ith a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) dropping in six months, now seems as good a time as any to chew over the tenth and most recent instalment in this unremitting franchise: 2009’s Halloween II, which itself is, uh, a direct sequel to Halloween. Rob Zombie’s Halloween, not Carpenter’s . . .
Confusing, eh?
“I know he’s not gonna come back just because of some stoopid holiday!” spits a disheveled, beaten-down Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) during an appointment with her therapist (Margot Kidder, cameoing). The dreaded ‘he’, of course, is Michael Myers: the maniac that butchered her parents and the majority of her pals on Halloween night a year ago.
C’mon, Laurie—surely you’ve seen the other movies? The boogeyman always comes back.
Much like his first foray into sequeldom, The Devil’s Rejects (2005’s blistering successor to House of 1000 Corpses), Zombie’s second altercation with the Halloween series—a postscript to his partly effective ’07 reboot—sticks a defiant middle finger up to its predecessor, brazenly establishing its own unique temperament whilst tearing off down a treacherous path of destruction. A grindhouse picture composed of art-house ingredients, it solders together the raw brutality of the filmmaker’s back catalogue with globules of Lynch-lite surrealism.
Kiboshing the typical story beats of exploitation fare, Zombie’s focus on character—the merciless undoing of his tired, tormented lead damsel above all—lends unexpected gravitas to the gruesome goings-on; seldom if ever do we see a genre piece tackle post-traumatic stress with such feral determination (the meatier, pathos-laden director’s cut nails it best), and Taylor-Compton emotes with all her might. A wizardly Brad Dourif also brings leverage to the table, his poignant turn—as Lee Brackett, town sheriff and charitable father figure to Laurie—exhibiting that he’s truly one of the industry’s finest. Ultimately, it is the left-field metamorphosis of Loomis—now a cutthroat media whore—that proves the pic’s masterstroke, with Malcolm McDowell taking untold delight in repurposing the once-honourable doctor as an egocentric arsehole; “I’m not going in there until you get me a cup of PG Tips with a splash of milk, and I want it sizzling hot!” he barks during one exchange with his hapless PA.
From a visual viewpoint, sequences starring snow-glazed cemeteries, pumpkin-headed demons, and a spectral Ma Myers (Sheri Moon Zombie) provide bucketfuls of mischievous eye candy; Brandon Trost’s 16mm lensing, all shadows and grain, is exquisite. A tad more dubious is the recurring motif of a milk-white stallion, described at the intro as being connected with “instinct, purity, and the drive of the physical body to release powerful and emotional forces”: as ethereal decoration it’s nothing if not dazzling, but the primitive pseudo-psychology feels contrived.
Naturally, this being the brainchild of Mr. Rob Zombie, over-the-top bloodshed eclipses bona fide terror (he explored the minutiae of suspense more successfully in his subsequent Lords of Salem), while his trademark potty-mouthed dialogue—you’ll lose count of the “cunts” pretty quick—could use some soap. Still, nine years on, H2 stands tall as a singularly daring work from one of modern-day horror’s greatest mechanics, its refusal to bow to cliché cementing its position as the most perverse, disobedient, and divisive Halloween thus far.
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