10 Things You Learn Rewatching Halloween II (2009)
Does Rob Zombie fare any better the second time around?
After the immense financial success of Rob Zombie's Halloween remake, Dimension and the Akkads were hungry for more. With a newly rebooted timeline in place, they recruited Zombie to the franchise once more and deliver a follow-up.
Zombie spent the lead-up to his sequel's release singing its praises, referring to it as "my Road Warrior" on several occasions. He teased that in making a second Halloween film, he was able to make the film he had always wanted to, saying;
"I felt like the last movie was 50% me, 50% John Carpenter... Now, it’s 100% me."
Audiences, however, did not share Zombie's enthusiasm.
When the film was released, it was roundly trounced by fans and critics alike. It didn't even recoup half of the grosses that the previous film made and it wound up putting the franchise on ice for nine years, the longest period of time the franchise ever went without releasing a film.
Now that the draught is nearly over, with Blumhouse's new film coming out in less than a week, it's time to look back and see; is Halloween 2 as bad as its reputation suggests? Let's find out...
10. The Prologue
After Zombie's first Halloween film suffered from a case of compromised vision, Zombie comes out of the gate swinging in this sequel.
Picking up immediately after the events of the remake, Sheriff Brackett finds Laurie wandering the streets of Haddonfield, still clinging to the gun she shot Michael with. He takes her to the hospital, as the coroners grab Michael's body from the Myers house. Of course, nothing goes according to plan. Michael wakes up, kills the coroners, and makes his way to the hospital to tack down Laurie.
What follows is a genuinely riveting sequence which showcases the film's love of gore, the brutality of Tyler Mane's Michael, and the fact that this thing is 100% Rob Zombie. It's got gonzo visuals like Laurie falling into a trash compactor full of bodies, Michael using an ax to kill a guard ala Jack Torrence killing Dick Hallorann in The Shining, and a relentlessly in-your-face pace that hardly ever holds long enough for the audience to even catch its breath.
Hell, it even sees Zombie successfully utilizing suspense more so than the entirety of the previous film did. It is everything one could possibly expect from a Halloween movie by Rob Zombie... and then the movie throws it all away.
In reality, it was all just a nightmare that Laurie was having. This is a cheap excuse for a killer intro because it means that literally none of it mattered, it was all just for show. The movie then proceeds to become infinitely less interesting from here.