With his rowdy redneck phantasmagorias and weird swoons of empathy, Rob Zombie has established such a unique voice in American horror films, it’s been frustrating to watch him follow his 2005 mind-blower The Devil’s Rejects with slasher remakes. His schizoid 2007 take on John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween had a strong first hour, recasting faceless monster Michael Myers as protagonist and plunging into the killer’s tormented childhood with an awed combination of sadness and terror. But that film’s second half found Zombie lost on the leafy sidewalks of suburbia, his vision too jumbled and chaotic for Carpenter’s clean geometric precision.
Halloween II is more, and quite a bit less, of the same. After kicking things off with an extended, genuinely terrifying homage to Rick Rosenthal’s 1981 hospital-set sequel, Zombie’s screenplay lurches ahead a year and messes around with a half-assed attempt to explore Laurie Strode’s survivor guilt and post-traumatic distress. (Apparently having all your friends and family slashed up by your hulking long-lost brother turns you into a potty-mouthed, tramp-stamped party girl.) As Laurie, Scout Taylor-Compton can’t navigate many emotions beyond shrill, and the poor gal is obviously mentally doomed once you realize that’s Margot Kidder as her therapist.
Zombie’s sympathies are once again for the devil. Tyler Mane’s Myers has spent a year living in the woods, feasting on carved up dogs and plagued by nightmares of his late mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) barking orders alongside a Freudian white horse. Shooting on grainy 16mm film, Zombie infuses the scenes with an intense, woozy claustrophobia—every stab wound accompanied by an icky squish. But the high style can’t disguise that there’s nowhere for the story to go.
It’s dejà vu all over again once Myers returns to Haddonfield, and even though the director throws in all sorts of strip club non sequiturs, white trash impalements and goofy cameos by everyone from Howard Hessman to Weird Al Yankovic, we’re never able to forget that he’s just retreading a remake. The movie feels preordained and plodding. Zombie is such an original talent, it’s time for him to get back to telling stories of his own. C-
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