Halloween II
by Rick Rosenthal
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Actor: Charles Cyphers, Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jeffrey Kramer, Lance GuestDirector: Rick Rosenthal
Brand: Universal Studios
Producer: Barry Bernardi
Producer: Debra Hill
Writer: Debra Hill
Producer: Irwin Yablans
Producer: John Carpenter
Writer: John Carpenter
Producer: Joseph Wolf
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 92 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-09-18
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Universal Studios
DVD Reviews of Halloween II
DVD Review: Halloween 2 (DVD)
Summary: 3 Stars
There are some acts you'd just hate to follow, and the original Halloween is one of them. The 1978 movie single-handedly created the slasher genre of the eighties; by three years later, it had become an entire cottage industry, with films like The House on the Edge of the Park (1980), The Dark (1979), Don't Answer the Phone! (1980), He Knows You're Alone (1980), Maniac (1980), Prom Night (1980), The Prey (1980), Schizoid (1980), and the first installment of the unstoppable Friday the 13th series (1980). Some were more slavish in their adherence to formula than others; Prom Night even went so far as to rope Jamie Lee Curtis into a similar lead role. All were inferior to Halloween, but as usual, crap outnumbered quality by a wide margin, and the genre had become defined by the imitators rather than the originator.
And then the powers that be realize that Halloween can be more than a movie -- it can be a franchise! Big given that they are now hemmed in by genre constraints that they unwittingly helped germinate, can even a largely-identical creative team recapture the honest terror of the original?
Well, no. But they can give it the old college try.
From what I've seen, Halloween 2 viewers fall into two camps: Those who credit it as a commendable film, though not approaching the original; and those who would consign all film prints to flames of woe. One rarely sees such a hardcore divide of opinion outside of an election year. While Halloween 2 may not universally be considered a terrible movie, it does have a reputation as being one of the most notorious sequels in moviedom, ranking right up there with Highlander 2 and Wayne's World 2 as being first against the wall when the revolution comes. Is all this rancor deserved?
Well, first off, nothing in the known universe approaches the sheer suckiness of Highlander 2, and Wayne's World 2 actually turned out to be exactly what should have been expected of the first one: a slack SNL-skit-turned-feature. Halloween 2 is actually a solidly-built slasher flick -- certainly scoring well on the bell curve of the genre (which may be more of a sad commentary on the genre than praise of this particular movie) -- but it commits that Great Sequel Sin which everyone dreads: It retroactively colors your appreciation of the original.
It what was probably one of the greatest ideas in this movie, we open exactly where we ended in the first movie: Dr. Loomis (Pleasence) has just burst in to save Laurie Strode (Curtis) from The Shape, aka Michael Myers, by unloading his full revolver into Michael, thus blowing him out the second-story window to the lawn below. (It's never a good idea to start a movie with a continuity gaff, and having Loomis' six-shot revolver miraculously fire seven times is a doozy. Not that the extra bullet did any good.) By the time Loomis gets to the lawn, though, Michael is gone -- leaving nothing but a bloody imprint in the grass where he had landed.
Let the festivities begin.
Largely, the rest of the movie can be summed up, plot-wise, in a handful of sentences. Loomis joins the small-town police to try to track Michael through the dark neighborhoods crawling with trick-or-treaters. Meanwhile, after doing in a few people at random, the bloody but still mobile Shape tracks poor Laurie to the understaffed hospital to finish what he started.
Sure, it's a simple-sounding plot, but so was the original Halloween's. The terror was in the details; unfortunately, in this outing, it's the details that sink the ship. [My official mixed metaphor for the day.]
The most visible flaw is the one that relates to the commentary above: Michael Myers succumbs to the "death by variety" temptation which is used to keep viewer attention in the more vapid slasher flicks. Some of new and novel weapons make sense; for instance, Michael enters the hospital through the maintenance shop, so it's not a problem that he kills the security guard with a claw hammer. The hot tub death is more problematic; aside from the ungainliness of using a boiling hot tub as a murder weapon, why would someone who's been catatonic for a decade know how to work the temperature controls? Both of these problems are showcased ultimately in the death of the head nurse; Michael has apparently subdued her and then syphons her blood onto the floor. It's too much a novelty for a driven killer, who in the last movie was intent on dispatching his victims in the simplest and most direct ways possible.
But even more damaging are the attempts to explain Michael's rampage. We find out, through Laurie's dream sequence and some later exposition from Michael's "hidden file," that Laurie was actually Michael's baby sister who was adopted by the Strodes in infancy. While it attempts to add a symmetry to the two movies, it manages instead to force the viewer to read back into the first movie an intent which was not there to begin with. Michael's rampage in the original Halloween was not an attempt to kill Laurie Strode specifically; it was a pointless rampage. It was senseless violence. That was the terror of the "boogeyman" -- that Michael was not a wisecracking pop cultural figure, maming murder fun and interesting until his secret weakness was spotted. "The Shape" was the personification of our worst fears: A killer who can't be defended against because a) there is no rhyme or reason to the killings, thus no way to outthink him, and b) he simply refuses to quit. Michael Myers was evil as a force of nature, without even a recognizeable motive beyond the pure act of killing itself. As Loomis went to great lengths to point out, Michael was "pure EE-vil," without the human niceties of personality or purpose. And by giving Michael a motive and a specific target, the powers-that-be brought the boogeyman down to size, until he's just a killer in a mask.
Thus, Laurie's terror is best exposed in the question she blurts out under medication: "Why me?" And in answering it, this movie negates that great fear.
It's kind of surprising that this flaw wasn't perceived by the filmmakers, as they even included a scene which shows that explaining the violence -- "making sense of senseless killings," as the headline goes -- helps defuse the fear. What do the people of Haddonfield do in reaction to the killer in their midst? Crowds of them gather at the abandoned Myers house and throw rocks at it. By finding a target, they find some sort of explanation to hold onto to keep the terror at bay. The filmmakers make the same mistake with the movie as a whole.
In this context, it's instructive to re-examine the ending of the original Halloween: Loomis, having emptied his revolver into The Shape, discovers that, beyond all rationality, the killer has gotten up and vanished. Looking back after two decades of inevitable sequels to any possible movie, our conditioned viewpoint is that such a non-ending was a blatant set-up for a sequel. But instead, it was a confirmation of those fears expressed in the dialogue between the shooting and the discovery of the missing body: Laurie cries that Myers "really was the boogeyman," and Loomis confirms: "Yes, he was." And the boogeyman is not stopped by bullets, because he will not be bound by the protections we rely on; he is the fear which lurks in the unknown.
And don't get me started on the completely gratuitous reference to "Samhain" and the Druids, which not only blurs the focus even further, but also allows the setup which putrified several of the later sequels.
Now, not to appear like a complete sourpuss, I should go back and justify my earlier assertion that this is a solid movie, despite falling so far from the original. Unlike most other negative reviewers, I had no real trouble with the fact that Laurie Strode was bedridden, comatose, or befuddled by medications through most of this movie; really, was she that much more active in the first movie? (Which is what I thought was one of the flaws of the original; the ostensible "heroine" doesn't even know there's a crisis until the last ten minutes.)
Also, remember when I said that starting this movie right where the previous one ended was a good idea? This is at least a good-faith attempt to keep the Halloween movies from simply becoming a Michael Myers franchise, by keeping all of the main characters instead of plugging a new set of victims in as fresh meat. Unfortunately, there's only so far a full cast could go, and after the unrelated interlude of Halloween 3, Michael Myers became a full-fledged franchise with Halloween 4 (though not a terribly successful one, as Michael lacks the pop-culture cachet of, say, Freddy or Jason) and while alot of the media dont like poor old Mikey, I think he's miles better than his opponents of Freddy and Jason.
After all this, what's the final assessment? Well, Halloween 2 doesn't do near the damage to the original as Highlander 2 did to its predecessor. And compared to most blade-wielding maniacs, this is still a taut thriller. (Granted, some of that stems from a timeline of events only slightly less truncated than that of Othello.) I suppose the most important thing to remember is that Halloween 2 is not an honest continuation of the first movie. Halloween was a complete movie, in and of itself; all sequels are merely hangers-on, progressively reflecting less and less of the light from the original.
Description of Halloween II
HALLOWEEN 2 - DVD Movie"You can't kill the boogeyman," explains John Carpenter in Halloween, and to prove it he brings Michael Myers back in this handsome but grisly sequel. Jamie Lee Curtis returns as Laurie Strode but spends most of her time cowering in a hospital gown, and Donald Pleasence runs around like a maniac as the panicky doctor desperate to hunt down Myers before he kills again. Carpenter writes and produces with partner Debra Hill, and together they replace the mystery and uncertainty of the original with an exponentially bigger body count and some strange tales about the Druids and pagan ceremonies, and the now-familiar family ties between Michael and Laurie. First-time director Rick Rosenthal (Bad Boys) paces the film at a brisk jog and directs it with a clean, crisp style, taking the murders out of the dark to display them in all their nasty detail. --Sean Axmaker
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