Santikos Cine-opsis

Rob Zombie’s “Halloween II” picks up exactly where his first stab at the Halloween franchise left off…both in plot and in style.  We see the aftermath of Michael Myers’ killing spree, his sister walking down the middle of a street soaked in blood and holding the gun she used to shoot her brother.  We see Myers’ giant frame loaded into the coroner’s van and taken off to the morgue.  We know, of course, that it will never get there.  We know that Myers will wake up, pound out of the back of the door, and snap off the heads of the necrophiliac morticians and begin another gore-filled tirade across the countryside.

What we don’t know is that the van hits a cow on the road and cow brains get splattered all over the highway.  That was a surprise. Thanks for that, Rob Zombie.  Thanks for the cow brains.  I really needed to see that.   That was necessary for your artistic vision to be complete, I’m sure.

These excessive departures are not prevalent in “Halloween II”, but they are distracting.  However, as a whole, I think that “Halloween II” is every bit as deeply disturbing and frightening as the first.  And, it will be every bit as hated.  Zombie’s first Halloween movie was destroyed by most critics, who felt it was repulsive and nihilistic.  But a few saw the method behind Zombie’s madness and enjoyed the shift of perspective from Michael Myers as immortal slasher to Myers as a wounded child in a goliath’s body.  A goliath who stabs with the force of a jackhammer and is able to hide his 7-foot frame  behind tiny little trees as he sneaks in for his next kill.

And there are plenty of kills.  But Zombie’s murders lack the frivolity of other bloodthirsty filmmakers.  There’s no mirth or satisfaction taken in the killing, nor are the kills very clever or entertaining.  They’re just murders…brutal, angry, senseless murders.  This isn’t “Machine Girl” or “Final Destination”.  It’s not even “House of 1,000 Corpses”, which was scary and funny.  But “Halloween II” is not meant to entertain…it’s meant to freak you out.

And that might explain why most critics hate Zombie’s version of the Halloween franchise.  These are disturbed people who die in horrible ways.  It frightens people in a darker way than most “gotcha” horror movies where scary villains jump out on screen and freak you out.  Zombie says it best in the film, when a horror junkie asks for Dr. Lumis’ autograph.  He says that Michael Myers really terrorizes the souls of his victims.  Zombie’s “Halloween” terrorizes the souls of the audience…and that’s hard for some critics to endorse.  I however, think that the latest “Halloween” movie is just as dark and deeply terrifying as the last, and if you enjoy looking down into the abyss of madness, this is the movie that will take you down that rabbit hole.

But next time, leave out the cow brains, ok Rob?