Granted, Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween was not loved by all (see our most recent G Vs B), but on its own, I thought it was worth giving a chance. It was not perfect, I grant you, but as a revisionist piece, it was not without its charm. It would seem that Zombie’s “ultimate vision” of Halloween though was to shoot it all to hell if what the sequel Halloween II offers is any indication. By all means, roll the dice, play around with the characters and the concept, but by the time the credits roll, I still want to be satisfied. More laugh-inducing then fear-inducing, Zombie takes his psycho-analyzing of Michael Myers too far, and seems to loose all the things that made Halloween such a durable franchise in the process.

The original Halloween II from 1981, the one directed by Rick Rosenthal from a script co-written by John Carpenter, picked up mere moments after the first film’s conclusion. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) nurses her injuries in hospital and finds it no refuge from the boogeyman that’s spent the night stalking and killing her and her friends. Along the way, a series of flashbacks and a never-before-discovered personnel file revealed that Laurie was Michael Myers’ sister, and thus perhaps explaining his pathological desire to get her with a kitchen knife. But Zombie goes deeper, with Freudian symbolism and ghostly apparitions egging Michael on in his Herculean quest to ice his sister.

What I do appreciate is Zombie’s basic idea; showing the physical and emotional aftermath on the people victimized by Myers and making that the focus was, on the surface, brilliant. Seeing Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) and her friend Annie (Danielle Harris) with the physical scars of their narrow escape and the lingering nightmares that require nightly medication was interesting. Also, having Laurie go from prim and proper to rock and roll bad girl had its moments too. Did Zombie take things far enough though? I don’t think so. Never have I seen a filmmaker try so hard to be different and get so very little done in the process.

Actually, that’s not true. He achieved quite handily at making Dr. Sam Loomis (as played again by Malcolm McDowell) a thoroughly dislikeable, narcissistic, book-of-the-week huckster that’s trading on Myers’ infamy to the disgust of all, including his press agent. Donald Pleasence’s take on Loomis may have degraded deeper into paranoid loon territory the more numbers the series added, but at least you could appreciate the good doctor’s drive to keep innocent people out of harm’s way. McDowell’s Loomis seems to revel in his notoriety, while also screaming at the press, who impudently inquire as to whether or not the missing Myers is still alive, that his former patient is indeed quite dead. It’s a weird reversal, Loomis is supposed to be the one always yelling at the sceptical public that Michael’s coming back for more.

Basically what is comes down to is that we get very little time with Myers being Myers, and even more time spent psychoanalyzing his bizarre Oedipal complex. He sees his mom (Sheri Moon Zombie) as an ethereal angel dressed in white and wearing dark eye-liner. He communicates with her as the spirit of his younger, pre-pubescent self, before the masks and the stilted silence. He kills his way through the strip club that his mom worked at as he makes his way back to Haddonfield to pick up where he left off a year earlier, including a rather nasty scene where he kills and eats a dog. True, when Zombie lets things get bloody, he really gets them bloody, but that’s never what this series has been about.

After more than an hour of Loomis acting like Paris Hilton, Laurie having several non-specific meltdowns and a few random kills by Myers at the behest of his fetishized mother, Halloween II lumbers into what it should have been doing all along. I don’t know if it’s a case of Zombie turning Halloween into something its not or a case of a filmmaker having no idea what he’s up to, but the end result was painful to watch. It’s almost like a bad parody of the Halloween films. Like the American remake of Godzilla, somebody thought they could slap the same label on it and sell it the masses as the product they know and love. Cool ideas don’t matter when you don’t know how to execute them, and while Zombie may be talented as a filmmaker, a competent cover artist he is not.