A little less screaming/crying, a little more Zombie, please.
Man, Scout Taylor-Compton’s throat must still be bloody raw. As leading lady Laurie in the sequel to Rob Zombie’s 2007 “Halloween” remake, Taylor-Compton spends almost the entire hour and forty minutes screaming and/or crying; add permanently swollen tear ducts to that raw throat. I saw “Halloween 2″ two days ago, and now that HER screaming is finally out of MY head, I can actually start to gather my thoughts on the film.
“Halloween 2″ picks up right where the first one leaves off, with Laurie being rushed (screaming) to the hospital after shooting the ridiculously enormous Michael Myers in the face (while screaming). Zombie gives us a sufficiently grisly opening scene with Michael stalking Laurie around the hospital grounds in the middle of the night, mercilessly hacking to pieces anyone who gets in his way. Or doesn’t get in his way. You know, whoever. Fast forward to one year later, and all the characters who survived the first ordeal are now decidedly screwed up in one way or another. Laurie develops an unconvincing ”fuck the world” attitude, and is haunted by disturbing nightmares and the apparent loss of her hairbrush. Dr. Samuel Loomis, Michael’s psychiatrist for 15 years, has unfortunately become a shameless opportunist who lives to promote his new book, a tell-all about Michael Myers and the events of the previous year, including the secret that Michael’s constant prey, Laurie, is really his sister (which even she doesn’t know…YET). And Michael has somehow survived being shot in the face and starts making his way back to Laurie once again. And don’t you worry, gorehounds, he finds plenty of people to gruesomely dispatch along the way.
It’s true that most of this film is pretty much the standard stalk ‘n’ slash routine that we’re seeing in so many of today’s big-budget remakes. What does make it somewhat unique, however, is the surreal Rob Zombie touch given to Michael’s motivations. In Zombie’s first “Halloween” entry, Michael’s driving force was his desire to return home and find the baby sister he’d been separated from fifteen years earlier. This time around, however, Michael is plagued by visions of his dead mother, floating towards him in a gauzy white dress and leading a white horse; she urges him to find Laurie and “bring us home this year,” presumably reuniting the three in death. These visions also start appearing to Laurie herself, suggesting an unbreakable familial connection. I’m not sure if this psychic link was an organic plot idea, or simply a device to ensure that Zombie’s wife could reappear in the sequel after blowing her brains out in the first film. I don’t really care either way, because it added the only really unique, nightmarish component to “H2,” making it way darker than just some big yahoo running around with a knife.
Unfortunately, as much as I liked the sinister, dreamy apparition of Sheri Moon Zombie as Michael’s mother, pleading for him to bring her other child back to her, the movie ultimately failed to connect with me. The problem is, Rob Zombie just doesn’t know how to write a sympathetic protagonist. In his first two films, “House of 1000 Corpses” and “The Devil’s Rejects,” we rooted for the villains all the way; they were charismatic, sick in the head, and they kicked major ass; despite their ghastly deeds, you couldn’t help but cheer for them and hold only disdain for their sniveling, helpless victims. In the “Halloween” remakes, however, the sniveling victims are the protagonists and they don’t kick any ass at all. By the time Laurie finally finds out that she is really the lost Angel Myers, has a hysterical meltdown in her car, and drunkenly screams from her front porch, “Hey world, guess what! I’m Michael Myers’s sister!” I just. Don’t. Care.
