I will be the first to admit I initially liked the theatrical cut of this movie. Admittedly I saw it online, but I felt it had a decent pace at its original 100 minutes, it had a neat style and I also failed to notice how bad the acting was. I also failed to notice something else that I found in Zombie’s first take on the Halloween franchise; it is really, really boring, but even more so then before, at least in the director’s cut.
The plot, if you can call it one, is this: two years after the events of the first movie, Laurie Strode is having a lot of post-traumatic stress issues; she wakes up at night screaming and sweating, her shrink is not working, every time she looks at her best friend and housemate Annie Brackett and cannot help but think her scars from the first film are her fault, and she also has inexplicably turned from preppy to white trash all in the course of those (apparently very hard) two years. Meanwhile, Michael, thought dead, is walking around looking like a biker who’s into 80’s metal, just ready to strike again after his two year leave of absence.
It doesn’t take long to realize this film is headed down the rails, slight spoilers ahead by the way. The very first scene involves mother Myers (Sheri Moon Zombie) visiting her son (played this time Chase Wright Vanek, who looks, sounds and acts nothing like the first films horrible Daeg Faerch, but is just as bad), she gives him a white horse, which is referenced in a quote before the film begins, and then we switch to where the first film ended. The scene initially starts off creepy, with Laurie walking down the road holding the gun she used to dispatch Myers at the end of the last film. We then switch to Myers being transported by two of the most foul and inept paramedics you are bound to see on a movie or in real life, who after an entirely pointless conversation on necrophilia, crash into a cow; seriously. After the surviving paramedic repeats the most consecutive use of the word fuck I think I have ever heard (it goes on for nearly a minute, if not more), Myers hops out of the back, silently decrees “off with his head” to the paramedic, walks off to an hallucination of his mother dressed in white standing next to a white horse in the middle of the road.
The sequence that follows this, I will admit, I absolutely love: it involves Laurie waking up in a near empty hospital and subsequently being chased slowly and methodically by Myers through its corridors and outside where she holes up in the security guards shack, where, unfortunately, right before Myers dispatches her, she wakes up from what apparently was a dream. We are twenty minutes into the movie at this point, and the films best scene (also ruined by the director’s cut) has turned out to be a dream. If this scene was just a short film, I’d buy it. In the director’s cut however, a small scene is added here where Strode falls into a pit of bodies at the hospital. I do not think that the hospital would be running with so few staff and a pit where they hide the bodies that they apparently have succumbed to malpractice so as to avoid lawsuits. Just sayin’.
The film then veers off into what I thought was quickly becoming a Sundance drama without the quirk, following Laurie as she faces life nearly two years after the tragedy and the mess she has become, but wait, to make matters worse, she then learns from Dr. Loomis’s (Malcolm McDowell, looking as incredibly bored and pained as we are, probably wishing he was refilming Caligula instead) tell-all recount of the madman who was Michael Myers, that she is in fact the deranged killers sister. Uh-oh! Talk about an excuse to go out and hammered after her early come middle age crisis, on the night that “he comes home”… again. Cut in scenes of some crazed homeless guy walking around the fields of middle America looking for a shave, talking to his mother, early self and a horse inside his head and occasionally murdering whatever white trash redneck comes along his way.
If more time and effort had been put into Myers’ killings and making his victims less cloyingly white trash, these might have made up for how boring the rest of the film is, but instead they merely make it even more boring by the fact that I was waiting for these characters to die from the first second of their miserably short time on screen, and more then a little disappointed that the most interesting way Myers can dispatch a victim is to stomp down his face. I kept wishing for him to grab a shotgun and stab through a girl in her panties and a door like he did in the Halloween 4, but no such luck.
However, if the film had merely been mundane and boring then it might not have been quite as painful as it is, and that’s the way it was in the theatrical, merely mediocre. But in the director’s cut, the ending destroys a mundane movie (is that even possible?) and rapes the Halloween name to within an inch of its life. Major spoilers regarding the films director’s cut coming up. In the theatrical cut, the climax takes place in a shed with Michael, Laurie, Loomis and the voices inside Michael’s head which have also taken control of Laurie, did I fail to mention her and Michael’s psychic connection that explains her decent into madness throughout the film? Sorry. This same climax takes place but ends differently in the director’s cut, where Michael, while holding Loomis, jumps through the wall of a shed, where outside the police are all pointing their guns at the pair and Loomis makes a final plea for Michael to stop. This is where the real indignities begin, consecutively like a series of gun shots. For one, Michael is not wearing his mask, you see his shaggy, angry, hobo face in full helicopter spot light. Then, after Loomis’ final plea, Michael screams “Die!” at the top of his lungs, and stabs Loomis to death. Michael is then shot, if I wasted my time and went back to count, probably more times then at the end of Halloween 4, before he finally falls to the ground as dead as he was at the end of Zombie’s first Halloween remake, which means he probably isn’t so as to give way to another abomination of a sequel. At this point, Laurie walks out of the shed, standing with a knife over Myers’ body, and is also, for some reason, shot repeatedly. Wait for it… visual Jesus reference! The camera descends down to Laurie’s body lying in the grass, possibly dead or not, with her legs perfectly straight, he arms bent at the elbow pointing up, and a sublime look on her face. Switch to a perfectly, impossibly white hall, at the end of which sits Laurie on a hospital bed, as she begins to smile creepily and serenely at the sight of mother and that goddamned white horse walking towards her. Cue the end credits as a beautifully haunting but entirely misused cover of Love Hurts plays over them and the last minute or so of the movie.
I think it would be easier to find where this ending went wrong first as opposed to where it went wrong in general. By removing Michael’s mask and letting him speak, they remove what made him so terrifying in the first place. Michael was always a being of evil, no longer human. He was a vicious beast whose sole purpose living was to do away with the living, particularly his living family. This film takes those most crucial elements of Myers’ character and does away with them, essentially committing character assassination. What next, why did the police shoot Laurie Strode? She was just standing there, and all of a sudden she was being repeatedly shot at. It makes no sense. Then, the Jesus reference that makes no sense, has no place being in this movie and grinds the film to a halt (if nothing else before this had of done the job). There's the scene played in Laurie’s mind as we realized she has replaced Michael in the Myers’ family mad killer legacy. This would be interesting if it has been well done as opposed to the laughably horrible way Zombie attempts to inject these scenes into the movie. Finally, its Nan Vernon’s cover of Love Hurts, which, having listened to out of context of the film, I love, but in the film, it made me laugh. It seriously played out like this: Laurie, standing over “dead” brother, is shot, then, cue music. Shot… “love hurts”. I found it a laughably poor choice of song for the end of the film. Mix this with the lack of the Halloween theme song till the middle of the credits, and you have a truly horrible film.
Halloween II the Director’s Cut is a horrible mix of bad acting, bad screenplay and really bad pacing. Zombie reaches his lowest low since 2003’s House of 1000 Corpses (thank god not quite so low), and proves just how unimaginative and uncreative he truly is. The film has numerous good ideas, particularly the attempt to display Michael and Laurie’s connection and Laurie’s descent into madness, but unfortunately all of these are too poorly done to connect the film into a larger whole, and what we get is the mess on screen. If you do decide to subject yourself to this film, at least have the decency to do so with the theatrical cut (I haven’t even mentioned the character assassination done to poor old Dr. Loomis), which at least leaves the beginning hospital sequence intact; that version of the film gets itself a two, possibly one and a half star rating. This film is just more proof that Rob Zombie is this decade’s true hack.
* out of **** stars
