Halloween II

 

Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween in 2007 was a financial success prompting the studio to greenlight the inevitable sequel. Enough time had passed after the making of that movie that he had forgotten what a difficult experience it and was willing to go again but this time he would no longer be constrained with having to remake another person’s movie thus allowing him to follow his creative bliss, making a follow-up that was more brutal and refreshingly stranger than the previous movie. The result was Halloween II (2009).
 
After a brief flashback to Michael as a child, recounting a dream he had to his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie), we are brought back to the present with a bloody and battered Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) walking down the middle of the road in a shell-shocked daze after having just fought off and killed Michael Myers (Tyler Mane). Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) catches up to and tries to calm her down. Slam cut to a close-up of her screaming face as she’s wheeled along a hospital corridor on a gurney.
 
Back at the site of the climactic showdown, an unconscious Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is also sent off in an ambulance while Michael’s body is carried away as well but when the two inept coroners driving the truck crash into a cow (?!), Michael rises and disappears into the night. At the same moment, Laurie rises from her hospital bed to see her friend Annie (Danielle Harris), another survivor from the encounter with Michael, and Zombie makes a point of lingering on these two young women, their bodies damaged by what happened to them, but those wounds will eventually heal. It is the psychological damage that Zombie is interested in exploring with this movie.

He does pay tribute to the original Halloween II (1981) in the first 20 minutes or so as Michael stalks Laurie through the corridors of the hospital and manages to avoid the obvious error or having a nearly empty building for the two to engage in a prolonged cat-and-mouse game that always rang false by having her quickly escape out into the pouring rain, but oh wait, it was a nightmare and a year has passed since the events depicted in Halloween. It feels like Zombie’s fuck you to the original sequel as if to say don’t we all wish that movie was a nightmare we could forget?
 
Laurie takes pills for pain, anxiety, you name it, still traumatized and living with Brackett and his daughter Annie. It’s a well-played scene as we see these people trying to get on with their lives as best they can considering what they’ve been through. Laurie, especially, is lost in the world. Her parents are dead and Michael’s body was never found, which leaves her frustratingly without closure.
 
Meanwhile, Loomis has bounced back as a flashy television personality, cashing in on what happened a year ago and Zombie re-introduces his character via a super slick tracking show that would make Michael Mann proud, combined with a very Aaron Sorkin-esque walk-and-talk sequence. He’s become a petulant primadonna, which Malcolm McDowell has fun playing to the hilt. The “good” doctor happily cashes in on the fascination with Michael Myers but when someone brings up the possibility of the killer still being alive he loses it and we see the cracks in the façade. He is not above doing an interview in front of the now-abandoned Strode house as he tells his long-suffering assistant, “Bad taste is the petrol that drives the American Dream.”

Halloween II is a more visually interesting movie when we finally see what Michael has been up to all this time, living in an abandoned barn out in the middle of nowhere, killing and eating animals to survive, and having visions of his mother. Initially, it is of her dressed all in white next to a white horse but soon they become more involved. His mother was the only good thing in Michael’s life and once she was gone so were the last vestiges of being human. These visions are beautifully surreal sequences, bizarre tableaus that anticipate what he would delve into to a greater degree with The Lords of Salem (2012), which eschewed gore and violence for atmospheric dread.
 
The movie has the requisite kills that fans have come to expect from the franchise but here it feels as if Zombie is getting them out of the way as he’s more interested in tracking the shattered lives of the main characters than goosing the body count for cheap thrills. We get considerate character beats, such as Sheriff Brackett extolling the virtues of Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou (1965) to Laurie and his daughter who have no idea what he’s talking about. They provide brief moments of levity in an otherwise extremely grim movie.
 
A child of the 1970s, Zombie populates his movie with a bevy of character actors who were stars during that time and so we have Dr. Johnny Fever himself, Howard Hessman as the owner of a cool independent record store that Laurie works in and Margot Kidder as Laurie’s therapist. Despite working for a studio, Zombie still manages to find room for his troupe of favorite actors, such as Richard Brake, Jeff Daniel Phillips and Daniel Roebuck, many of whom get the honor of being brutally dispatched by Michael.
 

This being a Rob Zombie movie and his perchance for all things white trash, he trades in the suburbs of Haddonfield, that we normally associate with the Halloween franchise, for his preferred locales – indie record stores, deserted barns and sleazy strip clubs. He employs a desaturated color palette for this grim movie, saving key moments for splashes of color, such as the aforementioned strip club and the Halloween party Laurie attends – both awash in garish reds.
 
With Loomis’ endless press interviews and book signing gigs, Zombie is showing how infamous crime cases are commodified and exploited by people like Loomis without caring about the damage that has been done and continues with this careless exploitation. It brings out kooky fans and grief-stricken parents of kids killed by Michael that want to vent their anguish and anger on the doctor who has nothing but contempt and indifference for his audience. Laurie continues to unravel, permanently scarred both physically and psychologically by Michael and Loomis’ book only reopens these old wounds.
 
With both of his Halloween movies, Zombie is not interested in making a gimmicky Scream meta slasher movie or an over-the-top kill-happy Friday the 13^th movie but instead grounding the franchise mythos in something approximating realism by showing the toll Michael’s bloody rampage takes on Laurie and those close to her. It’s not funny but sad, leaving one drained by the end of the movie, much like Laurie. Characters live with trauma and try to carry on with their lives but Michael won’t let them. People are killed in horrible, painful ways and those that survive are haunted, their lives shattered beyond repair.

DVD of the Week: Halloween: Unrated Director's Cut

Remaking a classic horror film is almost never a good idea. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Dawn of the Dead (2004) and The Hitcher (2007) are examples of recent remakes that are inferior shadows of their original selves. And so it came with great disappointment when it was announced that John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) was going to be remade and Rob Zombie would direct. Known mostly for his music with White Zombie and a successful solo career, he’s branched out into making films like The Devil’s Rejects (2005), a down ‘n’ dirty homage to outlaw cinema of the 1970s. Why would a self-professed horror film buff like Zombie even try to remake a revered classic like Halloween? Hubris? Fanboy wish fulfillment? Or, did he figure that this film was going to be made one way or another and rather than let some hack do a crappy job he could at least bring his stylistic touches and point-of-view to the table.

Remakes succeed or fail on the kinds of choices the filmmaker makes and Zombie spends the first two thirds of the film examining what turned Michael Myers into an emotionless serial killer. All the signs are there at an early age: Michael (Daeg Faerch) tortures and kills small animals, his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) is too busy trying to support her family by stripping, his stepfather (William Forsythe) is an abusive, homophobic bully, and his sister is too pre-occupied with her boyfriend to care about her brother. To make matters worse, he’s relentlessly picked on at school.

Pretty soon, Michael graduates from killing animals to viciously dispatching everyone who treated him horribly. The ten-year-old boy is eventually transferred to a sanitarium where he is put under the care and supervision of Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell). The scenes between Loomis and Michael are some of the strongest in the film as the good doctor attempts to understand the young killer’s psychology and how he uses masks to hide what he perceives as his ugly self. Aside from his mother and Loomis, Michael communicates with no one and this only gets worse as the years progress.

Daeg Faerch, the young boy who plays Michael, is fantastic and very convincing as the disturbed killer-in-training. It’s all in the eyes which look dead and only get worse as he gets older until nothing good is left. It’s a very impressive performance. Zombie has an uncanny knack for casting. Malcolm McDowell is the only actor who could possibly replace the late-great Donald Pleasance. He brings his trademark intensity to the role while also providing shades to his character. Loomis starts out as altruistic with Michael but when he realizes that the boy is a lost cause, he turns his many sessions into a tell-all book and begins flogging it on the lecture circuit. It is only once Michael escapes the sanitarium that Loomis has a purpose again and makes it his single-minded mission to find and capture his former patient.

The original Halloween focused on the mystique of Michael while the remake shines a light on the areas of his life not explored in Carpenter’s version. What happened to Michael as a kid that made him into a monster? Zombie’s film answers this question and really gets into his head and explores what motivates him. The remakes of The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and The Hitcher failed because they were simple rehashes of the original with no new insight. Zombie doesn’t make that mistake. We get to hear Michael talk in great scenes with his mother and with Loomis that humanize him and also show his gradual de-humanization. They are simple, yet effective scenes with two people talking and are a nice breather from all of the carnage.

The first two thirds of Halloween (2007) are unrelentingly bleak and grim but also very gripping stuff. The last third condenses Carpenter’s film but fortunately Zombie doesn’t try to ape its style, opting instead to choose unusual camera angles and interesting compositions of the frame for certain scenes. He also mixes up how the many killings are depicted. Some are shot traditionally, others with hand-held camera in a very claustrophobic way, and one of the more interesting ones is when Michael kills a nurse in the sanitarium. It is captured in slow motion with the sound replaced by a jarring alarm that is surprisingly effective.

Zombie’s remake works because he takes the Halloween mythos and expands on it in all kinds of fascinating ways. He makes some really intriguing choices, like not making Michael supernaturally strong but rather a big guy who is naturally tough. Zombie also opts for gritty realism like he did with The Devil’s Rejects and it is a smart choice that works. Whether you love or hate Zombie’s take on the material, you have to admit that it doesn’t resemble Carpenter’s film in any way. It is easily the best Halloween film since Part III, although that isn’t really saying much when you consider the quality of the subsequent sequels.

Special Features:

The first disc features an audio commentary by writer/director Rob Zombie. He points out the various locations they shot in while also drawing our attention to where he took footage out and why. He also talks about the music choices he made and why he picked a certain song that appeared in the film. Zombie spends a lot of time talking about the challenges he faced on certain scenes. He also points out the new footage in this cut and why he put it back. The filmmaker delivers another solid commentary that is well worth a listen if you’re a fan of this film.

The second disc starts of with 17 deleted scenes with optional commentary by Zombie. Unlike some auteurs, he is refreshingly ruthless with his footage and so we have a lot of scenes that were cut, including more of the strip club where Michael’s mom works. There’s also more of Loomis talking to a young Michael. Michael also attends a parole hearing that features a character played Tom Towles. Adrienne Barbeau even shows up briefly in a scene with Loomis. Zombie does a good job explaining why these scenes were cut.

Also included is an “Alternate Ending” with optional commentary by Zombie. This one is more sympathetic to Michael but wasn’t satisfying enough for the director and he went with the other ending which is much more visceral.

“Bloopers” features footage of McDowell cracking up with Sheri Moon Zombie take after take. It turns out that the veteran actor is a real goofball and looks like he’s having a blast making his fellow actors laugh.

“The Many Masks of Michael Myers” takes a look at how they constructed the iconic Michael Myers mask. They created several versions, including clean ones and then gradually grungy ones to symbolize the passage of time. We also see how the put together the various ones that Michael makes in the sanitarium.

“Re-Imagining Halloween” is a three-part look at various aspects of the making of the film. Zombie wanted to shoot it in the style of 21 Grams (2003) and The Constant Gardener (2005). He wanted the three acts to have their own distinctive looks: the first part was all hand-held cameras, the second was very static, and the third act used lots of steadicam work. The film’s production design is examined. They take a look at the various sets and briefly talk about the specific look Zombie was after. The makeup effects are also featured. This involved a lot of work as Michael kills a lot of people. Zombie wanted them to look realistic and we see how some of the kills were done.

“Meet the Cast.” Zombie says that the casting process is the most exciting part of the filmmaking process for him because it is the first time the film feels real. He talks about why he cast the actors that he did and, in turn, they talk about their approach to the characters and a bit about working on the film.

“Casting Sessions” is a collection of excerpts of audition footage of the cast members. It gives us a chance to see what convinced Zombie to hire them.

“Scout Taylor-Compton Screen Test” features more footage of this young actress testing for the role of Laurie Strode. It is easy to see why she was cast as she nails the role.

Finally, there is a theatrical trailer.