longer makes it shocking; it makes the humans look like bloated pinatas that puncture easily and spray their innards everywhere if they step on a thumbtack. One thing's for sure, and that's that every single victim in the Rob Zombie-Halloween-verse has an incredibly low platelet count. Their blood sprays like it's shot out of a water gun. They're like the characters in the original Mortal Kombat. Aside from being overly gruesome, many of them are cheesy to boot. As I said, Michael stabs the nurse in the beginning so many times it almost becomes comical. He bangs the stripper's head into the glass again and again and again and it's awesome but not without being comical.
At least the art direction is on par. Being Rob Zombie, the design of the film is pretty great. The band "Captain Clegg and the Night Creatures" as well as Uncle Coffins have Zombie written all over them. Everything being back lit by the color red or blue. The movie's a treat to look at, for sure. Then the movie starts happening and you want to look away, so I guess look at it while you can get it. Another great aspect is some of the tense scenes. My favorite scene is when Lynda's dad goes to Loomis's book signing and pulls a gun on him, blaming him for Michael's killing of his daughter. Another scene I like is the beginning during the transfer of Michael's body where the two coroners hit the cow that brings Michael back to life. That's another thing, I liked the two coroners. The movie didn't use them enough. Still, Zombie's oh-so-trivial dialogue about having sex with corpses had to fuck that up too, so take them as you get them I guess. Then there's Weird Al...just because I guess the movie needed some levity. Hey, between Laurie's depression, Loomis's capitalist authoring of books, Annie's bitch factor, Brackett's desperation to keep everything together, Michael's psychotic rampage chasing a horse that isn't there, the bloody, disgusting death scenes and the overall tone of the film...I practically lept off my couch and hugged my TV when I saw him.
Indeed, Halloween II is depressing. Even moreso than Batman Returns. The characters you fell in love with do total personality switcheroos and are no longer relatable or fun or...even heroic. At the end, I don't know who I was supposed to root for. Michael to kill Laurie so she'd finally go away, or Laurie to kill Michael so the white-horse shit would finally end. Loomis being a dickhead profiting off of the deaths of others for 95% percent of the movie only now at the end changing his mind and being Loomis again before he gets killed any way sucked. It took characters you loved and ruined them.
I really can't say anything else without repeating myself. Hell, I've repeated myself so many times already, so I might as well call it here. Halloween II started out promising, paying homage to the previous Halloween II from 1981 by having Laurie's dream in a hospital, and also starting the movie on the same night as the previous film. I like movies that pick up where the previous film leaves off. But once the movie stops following the same night, it takes a total one-eighty and starts blowing major ass. I mean major ass. The characters become laughably cheesy, unGodly annoying, ridiculously depressing or just flat-out too damn incompetent to bare. My love for Sam Loomis takes a nose dive into a mountain when he becomes a narcissistic author profiting off of mayhem and slaughter. Laurie's too depressing to look at, listen to, or even enjoy. I hate everything about this Laurie and really didn't care if she lived or died. I was a bit broken up at Annie's death, but Laurie's? The main fucking character? Didn't care. Michael's obsessed with invisible images others can't see and we wish we couldn't see. They built up the white horse as a centerpiece of the whole story which was a joke to begin with. The white horse thing is like when your friends visit you at your mother's house and start telling the story of something stupid you did and you're just wanting them to shut the hell up before they incriminate you. Halloween II isn't fun, enjoyable and it's most definitely the worst horror movie that I've ever seen. Sure, there are worse ones in terms of quality, but they weren't trying to be taken seriously. This one was, and the end result just makes me laugh my ass off at what a brain-dead mess of nothing it truly is. Skip this one like your life depends on it.
I guess you could say Halloween II...is a horse of a different color? Ba-dum-tsssss
If I could sum up this movie for any non-Halloween fan, it'd be: "Young girl sad. Old man mad. Crazy man bad. The rest is a shit heap."
So yeah, Laurie and Loomis pull the biggest one-eighty as far as how they behave, As I said, they're both traumatized by the events of that Halloween night in Halloween (2007) and both are dealing with it in their own weird, twisted ways. Laurie, for example, went from preppy school girl with post-high school dreams and a bubbly personality to literally being the understudy of Vampira. She wears dark rags, her hair's all greasy, she's clinically insane, she shouts obscenities at her shrink, and when she finds out she's Michael Myers' sister, she goes into a total "I don't care" attitude and starts partying like she wants to die. Loomis is a giant asshole, on the other hand. After the events of the first film where he was almost killed, he wrote another book discussing the events. The book was released and, in it, Laurie learns that she's the younger sister of Michael Myers, which sends her into her mental downhill slope. Loomis tries to redeem himself at the end of the movie, again trying to reason with Michael before he does something bad, but also trying to keep Laurie from going insane (even though he's a little late to that party).
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| Laurie Strode takes a dive into the looney bin |
The biggest character fuck-up is Michael himself. Michael Myers not only walks around without his mask on most of the time, but also talks (in the unrated edition). What more do you need to hear? They fucked him up. They bent him over a barrel and shoved the folklore right up his ass! Oh, and the white horse bullshit? That's where it comes into play. The movie opens with a young Michael telling his mother that he has a dream during his stay in the looney bin where Deborah, his mother, comes to rescue him from his stay, dressed in all white and leading a white horse down the hallway. For something as simple as a dream, they sure play it up the rest of the way because for the rest of this misadventure, the white horse is referenced...constantly. Older Michael sees visions of his ghostly mother, his younger self, and a white horse everywhere he goes. As far as his iconic mask, it survives the first portion of the movie, in Laurie's dream in the hospital (they're really playing up the dreams, aren't they?), but in the regular world, Michael's mask gets torn up by some stripper he tries to kill, leaving his face half visible. Let me ask; if the point of Michael in this movie was to be groundbreaking and show his face, why did you bother keeping half the mask? If the point was appease the fans by keeping the mask, what was the point of having it get torn up and show part of his face?! You can't have both!
Including Deborah Myers in this movie was a huge mistake. In the first movie, she's a struggling mother dating a horrible, abusive asshole and trying to raise her slutty daughter, her nutcase son, and her soon-to-be crazy newborn. She really had it rough in the movie, and you sympathized with her when her will-to-live took a dive off a cliff, forcing her to kill herself. She was a well-rounded character and done very well. Then when you turn around and include her as a ghostly witch-lady vision of Michael Myers beckoning him to "go home" with her, and "bring Angel with him" (Angel being Laurie's Myers name) and having zero to do with her past-self was shown as nothing more than story cancer and a blatant attempt by Rob to include his wife in this movie. Rob, we get it, you love your wife. She's a sweet woman and beautiful, but even she isn't worth ruining your movies.
The death's are stock and can be over done in the attempt to not look stock. The thing with Rob Zombie is that he likes his gore, which is fine. Gore isn't necessarily the root problem. Let's face it, there's only so many ways you can do gore and have it be fresh and original. Michael slamming the stripper's head into a wall repeatedly? Hilarious! Michael stabbing a nurse repeatedly (and I mean repeatedly) even as Laurie's escaping in her dream? Tedious. Looking at gore over and over again gets pretty dull. Having blood everywhere no longer makes it shocking; it makes the humans look like bloated pinatas that puncture easily and spray their innards everywhere if they step on a thumbtack. One thing's for sure, and that's that every single victim in the Rob Zombie-Halloween-verse has an incredibly low platelet count. Their blood sprays like it's shot out of a water gun. They're like the characters in the original Mortal Kombat. Aside from being overly gruesome, many of them are cheesy to boot. As I said, Michael stabs the nurse in the beginning so many times it almost becomes comical. He bangs the stripper's head into the glass again and again and again and it's awesome but not without being comical.
 |
| Captain Clegg and the Night Creatures |
At least the art direction is on par. Being Rob Zombie, the design of the film is pretty great. The band "Captain Clegg and the Night Creatures" as well as Uncle Coffins have Zombie written all over them. Everything being back lit by the color red or blue. The movie's a treat to look at, for sure. Then the movie starts happening and you want to look away, so I guess look at it while you can get it. Another great aspect is some of the tense scenes. My favorite scene is when Lynda's dad goes to Loomis's book signing and pulls a gun on him, blaming him for Michael's killing of his daughter. Another scene I like is the beginning during the transfer of Michael's body where the two coroners hit the cow that brings Michael back to life. That's another thing, I liked the two coroners. The movie didn't use them enough. Still, Zombie's oh-so-trivial dialogue about having sex with corpses had to fuck that up too, so take them as you get them I guess. Then there's Weird Al...just because I guess the movie needed some levity. Hey, between Laurie's depression, Loomis's capitalist authoring of books, Annie's bitch factor, Brackett's desperation to keep everything together, Michael's psychotic rampage chasing a horse that isn't there, the bloody, disgusting death scenes and the overall tone of the film...I practically lept off my couch and hugged my TV when I saw him.
Indeed, Halloween II is depressing. Even moreso than Batman Returns. The characters you fell in love with do total personality switcheroos and are no longer relatable or fun or...even heroic. At the end, I don't know who I was supposed to root for. Michael to kill Laurie so she'd finally go away, or Laurie to kill Michael so the white-horse shit would finally end. Loomis being a dickhead profiting off of the deaths of others for 95% percent of the movie only now at the end changing his mind and being Loomis again before he gets killed any way sucked. It took characters you loved and ruined them.
I really can't say anything else without repeating myself. Hell, I've repeated myself so many times already, so I might as well call it here. Halloween II started out promising, paying homage to the previous Halloween II from 1981 by having Laurie's dream in a hospital, and also starting the movie on the same night as the previous film. I like movies that pick up where the previous film leaves off. But once the movie stops following the same night, it takes a total one-eighty and starts blowing major ass. I mean major ass. The characters become laughably cheesy, unGodly annoying, ridiculously depressing or just flat-out too damn incompetent to bare. My love for Sam Loomis takes a nose dive into a mountain when he becomes a narcissistic author profiting off of mayhem and slaughter. Laurie's too depressing to look at, listen to, or even enjoy. I hate everything about this Laurie and really didn't care if she lived or died. I was a bit broken up at Annie's death, but Laurie's? The main fucking character? Didn't care. Michael's obsessed with invisible images others can't see and we wish we couldn't see. They built up the white horse as a centerpiece of the whole story which was a joke to begin with. The white horse thing is like when your friends visit you at your mother's house and start telling the story of something stupid you did and you're just wanting them to shut the hell up before they incriminate you. Halloween II isn't fun, enjoyable and it's most definitely the worst horror movie that I've ever seen. Sure, there are worse ones in terms of quality, but they weren't trying to be taken seriously. This one was, and the end result just makes me laugh my ass off at what a brain-dead mess of nothing it truly is. Skip this one like your life depends on it.
If I could sum up this movie for any non-Halloween fan, it'd be: "Young girl sad. Old man mad. Crazy man bad. The rest is a shit heap."
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