In 1978 director John Carpenter (The Thing, Prince of Darkness) unleashed his micro-budgeted horror classic Halloween on unsuspecting audiences nationwide. It became the highest earning picture of all time in terms of cost to profit ratio, and helped launch the whole slasher subgenre. With such rousing success, a sequel was inevitable—which is what we got in 1981 when Universal Pictures released Rick Rosenthal’s (Birds 2: Land’s End—as Alan Smithee) Halloween 2.
It’s easy to see why horror has been relegated to the ghetto of genredom. Anything that shows even a modicum of originality or success is immediately sequel-ized into oblivion, with each subsequent entry being exponentially worse than its predecessors. Or, if it’s not sequel-ized immediately, every other studio puts a carbon copy script into development in hopes of churning out a movie to cash in before the craze dies down. For example, Halloween’s success spawned scads of inferior, imitative films, including Prom Night, Happy Birthday to Me, and even Friday the 13th(although I truly believe that the first two installments in the F13 series owe more to the giallo style of Italian filmmaking than Halloween). Each of these films took the "young kids stalked by a psycho killer" formula that made Halloween such a hit and expanded on it—usually by adding more gore and nudity. So, in order to compete in this new and crowded slasher market, Halloween 2 had to eschew everything that made the first film a classic and copy the style of the popular slasher films of that time—which is one reason why Halloween 2 isn’t a very good movie.
The film opens up with the ending of the first film. Loomis (Donald Pleasance: Halloween, Phenomena, Halloween 4) empties his gun into Michael Myers, who falls from a balcony only to disappear moments later. Survivor Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis: Halloween, Halloween H20, True Lies) is taken to the Haddonfield Memorial Hospital. It’s not long before Myers finds her and attempts to finish what he’d started earlier in the evening.
Taken on its own, that doesn’t sound like a bad plot for a slasher film. However, Rosenthal and company muck it up by making it all much more complex than it needs to be. Part of the reason the original Halloween was so successful was because it was simple. Here was a tale about the boogeyman—in essence no more detailed than the popular urban legend about the guy with the hook hand. Myers is simply the embodiment of absolute evil…a killer who murders for no apparent reason. Halloween 2 effectively neuters Michael by trying to attribute motives to his actions (the absurd druid/Samhain angle) and why he’s obsessed with Laurie Strode (the outlandishly stupid "sister" angle). This attempt at psychoanalyzing the killer destroys much of his power to inspire fear. Afterall, why should I fear this guy? I’m not related to him, and I’m not getting in his way.
The script (written by Carpenter and Debra Hill) is pretty weak in other areas as well. Haddonfield Memorial seems like a large hospital, yet there’s relatively no staff or patients. Newborns in the nursery are left alone for long periods of time so that one cast member can sneak off for some sex and the inevitable murder. Most of the hospital is unlit, etc. Stuff like this, things that fly in the face of common sense, have become slasher cliché—but the original film never had to rely on them in order to succeed.
Halloween 2 boasts some awful performances as well. Curtis sleepwalks through her role (literally) as she’s drugged up for the majority of the film. Jeffrey Kramer is unbelievably awful as EMT Graham and his cohort Lance Guest isn’t much better. The only shining performances come from Pleasance, whose portrayal of Loomis could be likened to a modern day Ahab, and Nancy Stephens, who reprises her role as nurse Marion Chambers. Pleasance is a delight as he rants and raves through his scenes, playing everything with either a manic glee or a melodramatically somber tone. He's the film’s one saving grace.
In order to compete with the new crop of slashers glutting the market, Halloween 2 upped the stakes in terms of onscreen gore. In Halloween there were only a handful of murders—all strangulations or knife attacks, and none with much blood. The sequel is not only more violent (featuring many more murders) but also much gorier. In order to keep up with the Vorhees’ of the slasher world, Myers now murders in the most creative of fashions—using everything from scalpels, syringes, and a hot tub all the way through to allowing one victim to bleed to death from an IV drip.
Of course, what Rosenthal and Carpenter fail to realize is that these gruesome murders are no substitute for atmosphere—which is something Halloween 2 is certainly lacking. Halloween made Myers into a boogeyman—a character who lurked in the shadows, on the periphery of most of the film’s wideangle shots. He was there on minute, gone the next, often doing this wonderful dissolve/fade back into the shadows around him. Carpenter’s wide panaglide shots (which were set up by cinematographer Dean Cundey) highlighted a quiet suburban neighborhood where it was obvious that something was seriously amiss. Rosenthal is incapable of creating that kind of visual tension and instead chooses to rely on an endless array of cheap jump scares throughout the film. Equally unimpressive is his handling of Myers. In this film, Myers is the center of every shot he’s in—flaunted before the audience’s eyes and further robbed of fear inducing power.
Alan Howarth takes over the scoring duties, although his only real contribution is an electronic sounding update of Carpenter’s classic theme—which, much like everything else in this film, seems unnecessary.
Halloween 2 is a bad film—one that does little more than imitate the films that imitated its progenitor. Still, it’s the best of the Halloween sequels (although part 4 looked promising for the first thirty minutes. It’s a fine example of the old adage "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" as Carpenter and Rosenthal chose to tinker around with a winning formula and ended up making a subpar film in the process. Had Halloween 2 not been a sequel to one of the greatest genre films of all time, it would be regarded as little more than another bad slasher film from an era full of bad slasher films—a fate that it richly deserves.
Brand new to DVD, Halloween II shows off the indestructibility of Michael Myers as he resumes his murder spree despite being gunned down with six bull...More at Buy.com
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