"Halloween" Franchise Rewind Marathon: Rob Zombie's 'Halloween II'

Rob Zombie is super edgy bro!

By: Josh McCormack

For the next ten days I will be taking a quick look back at the long-running "Halloween" franchise leading up to the release of David Gordon Green's latest entry. Since the newest film is wiping the slate clean of all the sequels and remakes, I thought we could turn back the clock and talk about all of the films in reverse order. 

Happy Halloween!

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Rob Zombie's 'Halloween II' (also known as 'H2') wants to be everything but a 'Halloween' movie. 

It's a movie that relies on almost none of the conventions that were apparent in the franchise's previous entries, including the film it's a direct sequel to. It features dream sequences, grisly images of violence that are the darkest for the entire franchise, and a version of Michael Myers who is a gargantuan, dog-eating survivalist visited by spirits and a metaphorical white horse.

With all this strangeness, there's a way that this movie could have really been admirable for how it took the franchise in a different, more artistic direction.

But with Rob Zombie as the writer and director, 'H2' still winds up being absolute garbage. 

I'll make it clear now that I think Rob Zombie is a complete hack. A hack with an interesting visual sense? Sure. But a hack, nonetheless. 

The horror community loves to look at the rocker turned filmmaker as the new messiah, but I don't think he's ever made anything that I would call a "good movie" with a straight face. He has two films that are goofy fun ('House of 1000 Corpses' and 'Lords of Salem'), one that is INCREDIBLY overrated ('The Devil's Rejects') and the rest are trash. Perhaps Zombie would make a better director of photography than a writer/director, because there are images in some of his films that certainly stick with you. But anyone who tells you that he's a "good filmmaker" is full of shit.  

Zombie is at his best (or the best he can be) when he gets his characters to shut up and just let the strange visuals let loose. And unlike 'H2's predecessor, one of my least favorite films of all time, there are glimmers of a more psychedelic and ethereal movie in this mess, which makes it slightly more interesting.

The sequences of Michael strolling through a desolate field or corn maze, following his mother's spirit (played with trademark blandness from Zombie's wife and muse, Sheri Moon) in a setting bathed in full moonlight are visually striking even if the context makes little to no sense. 

There's also a sequence at a Halloween party that looks like Rob Zombie's wet dream. Topless tatted ladies dance to garage rock, with other partiers dressed as iconic B-horror movie characters all moving rhythmically in slow-motion, illuminated by a Giallo-esque red color palate. It certainly isn't the type of scene you see in a wide-release horror film nowadays and it's so visually interesting that you might be able to take your mind off the disgusting dialogue about putting roofies in girls' drinks and how blondes are "hollow on the inside". 

One of the visual aspects of Zombie's 'Halloween' movies I really don't like, however, is his headache inducing use of the shaky cam.

Somewhere along the line, Rob Zombie seems to have put Paul Greengrass in his endless book of filmmaking influences and whenever a moment of violence happens, he puts the camera real close to the blood and viscera and just shakes the camera to a point of lunacy. It's incredibly nauseating.

Speaking of nauseating, the violence in this film (and the previous one for that matter) is so unnecessarily grisly.  I've seen plenty of horror movies and slasher flicks, so I'm not one to usually have an issue with violence, but when the gore is so gratuitously realistic for no other reason than to shock the audience, I find it incredibly offensive. Michael Myers' first kill in this movie consists of him taking a broken piece of glass to a man who is already bleeding out from a car crash and slowly slicing his head completely off. You see tendons, you hear the man scream in agony all with blood spraying left and right. For a series that started off with so much of the violence off-screen, this just seems like Zombie showing off how edgy and brutal he is and it just winds up being tired. 

Oh. Michael also eats a dog on screen because Rob Zombie wants you to know how #ruthless he is as a filmmaker. 

In the end, as in all of his films, it's Zombie's writing that really destroys this movie.

I don't know who let Rob Zombie write his own stuff, but they really need to find work outside of the film business. At its worst, Zombie's writing isn't just bad, it's hostile. It's mean-spirited, politically incorrect and absolutely despicable. 

Only five minutes into the movie, there is an extended dialogue scene between two ambulance drivers about how they would molest a young, dead woman's body. Worst of all, it's played for laughs. 

Rob Zombie is like that little kid who used to tell nothing but "dead baby" jokes in their middle school days, but sadly never grew up.

Every character in a Zombie film is white trash because that's all he seems to know how to write. 

I don't think Zombie knows how real people talk because he doesn't like people. And it shows. All the characters in his films hate each other and lack empathy. 

Malcolm McDowell's version of Doctor Loomis is a self-obsessed author now, who doesn't even really get an arc in this film before he's unceremoniously butchered by Michael in the film's final confrontation. Even this version of Laurie Strode lacks empathy because she is constantly screaming at those around her and has no motivation other than to be frustrated with the entire world and needs to use the word "fuck" in every other sentence, even in mundane situations.

The only character that Rob Zombie seems to feel for in both his "Halloween" films is Michael Myers. This is a problem. Anyone who's seen 'The Devil's Rejects' knows how the violent rapists and murderers at the center of that film are the only characters Zombie attempts to make you sympathetic towards. This is probably because all evidence in Zombie's films point to him being a Charles Manson apologist (Laurie literally has a Manson poster in her room), but that's another discussion entirely. 

Aside from all the vile dialogue and black heartedness of the characters, the movie is also paced very poorly. Not much of consequence happens, which almost just makes it seem like a feature length alternate ending to the last movie. Michael wanders around a lot and Laurie is living in fear that he'll return on the one year anniversary of the killings. 

There's a slight twist at the end that says Laurie, being Michael's sister, seems to have inherited some of the Myers family evil and perhaps she will become the new killer. But there'll never be a third entry in the Rob Zombie universe. So who cares?

'Halloween II' has flourishes of something interesting and is better than its predecessor (which we'll get into in our next entry), but at the end of the day it's another trashy, mean-spirited Rob Zombie joint.