Also I found it kind of hilarious, and in a way that is noteworthy, rather than just the expected arc of any franchise that devolves into making more and more money with less and less artistic justification.
The biggest determining factor in the quality of the movie, I am inclined to believe, is the fact that John Carpenter was not back as director. He wrote much of the film (that's on him) and was expected to direct, but he had other directing assignments at the time (would have been either The Fog or Escape From New York) and he couldn't make it work. So in stepped Rick Rosenthal, whose only other film I've seen out of a dozen titles is the Sean Penn movie Bad Boys from two years later. Let's just say it was not a fortuitous switch.
The most problematic choice from a narrative perspective is to pick up the story at the exact moment that the original Halloween ends.
A little lesson in viewer psychology: We like to think that the characters we were following in the first movie got a little break after they emerged with their lives. Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, just barely did at the end of Halloween. We know Michael Myers also only just barely emerged with his life -- at least, we have to assume it was a very narrow survival, after he was shot six times and fell from a balcony -- and so we assume he's still out there, ready to complete the kill on Laurie. But most supernatural serial killers would take the near-death experience to regroup and recover, and return stronger than ever at some later point -- you know, exactly a year from now, that sort of thing -- with the element of surprise in their favor.
Not Michael Myers. He's going to take as many shots at Laurie on Halloween of 1978 as he can possibly manage.
And while that isn't a problem for the end of Halloween, since we don't know at that point that they are going to take this tack on the story, it is certainly a problem for Halloween II, now that we know.
I might as well give you a SPOILER WARNING for Halloween II at this point.
So equipped with the knowledge of the area he developed as a six-year-old before he was shipped off to a mental institution, Michael follows Laurie to about the darkest and quietest hospital you have ever seen in your life. I'm not sure if you have ever been in a hospital at 2 a.m., but if you have, you know that only the individual patient rooms are dark, while the hallways tend to be as bright as ever due to the need to navigate them safely and due to the 24-hour nature of monitoring patients and ensuring they don't suddenly start to die. This hospital has about one active staff and, as far as we can tell, no patients other than Laurie.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here. I suppose that is inevitable when you have so much to say about a bad movie that you can't figure out the correct entry point.
So let's back up a step and talk about Dr. Loomis, played by Donald Pleasence.
Now, I tend to think of Pleasence as a good actor. He never got an Oscar nomination or anything like that, but he was a stage-trained British thespian who carries with him a certain serious and sober presence. At the very worst, he's a reliable professional you shouldn't have to worry about being the weak spot of your movie.
From an acting perspective, Pleasence is the weak spot here. I'm not sure if we can blame it on the passing of the directorial baton from Carpenter to Rosenthal, but to put it simply, Dr. Loomis has gone crazy in this movie. Because the film was shot fairly soon after Halloween and because it's the same character, you'd expect Pleasence's performance in Halloween II to be of a piece with his performance in Halloween. Nope.
I already gave you a spoiler warning, so let's get into and address all of this silly things about Loomis in one paragraph.
For starters, his manner is that of a crazy person, which is especially problematic since he's playing a doctor who treats crazy people. A generous reading would be that he's become unmoored from his previous calm demeanor because he shot a serial killer six times (a number he keeps repeating in Halloween II) only to watch him not die, but I'm not sure that adequately explains his increasing agitation throughout this movie, as well as certain specific line deliveries that suffer both from writing problems and directing problems, and make you laugh out loud. It gets really absurd when Loomis pulls his gun on a U.S. marshal in order to force the marshal to return to the hospital where he (correctly) believes Michael Myers to be. He waves that gun around like a fool for the rest of the movie.
His final act actually requires a new paragraph because it's so silly in context. With the gun Loomis gives Laurie near the end of the movie, Laurie shoots Michael in the face, twice. We know this not because we can see a bullet hole in the mask but because there is now blood coming from Michael's eyes. Okay. Whereas Michael has now twice survived a round of bullets to his chest, most recently about 15 minutes earlier in this very hospital, being shot in the face really seems to bother him. He's now left semi-blinded and swinging a scalpel wildly at his targets in an attempt to continue his killing spree. It should be very clear to both Laurie and Loomis -- who has been stabbed, but not fatally -- that Michael is truly incapacitated this time, at least temporarily, and since they don't know what it takes to kill Michael, this is a positive development that should at least allow them to escape the room while Michael is wildly swinging his scalpel. (An image, I should say, that is quite silly in and of itself.) Instead, they release gas into the room and then Loomis stays to flick his lighter, which causes the room to explode and Loomis obviously to be killed. Michael staggers out on fire before finally face-planting, which seems to have really gotten him this time. Again getting a head of myself, the movie ends a few minutes later on a still of this flaming corpse, so we have no reason to believe Michael Myers is not dead. (No reason at the time. In retrospect, they were never going to let this newly iconic serial killer disappear entirely, not when he could keep making them money -- though it should be said that they allowed him to be dead at least for Halloween III, which has nothing to do with him.)
So why on earth did Loomis need to kill himself when he could have easily slipped out of the room and waited for reinforcements while a half-blinded Michael, now clearly operating at diminished capacity, swung around a scalpel wildly? No idea.
Incidentally, I now see that one of Donald Pleasence's few screen acting nominations of any kind was, get this, a Saturn Awards nomination for best actor for -- you guessed it -- Halloween II.
So let's get into the big spoiler of this movie: There was a "secret file" on Michael Myers that showed that Laurie was actually his younger sister, little more than a toddler at the time Michael killed their older sister. The reason her name isn't Myers is because she was put up for adoption after her parents died, and the Strode family adopted her. Let's get into my problems with this:
1) Since Laurie was obviously too young to remember any of this, not even knowing she was adopted as far as we can tell, that means that her parents had to have both died immediately following Michael's killing of his older sister, in either one or two separate events that have no direct relationship to Michael. Perhaps that subject matter is explored in later films, but at this point in time, it seems pretty unlikely and worth more than just a throwaway comment.
2) If you are going to put her up for adoption but then seal the records so that nobody could find out, wouldn't you prefer to adopt her off to, I don't know, some other part of the country? Rather than a family who lived on the same street as where the murder occurred? (It may not be the same street but it is at least the same town.)
3) Considering that Michael has, as far as we know, spent the entire time since his institutionalization essentially in a catatonic state -- just waiting, as Loomis says -- how does he even know that Laurie is his sister, let alone how to find her? I suppose we've already suspended disbelief on the idea that he can drive a car, as he did in the last movie, and that he would know how to get to his old home in the town of Haddonfield. But how did he know where to find her on that night? And is "he killed one sister and now wants to kill the other" really a rational motivation for a serial killer? To the extent that anything a serial killer does has any rational mental or emotional foundation.
Okay let's finish our discussion of Halloween II with some quick-hit observations:
1) One of the bits of unintentional comedy in this movie occurs when, for a moment, they think Michael Myers might have been killed when an adult in a Myers-style mask is hit by a police car at full speed. The police car then collides with a truck, pinning the man between the two, and both vehicles erupt into a very localized fire that allows the police officer to escape the vehicle, but the man to immediately burn to a crisp, requiring the identification of dental records to determine whether or not it's Michael. The slapstick, almost sped-up way this crash plays out cannot be watched without bursting into laughter.
2) There is also some fairly silly stuff in this movie involving a paramedic played by Lance Guest, star of The Last Starfighter a few years later. At first I didn't get that this guy Jimmy was a paramedic, so for half a second I thought it was the kid they had talked about in the first movie, whom Laurie wanted to ask to the dance. That would have been strange as that kid wasn't in the first movie at all, and now he's coming to the hospital to see Laurie? But that was an incorrect assessment of Jimmy.
So Jimmy is one of those creeping around the hospital with Michael potentially pursuing him, but he ultimately has no interaction with Michael, even though it seems like he would have been set up to be cannon fodder. Instead, he finds a dead nurse on a gurney with all the blood drained from her body. The silly thing about this scene is that Jimmy approaches her body apparently without any recognition of the fact that he's walking through a giant pool of blood, on which he slips and conks himself out after he's started to walk away again. Jimmy's only role in the proceedings is to get a concussion from his fall, which prevents him from being able to drive Laurie away from the hospital later on, when he passes out behind the wheel due to the concussion. And that's the last we hear from Jimmy. (To say nothing of the fact that none of the blood that should cover his entire back, from slipping in the puddle, is anywhere to be seen.)
3) This is less a nitpick than just an observation. Dr. Loomis introduces a discussion of Samhain in this movie, of course pronouncing it "Sam Hain" because that's how the word looks. Having watched the Netflix show Bodkin, I now know this word is a Gaelic word that is actually pronounced more like "Saw Win." Obviously this movie was never going to try to explain that to people.
4) Dana Carvey is in this movie! Though I never would have known unless I'd been watching the closing credits. He plays "assistant" and here is how he looks in the film:
I just watched the clip on YouTube and he doesn't even have a line of dialogue. He just nods to what this woman, a reporter, is telling him.
In fact, in watching this clip, which is very near the beginning of the movie, I just realized it reveals something interesting about the movie's narrative structure. Immediately before we close in on this pair, there is a male reporter speaking to a camera and talking about the three bodies found in the house behind him -- the house where most of the killing occurs in the first movie -- and that the suspect, Michael Myers, is thought to have burned to death.
I didn't notice that when I was watching the movie, but it indicates that this scene is taking place after everything we are about to see. While that also doesn't make sense on some level -- this scene is taking place quite earlier in the night, while Michael doesn't succumb to that fire until almost dawn -- it's an interesting choice as it gives away this movie's ending. I'm almost tempted to go back and re-watch the start of Halloween II to try to get a better sense of the purpose of revealing that Michael burned to death at the very beginning of the movie.
Almost. This movie is not good, and I have a lot more Halloween to watch this month.
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