Halloween II (2009)
“We're done waiting. Only a river of blood can bring us back together. It's up to you. It's always been up to you, Michael.” – Deborah Myers
As we reach the tenth Halloween film, it pains me to have watched this particular one for only the second time in thirteen years, and to have to admit it left a bad taste. I remembered very little, other than an impression of Deborah Myers with a white horse. (I know – WTF, right?) So, I was understandably curious about the film and the context.
Rob Zombie returned to the franchise two years after his remake of the original. A remake that I believe was just unnecessary and redundant. It fleshed out an area of Myers’s life that I still believe didn’t need to be padded. And considering that one of the biggest shocks in horror movies when seen for the first time, is the revelation that Judith Myers’s killer is a six-year-old kid (or in Zombie’s version, ten years old) building up the kid as a psycho from the beginning just removes the shock even for new viewers.
But enough of that, on with this.
It strikes me that with the previous film being a remake of the existing classic, Zombie was constrained to staying, more or less, to the established story. Yes, some characterisations differed in interpretation, but the story was, within parameters, essentially the same.
This time, Zombie was free to do whatever he wanted, and came up with a script that pandered to his worst excesses as a horror film-maker. A film that was very long on excessive gratuitous gore, excessive gratuitous nudity, excessive gratuitous profanity – but very short on story, plot, tension, menace or indeed cohesion. A criticism often levelled at Zombie is his habit of casting his wife Sherri Moon Zombie in all of his movies. I’ve dismissed those comments in the past because I think she’s a strong performer. But here – I have to agree. Sheri is just shoehorned in, seemingly to give her something to do. Her role is just completely unnecessary and a bit confusing.
The film takes place immediately after the events of Halloween, but not quite – we open on a flashback of young Michael Myers (thankfully recast from the demonic looking little spud we saw last time, he’s now played by Chase Vanek) receiving the gift of a model white horse from his mother Deborah (Sheri Moon Zombie). Michael tells her that he’s had dreams about her in a white dress.
Next scene we’re fifteen years into the future, the fateful Halloween night. A heavily bloodied Laurie Myers (Scout Taylor-Compton) is staggering in the middle of the road, gun in hand, having shot Myers as per the final scene in the last movie. She’s stopped by the Sheriff (Brad Dourif) and taken to the hospital. Myers is taken to the morgue – but the ambulance transporting him hits a cow in the road (I wish I was kidding, but I’m not) the ambulance crew die, Myers breaks free. As he wanders off into the night, he walks toward a ghostly vision of Deborah, in a white dress, with a white horse.
Laurie is patched up, Annie, her friend (Danielle Harris) has survived from the previous movie, but Myers tracks them down and kills everyone apart from Laurie and Annie – or that might be a nightmare, because Laurie wakes up and it’s a year later. Laurie is living with Annie and her father, the Sheriff.
Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowall) has cashed in on the opportunity to write another sensational book about the previous Halloween and is on a book tour, which brings him to Haddonfield on Halloween.
Myers (Tyler Mane) has spent the whole year as a drifter, wandering through fields and over meadows and is now heading back to Haddonfield, while slaughtering anyone he sees on his way. He persistently sees visions of Deborah, along with his ten-year-old self, It seems he has a Jason Voorhees-type mother fixation, as she tells him to kill, and commands him to go to Haddonfield to kill his sister so they can all be joined in death.
In the meantime, Laurie has read Loomis’s book, which reveals to the world that she is Myers’s sister which at first sends her into a depressive rage, but seconds later she decides to get drunk at a Halloween party.
Michael finally manages to kill Annie and abducts Laurie, who by now also sees the visions of Deborah and young Michael and takes her to a cabin where he’ll kill her. Loomis shows up, gets killed, while Michael gets shot twice by sniper fire because the cabin is surrounded by the cops, AND stabbed with his own knife by Laurie. Laurie leaves the shack wearing Michael’s mask.
The last scene has her sitting in isolation is a psychiatric ward. As she lifts her gaze to camera level, we see that the Myers homicidal streak has been passed on as she smiles slowly, watching the vision of Deborah and the white horse walk toward her.
We’ve seen how the quality of the Halloween films has veered drastically over the years, with the unpredictability of a Richter scale – but this one ranks among the worst of them. Bewilderingly, Dimension Films approached Zombie with an idea for Halloween 3D, but he wisely passed, moving on to make his wildly under-rated Lords of Salem.
In fact, Dimension lost their rights to the series, which given the quality of their recent productions was no bad thing. But as we know, Michael Myers isn’t killed easily. The rights were picked up by a studio known for their horror films, and a production company specialising in horror.
Enter Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Productions – and they had a very special trick up their sleeve. They had John Carpenter on board, and he had a radical idea.