Michael Isn't Through Yet! He's Just Getting Started!

This year I decided to focus my attention on the positives of Zombie's Halloween II and perhaps save my negative feelings for a different time. I wanted to cover this film last year but time wasn't on my side and I just didn't seem to get around to it last year.

I had a great bit of aggravation over a number of things. The use of the Laurie character is chief among them, especially Scout Taylor-Compton's performance. To say it was like nails down a chalkboard would be an understatement.

Tyler Mane does the role justice as a very soulless, cold blooded killing machine.

What bothered about the onset was the introduction of a white horse that we never saw at all in Zombie's first film. He does break free from the restraints of the first film's demanding fanbase and decides to go on his own path with Michael Myers and his story. But this tickling of mother to son, and all of that seems to go against the sessions between mother and son in Zombie's previous film. It feels incorrect and opposes the decline of a child while the one that gave birth to him must endure it without knowing what to do to rescue him from the monster that he was and would ultimately become.Daeg Faerch's growing up devastates this film, in my opinion. I could opine on this over and over because Chase Vanek is atrocious. He doesn't have the fierce, creepy, ominous face that Faerch had. But I mentioned that I would try to keep the review on the positive when negative seeps into my writing for the sequel.

I'm not anti-gore and I did appreciate that Michael is a force of absolute nature with few people standing in his path that will survive once he's through with them. When Michael kills, it is full of rage and there's overkill. There's a stabbing to a nurse that goes on and on seemingly for ages. You can just feel a urge to not stop, to exercise that beast yearning for him to stab, to destroy.

Close up viscera, a bad wound thanks to Michael

Laurie on the operating table.

I have wondered just how cool this film could have been if Zombie had decided to end the film with Michael trying to get at her in the hospital. I understand why he didn’t do that, though. Zombie doesn't want to follow the same path as Rosenthal's. I like that he pays homage to Halloween II (1981) at the beginning then moves on to make his own movie. But I think Zombie does a lot more than just present the homage, he further re-iterates Michael as a devastating human weapon.

Before this, we see Laurie in a daze, walking down a road in Haddonfield, all torn up after her encounter with Michael, eventually stopped by Sheriff Brackett, giving him the gun. Then we truly get a look at what Michael did to her and understand fully her trauma. Not only was her adoptive parents butchered by Michael, but she was herself brutalized by him. The surgical work in the hospital is explicit and matter-of-fact because those attending Laurie do what they do. It is a vivid depiction of what a survivor after Michael gets done with her goes through. I would say she should consider herself fortunate or lucky, but the residue of her experience left a lasting horror Laurie never returns from. Laurie is never absent emotional dysfunction.

Zombie doesn’t spare the gory details of the stitching and doctoring of wounds, all set to classical music, with the whisperings of the surgical staff conversing as if this was business as usual.

Beef...it's what's for dinner

I’d say there’s nothing obvious about anything that happened here tonight.

The necro sex humor by one of the coroners really says right out of the gate that this is Zombie’s Halloween film. The relish of the humor by this cretin as to what he desired to do to a female victim sitting in the back of the van gives his partner, driving the vehicle, the willies. Zombie’s scripts often dole out shock humor and this is no exception. Add to that a cow causing the van to collide with it, kind of "awakening" Michael from his slumber (how he could survive a gun shot to the face is anyone's guess), and Zombie truly commits to providing his fans with what they expect from him.

Zombie is at his best evoking Michael in the dark, about to slay.

Uh oh.