10 Things You Learn Rewatching Halloween II (2009)

In Zombie's first Halloween film, Malcolm McDowell's performance as Dr. Loomis was hit-and-miss. He committed to the role but the script left him with little to do, seeming strangely fixated on turning the character into a money-hungry jackass.

For some reason, Zombie doubles down on this in the sequel and it is very much to the character's detriment. Loomis is now exclusively a dick, with McDowell hamming it up to the point of turning the role into self-parody. Not only is this kind of insulting to the core of the character; it's just not interesting.

The film frequently cuts back to Loomis on his book tour, further exploiting the tragedy of Michael Myers and his victims, but its almost entirely superfluous. He doesn't interact with any of the characters in the narrative proper until the last few minutes of the film's runtime and the tone and style of his sequences are completely different from anything else in the film, making it feel like this was a different film entirely that just spliced into the edit.

It's obvious that McDowell and Zombie are having fun filming these sequences, but that doesn't make them fun to watch. They're dull and boring. There were several directions Zombie could have taken this incarnation of Loomis after nearly dying at the hands of Michael in the prior film's climax, and literally anything else would have been more compelling than this.