Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2 (2009)
Review By Willy Greer
The original Halloween franchise insulted the integrity of Carpenter’s masterpiece–and the intelligence of its fans–in a number of ways over the years: trying to replace Michael Myers with a crotchety Celtic mask maker and his army of robots; trying to pass off Myers’ twelve-year-old niece as the new Michael; retooling Michael as a Druidic assassin; and ultimately, pitting him in a fistfight against Busta Rhymes. Halloween fanboys were so beaten up by the series’ nonsensical transgressions that we were ready for anything–anything – that would cleanse our minds of it all – even a complete rebooting by hillbilly schlock-rock has-been Rob Zombie (interview).
In the wake of Zombie’s Halloween, and now Halloween II, I find myself sadly nostalgic for the good old days. I’d welcome a return to the white-elephant atrocities of the original franchise at this point. Hell, let’s pit Michael against Leprechaun, with Method Man and Redman as comic relief. Perhaps Halloween: The Musical, or The Bride Of Michael Myers. Michael Goes To College. Anything. Just make Rob Zombie stop.
Just as Zombie made a musical career out of recording the same song over and over (metal-rap verse followed by a chorus with the word “yeah” in it), he has established a film career by making the same movie four times in a row. Rob may have brought the old school Shatner mask from Carpenter’s film back, but its rotted, stitched-together appearance reminds us much more of Leatherface than The Shape. And, apparently having nothing else up his sleeve, Zombie has re-invented the Halloween franchise as The Haddonfield Chainsaw Massacre.
Halloween II opens with a title card explaining the symbolism behind Zombie’s wet-brained attempt at surrealism–the image of a white horse, which is, apparently, a representation of Michael’s rage (the gratuitous repetition of the Moody Blues’ “Knights in White Satin,” however, is never explained nor signified). We then cut to the aftermath of Michael’s rampage, as he is loaded into an ambulance and carted off by two (wait for it…) degenerate hillbillies who babble about how much they’d like to fuck the female corpse of one of Michael’s victims. Michael revives and escapes after the ambulance collides head on with a cow. Feel free to re-read that last sentence; I assure you it’s not a typo.
A digression here, if you’ll permit me: on the DVD’s audio commentary, Zombie made mention of the fact that most people thought it ludicrous that the ambulance taking Michael to the hospital hits. A fucking. Cow. But he defended this (as he defended several plot inanities on the commentary for his “original” Halloween) by saying that this kind of thing really does occur in real life. Which begs the question: how shitty of a filmmaker do you have to be to fail to make the audience believe something that actually occurs in real life?
Zombie’s Michael Myers is not a supernatural being. He is not the bogeyman of Carpenter’s film. He is merely a 7-foot-tall, shaggy hillbilly who looks remarkably like Rob Zombie if he were a pro wrestler. He is shot in the face by Laurie Strode at the end of Zombie’s original, and is in the ambulance which is destroyed upon hitting…A. Fucking. Cow. Yet, he gets up and walks away as if nothing happened. Zombie blows this off in the commentary, saying, “I don’t know. Maybe she just grazed him or something. You can’t explain it; why even bother,” and I can’t help but think of Johnny Depp as Ed Wood saying, “Movie-making isn’t about the little details; it’s about the big picture.” Anyway, moving on:
The next fifteen minutes of the film pay homage to Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II, with Michael stalking Laurie through a hospital, only to end up being a dream. It’s a big chunk of the first act of the film, and it didn’t even really happen.
Cut to two years later. In the aftermath of Michael’s killing spree, Laurie Strode has evolved into (wait for it…) a dreadlocked white trash punkette with the vocabulary of a fourth-grader who’s just discovered profanity. In fact, most residents of Haddonfield, Illinois look and act like Sterno-bum hillbillies (this, combined with the fact that every location in the film seems to be separated by miles of deserted country road and live oak trees, leads us to believe that Illinois is apparently south of the Mason-Dixon line. Who knew?). Dr. Loomis is cashing in on his association with Michael (as is, some might say, Zombie himself, selling out to make a sequel he said he never would) with a publicity tour for his new tell-all book, cracking lame jokes before stone-faced audiences and abusing his personal assistant like the bastard son of Naomi Campbell. And Michael himself has apparently spent the last two years squatting in a barn, eating stray dogs and having visions of his mother in a bridal gown and corpse paint. After two years, Michael’s ghost mom (Sheri-Moon Zombie, whom I’m shocked Rob didn’t give a musical number to in this one) tells him it’s time to collect Laurie into the family, and he hikes back to Haddonfield to stab more people and grunt like a pro wrestler.
Laurie attends a (wait for it…) white trash Halloween rock concert. Michael shows up at this concert as well. Laurie and Michael do not confront each other at the concert. Instead, Michael kills a friend of hers in the parking lot and heads to the Brackett house to kill Annie and wait for Laurie. Laurie goes back to the house, and the confrontation begins there. In other words, the concert scene does not serve any purpose. It does nothing to advance the story forward, and, like the hospital dream, is some fifteen minutes long.
To recap: we’ve got a visual motif so random it needs its own explanatory title card, an inexplicable resurrection plot point, a cow as deus ex machina, and a combined half-hour of screen time that ultimately means nothing. Zombie doesn’t really seem to be learning from the films he makes. This is not what one would expect from a director’s fourth film. Aside from the absurdities of the script, Zombie also offers us his usual caricature in place of humor, ham-fisted sadism in place of tension or horror, awkwardly fetishistic profanity in place of edgy, clever dialogue, and rock video pretentiousness in place of style.
Scout Taylor Compton and Malcom McDowell utterly humiliate themselves laboring under Zombie’s inane dialogue and over-the-top direction. Tyler Mane as Michael displays all the acting chops of, well, a professional wrestler. It amuses me to no end that the only actor to come away from this finger-painting of a movie with his dignity intact is “Weird” Al Yankovic.
There are three ways I can think of to summarize at the end here. One would be to simply sum the film up in a single word: senseless. Another would be to pronounce it the worst horror film of the decade. Still another would be to stand up and say, “I call bullshit. The emperor wears no clothes. Rob Zombie, while seemingly a nice and intelligent guy, has no talent, and his latest film is a steaming Hefty bag of cancer-ridden, maggot-infested elephant shit.”
I can’t decide for the life of me which option I want to go with. All of them have their plusses. Let me get back to you on it, okay?
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