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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 18.45%
Worth A Look: 28.16%
Average: 33.98%
Pretty Bad: 11.65%
Total Crap: 7.77%
3 reviews, 85 user ratings
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| Halloween II (1981) |
by Dr. Isaksson
"It's the Great Pumpkin Michael Myers!"
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The Halloween Holiday is very near. This old,old Pagan rite is soon going to be celebrated by tons of little kiddies dressed as Harry Potter. It's around now that people are a little more willing to travel into the dark side of life. From what I've noticed it seems as though everyone wants to become a little more evil. A tad more sinister for a couple of weeks. Sounds ok to me.Hell, lately I have noticed that the poseur Goth Teens (who all but disappeared after "Marilyn Manson" was no longer cool on MTV and who always gave me a blank stare when I mentioned the band "Mephisto Walz" to their commercially purchased Gothic listening ears) are beginning to resurface this Halloween. They are all proudly decked out in the cheap black garments they bought with their mother's credit card at the local "Hot Topic", saying "Look! I am an individual! I'm into mall Gothism!"... So, needless to say, it seems like a lot of people want to be scared or look scary for Halloween. And do you need to find a good film to blast on Halloween night? Something to watch in-between your moonlight Wicca rituals? Yeah well... If you are looking for a not-so-good film with pretty good shock scenes but with a great climax then go with Halloween II. If you want something that's actually GOOD, look for the original. There is a lot better you could go with and a lot worse.
1981's Halloween II takes place right where Halloween left off. Michael has run off and instantly, as with the first film, we are taken along (willingly or unwillingly) with the killer as he makes his way around the dark streets and backyards of Haddonfield while he terrorizes a teen girl and an old woman and gets himself a new knife. meanwhile, poor Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) has to resume his mission of finding Michael before he kills again. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) the sole survivor of the first film is taken to the Haddonfield Clinic where she is seen to by the doctors. They drug her up (not a good thing when your being stalked by a killer) and send her to a room to rest. She quickly befriends the paramedic who tended to her named Jimmy (Lance Guest) and from him learns of the killers identity.
As the night wears on, Halloween II becomes frightfully sluggish. Dr. Loomis spends a lot of the film in a police car talking about how his mental patient is "So unhuman... He is not a man." Yadda Yadda Yadda. We have heard this already and you know it's only sequel filler. We are then led through a tedious section of Halloween II where we watch unsuspecting candystripers walk around a strangely darkly lit hospital while Michael is lurking behind the doors. Nothing all that scary happens and you can't help but wish that writers/producers Debra Hill and John Carpenter would have come up with more engaging characters to watch. Instead, we get clockwork killings as Michael goes around knocking off the hospital workers, each with a different technique involved. Some of which is I found to be really well executed, just not very scary. (Note to horror writers: If you want to make a movie scarier then give the viewer some background on the characters so that we can care about them a little more when they get slaughtered. When a character is annoying or boring then we will only root for their demise.)
By the time Halloween II reaches it's third act, it luckily begins to swing into a higher gear. Once Michael gets his eyes on Laurie, then the film begins to take off. There is an effective chase scene in the hospital where Laurie barely escapes the masked killer. These scenes are once again heightened by the great music score by John Carpenter, who reworks the original music with a flair for the 80's synth. A loud synthed up organ is added to the music, giving off a very dense feel. Carpenter also includes a high pitched key that hisses loudly throughout the attack scenes. (Note: This music is greatly effective in high tension moments and sounds hair-raising amazing when played on my home theater, which happens to have huge speakers set all around the room. Also, I noticed that the Hi-Fi Surround Sound VHS of Halloween II sounds far better than the DVD version.) As for the film's climax, it is definately the best moment and leaves a powerful impression on the mind despite all of it's weaker and clumsier moments.
The performances are ok but Donald Pleasance plays Dr. Loomis a bit over the top this time. Jamie Lee Curtis, again, does a fine job with Laurie but oddly enough, only has about 20 lines to say throughout the entire film. The direction by Rick Rosenthal stays quite true to the original and this is good because it does capture a lot of the same creepy atmosphere of Halloween. But the film just never really snatches you into a terrifying grasp. The real downfall for Halloween II comes when the film attempts to explain why Michael Myers is killing and why he is after Laurie. John Carpenter and Debra Hill had no other option but to make them related as brother and sister and this was most likely not the case in the first film. The random killings of a mad man became a slightly dippy story of a brother trying to kill his other sister. If this explanation were the case in the first film, why wouldn't Michael have killed Laurie first? Why wait around and kill Annie and Lynda and Bob before going for Laurie? I myself believe that this wasn't Carpenter's original intention. I'm sure he was convinced that if showed the audience pure evil in the form of a young man that we wouldn't need a reason for the killing. And we didn't. It was effective in every way. But for the sequel there was a demand for a reason and this reason is the ruin of the film and the increasingly bad sequels that followed. When Halloween II needed a reason for Michael's actions, it lost a lot of it's pure terror.
The terror that an escaped mental patient who has returned to his abandoned childhood home would see a teen girl and her young friend on the sidewalk and take an interest in them and that night watch her and her friend as they baby-sat. All the while his urge to kill has arisen once again and before dawn he will act on the evil within him.
This is terror.
The unexplainable is terror.
The undefinable is terror.
When explanations are given for evil the fear can no longer be primal. It can only be shocking."Halloween II" has far too much to live up to and you can't help but find it hard to believe that all this would happen in one night. Still, it stands up well among it's many fellow slasher films. *** Stars
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1127&reviewer=296
originally posted: 10/29/02 18:44:37
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USA
30-Oct-1981 (R)
DVD: 14-Aug-2007
UK
N/A (18)
Australia
29-Apr-1982 (R)
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