HALLOWEEN II
Serial
killer Michael Myers, it turns out, has mother issues. In this disappointing
sequel to his intense and much underrated 2007 remake of John Carpenter’s 1978
classic, Halloween, rock star turned
filmmaker Rob Zombie sends Michael (Tyler Mane) on another killing spree at the
urging of his now-dead mom (Sheri Moon Zombie), who appears (all too
frequently) as a beckoning ghost standing next to a white horse. Once again,
Michael hunts baby-sitter extraordinaire Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton),
who’s living, one year after the first film’s murders, with the town sheriff
(Brad Dourif). In his 2007 movie, Zombie dug deep into Michael’s screwed-up,
white trash family history, a process which humanized Michael and made his
subsequent brutality all the more unsettling. This time, Zombie doesn’t appear
to have many deep thoughts, and so Michael doesn’t just stab his victims, he
slices and chomps them into gooey pulp — an overkill motif that actually feels
false to the character and quickly becomes a depressing bore. As evidenced by
his previous Halloween flick and
2005’s astonishing (and irredeemably brutal) The Devil’s Rejects, Zombie has talent to burn, but he’s slumming
here, and one suspects that he knows it. (Chuck Wilson)