Two years has been enough time to forget exactly why I didn't like that movie, though I suspect I found it gratuitously violent and otherwise glum. (Whereas some of the other movies I've watched this month have tried to be sort of "fun" within the context of a slasher movie about an unkillable psychopath.)
So I was a bit surprised that I am handing out three stars to Halloween II, which means it is the most number of stars I have given to any movie I saw for the first time this month, just barely. Halloween: H20 earned almost that many at 2.5 stars.
I think the passage of those two years has also seen me become slightly more generous in my star ratings, as I see I gave the 2007 Halloween only 1.5 stars. And though I don't totally remember the particulars, it couldn't have been that bad. I gave Halloween 4 and 5 two stars apiece, and I'd think Zombie's movie has more artistic merits than they do.
Before we get started, my standard SPOILER WARNING.
The 2009 Halloween II starts off as though it might be a straight remake of the 1981 Halloween II, before veering off in a manner that corrects one of my primary complaints about the original sequel to the original Halloween.
As you will recall from this post, I didn't care for the idea of picking up directly at the end of the first movie. I thought Laurie Strode deserved the chance to take a breath after not quite vanquishing Michael Myers, rather than running another gauntlet of misery at the hospital only a few hours later.
In fact, here is my exact comment from that post:
"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."
And this is in fact what Michael Myers does in this movie.
At first, we don't think that's the case. In fact, the action picks up at the hospital, much as it did in the first Halloween II. Michael is there and he is eager to chop up anyone who stands between him and Laurie, now played by Scout Taylor-Compton. (I say "now" not because there is a different actress in Zombie's original Halloween, but because this is the first person to play Laurie Strode not named Jamie Lee Curtis.) One of those he chops up is poor sweet Octavia Spencer in one of her earliest roles, playing a nurse. This is a pretty bloody and gratuitous scene, which prepared me to file away Halloween II with Halloween as Zombie going a bit too far.
After about 15 minutes worth of hospital stuff, though, Laurie awakens from a nightmare in her bed at home. It appears the hospital stuff must have not happened at all -- so Octavia is actually alive out there somewhere -- because at the moment she awakens, he'd been just about to bear down on her once and for all. Then on the news we hear that Myers was thought to have been shot dead by Laurie, which must have been the ending of that movie I saw two years ago.
To me, this was Zombie basically saying "No, I did not think it was a good idea to set Halloween II in the hospital either." He felt the need to reference the setting of that movie, before pulling out the rug from under us and saying "Nope, that didn't happen."
And indeed, this is a year later from the original film, as we see Tyler Mane's Michael making a slow and steady track back to Haddonfield, Illinois, that begins on October 29th.
Should mention Mane here. I can't remember if Zombie made this choice in his first movie, but he is more interested than the series' previous directors have been in showing Michael without his mask. I do think there's something a little deflating if we see Michael too much sans mask, but fortunately, Mane looks quite disturbing in the role, and he does always don the mask again even if it gets discarded for a few minutes.
While the other incarnations of Michael always favored a knife, this Michael does as much bashing (a stripper repeatedly against a mirror) and crushing (someone's head under his boot) as he does slicing. It's consistent with Zombie's unflinching sense of 21st century brutality, one of several aspects that make the movie more realistic than its predecessors. Another is that Michael still takes a licking and keeps on ticking, but in the short arc of these two movies, he isn't required to survive any episodes that would have 100% surely killed him. Zombie likely correctly believes that he's more frightening if we understand that he's a real human being with major brain malfunctions rather than an actual spawn of the devil who can survive anything.
A character really worth commenting on here is Dr. Loomis, played by Donald Pleasance in five previous Halloween movies. Although Loomis was a bit nutty and often overplayed by Pleasance, as I've talked about several times already, we never doubted that he was a good guy with the best of intentions. That's not at all the case with Malcolm McDowell's version of the character. The time lapse since the first Halloween has allowed Loomis to release a book on Michael Myers, which is of course coming out on Halloween itself. During the promotion we see him doing for this book, it's clear this guy is a craven asshole who has contempt for his fans and his assistant. What's more, the parents of the girls Michael killed the year before blame him for his culpability, which is exacerbated by the fact that he's profiting off it with this book. Loomis does have a moment of redemption, or at least attempted redemption, in this film, but it's a "too little, too late" sort of thing. The shift in perspective reflects Zombie's cynicism that a heroic doctor would just keep showing up and trying to thwart Michael Myers. Instead, he'd probably be a craven asshole profiting off the experience.
I enjoyed the other familiar faces that popped up here, from the sheriff played by Brad Dourif, to Bill Fagerbakke as his deputy, to Howard Hesseman and Richard Riehle in "blink and you'll miss them" roles, and even a single scene by Margot Kidder as another psychiatrist. Then of course since it is a Zombie movie, there's Sheri Moon Zombie, playing Michael's (and Laurie's) dead mother, who often shows up in Michael's visions dressed all in white and leading a white horse.
Even though Zombie's take is darker than that of his predecessors, he does seem to be a leader in the 21st century trend to get into the minds of villains and reveal what made them what they are. Chase Wright Vanek plays the young Michael Myers, also part of the visions with his mother, and we do see some scenes of Michael doing ordinary things like missing his mother. It's consistent with a career-long interest by Zombie in, shall we say, flawed protagonists, as you have to remember that movies like The Devil's Rejects and Three From Hell are told from the perspective of sadistic killers.
I wanted to mention one other name that has not gone mentioned at all this month: Moustapha Akkad, who is the first name seen in the credits of every Halloween movie I've watched this month. This producer was, as far as I can tell, the single consistent creative force behind all the previous movies in the franchise, as each one began with "Moustapha Akkad presents." Well, Akkad died in 2005 -- killed in a bombing, shockingly -- meaning that Zombie's 2007 movie probably had a dedication to him. And that also means that his son Malek inherited that producing credit from him, which I can see he has continued to carry through the recent David Gordon Green films.
One other thing I noticed from the end credits: The stunts were coordinated by Danny Aiello III. Yes, that's Danny Aiello's son. Unfortunately, he also died, the very next year, of pancreatic cancer, meaning his father outlived him by nine years.
In the end I can't really put my finger on why I liked Halloween II enough to give it a mild recommendation. Part of that seems to stem from comparing it to the other movies I've watched this month. If I'd watched Halloween II in a vacuum, maybe I would have felt less enthusiastic toward it, like I did Zombie's first film. But as a change of pace from the sameness of many of the preceding entries that I've watched this month, it may have been just what I needed.
I will finish with the three David Gordon Green movies, scattered in whatever manner I find most tolerable over the remaining six days before Halloween.
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