Halloween 2 (2009) - 3/4

Halloween 2 is without a doubt a confused and messy film. There are a few reasons for the mess. For one, Michael's behaviour and motivation is inexplicable unless one has seen the first film. Halloween 2 is more continuation than sequel. Where Halloween's strength is in how Zombie grapples with the influence of John Carpenter and asserts his own interests, Halloween 2 reveals a more confident artist, now over his struggle with Carpenter and taking the material into a grapple with a horror cinema in general. Zombie is, in this film, free to assert his own themes and to be as brutal as he wishes. Halloween 2 is consequently both a much more flamboyant film and a much grittier, bloodier, darker film.

There are really only two ways to grapple with the history of one's field: to ignore it or to appropriate it. Zombie appropriates. Caroline Williams is cast as a doctor in the hospital scene, referencing an even more over-the-top sequel, Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Margot Kidder's character is named Barbara Collier, referencing her character as Barb in Bob Clark's Black Christmas and her role in DePalma's Sisters, the protagonist of which is named Grace Collier. There's a Frankenstein's monster, a song about Terror Train, a guy dressed as the Vincent Price character from Madhouse Dr. Death, a guy dressed as Teen Wolf, Laurie and her friends dressed like characters, and so forth. Rocky Horror Picture Show. There's considerable bravado in all of this; despite being appreciative tributes, Zombie is clearly calling these light horrors compared to his own brutal vision. For instance, the Frankenstein's monster is attacked mid-coitus and the Teen Wolf mid-urination. Halloween 2 is, however, less anxious about its appropriation than Halloween. The appropriation is equally a celebration of horror history and a way of demolishing its presence in Zombie's creative mind with his monster, the perfect monster, Michael Myers. He even jokingly pokes at Marxist and Freudian readings of horror films, with the old '70s Marxist named Meat getting ridiculed and Loomis's lame Freudian jokes. Hopefully Zombie has at last worked out his anxieties with this picture.

The second reason for the messiness is due to a major theme of the film: self-importance. Nearly every character is entirely absorbed within his or her own problems and interests. A year after Myer's first attack, Dr. Loomis is now a best-selling author, capitalizing on the fame of Michael Myers. He only cares about his book deals, abuses his assistant and makes tasteless jokes about Michael Myers to the agony of those Myers has hurt. Laurie is now a psychological mess, riddled with nightmares and antidepressants. She only cares about her own psychological issues. Michael, now hallucinating about his mother and a white horse as he recovers in a mountain shack, only cares about finding Laurie and assembling his makeshift family. He brutally destroys other families along the way. Even minor characters, like the strip club owner, is shown advertising his strip club by setting up a petting zoo. The film's choppiness derives in large part from the way every character considers his or her issues more important than everyone elses and pursues them self-interestedly. The only exception Zombie allows is the Bracket family. Though Annie Bracket physically suffered more at the hands of Myers than anyone else, she and her father do all they can for Laurie, giving her a home and companionship.

As with the first film, the center of Halloween 2 is really the relationship between Michael and Loomis. Although Michael and Loomis are only in one another's presence for a brief moment in this film, that moment is the true climax. I argued in my review for the first film that Michael's condition worsened as Dr. Loomis refused to leave him return to his mother. Loomis was motivated by his reputation as a hot-shot psychiatrist; he wanted to cure Michael by his own methods in his hospital and get famous for doing so. Michael needed his mom. When Michael's mother died, all hope was lost. Dr. Loomis's cynicism and self-importance is the cause of Michael's condition. Michael's motivation is to reassemble his family in a pristine state at all costs. He is given divine, as it were, command to do so by the ghostly presence of his mother, all in white, and his own child-self from the exact moment of killing his step-father and sister.

So all of Michael's kills involve destroying influences that corrupt his family. His first Haddonfield victims are the denizens of the local strip-club where his mother used to work. This purges his mother's spirit of corruption. He then targets Laurie's new friends, two hipsters, one a party girl and the other a(n implied) lesbian, freeing Laurie. The final victim Michael pursues is his archnemesis, the ultimate barrier to his family and happiness, Dr. Loomis, a moment not unlike the meeting of Harmonica and Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West. Everything both characters do throughout the film leads them together for a final confrontation. Tellingly, the only word Michael speaks in the whole film is to Loomis, at that moment: "Die!" The blood-soaked ending could well be interpreted as a happy one.

Loomis's character is easily the most fascinating presence in Halloween 2. The cynicism and self-importance that were subtle in the first film explode into blistering pomposity in this film. A beautiful scene shows him on a late night talk show, a co-guest with Weird Al Yankovic of all people. As comedians do to anyone taking himself too seriously, Al and the Letterman-influenced host destroy Loomis. The experience of the talk show pushes Loomis into self-questioning and, at last, responsibility for his role in Michael's life and murders. Discovering Michael is still alive offers him an opportunity to vindicate himself; but, perhaps unbeknownst to him, this can only be at the cost of his life.

One aspect of the film that sadly does not work as well as it should have is the presence of Michael's mother and the white horse imagery. For one, Sheri Moon Zombie looks foolish, being asked to stare wide-eyed and blankly off-screen. I can see that Zombie is going for the look of a Russian icon, but it's not working. As for the horse, the film begins with a quote telling us a white horse is "linked to instinct, purity and the drive of the physical body to release powerful and emotional forces, like rage with ensuing chaos and destruction." The horse symbolizes the whole of Michael's rage and drive to restore his family, everything that Loomis took away. Cynicism and self-importance are the cause of rage and violence, in Zombie's vision. The symbol doesn't really add anything, however, and is rather fey for a picture so full of expertly-crafted brutality. The hallucinations, moreover, gradually become shared by Laurie, touching on something the film could have done without, namely, telepathy. Perhaps there is intended psychological realism in the peronsality of a potential victim of a psychopath gradually collapsing into the personality of the psychopath; but the shared hallucinations is beyond psychological realism.

While a flawed picture, Halloween 2 stands as a powerful and disturbingly accurate snapshot of the horrors of our time, not unlike Picasso's Guernica. Halloween was too self-absorbed to depict the world. But Halloween 2 shows us a world doomed to violence and brutality by our own self-importance and cynicism. The rays of hope are found in the generosity and playful warmth of people like the Brackets and in the jokes of comedians like Weird Al Yankovic.