Every Halloween Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

The best we can say of Rob Zombie's second and last Halloween movie is that it's marginally better than his first, but that's pretty much the definition of damnation by faint praise. Having struggled to toe the line between replaying the steps of the first film whilst piling on his own grimy sensibilities, Zombie's Halloween II goes off in a direction all of its own, for better or worse. Mostly worse.

Halloween 2007 already started down the wrong path by attempting to explain away Michael's psychosis via pop-psychology. Halloween II sours things further by having Sherri Moon Zombie appear as the ghost of Michael's mother, clad in white and guiding a white horse. The question "what were they thinking" is never far from the viewer's mind.

Worse yet is Halloween II's treatment of Laurie Strode. In this version of events, the trauma of the original has turned her from a prim and proper good girl to a debauched, hard-drinking party animal.

This may be a bold take on the character, and a logical progression in its own way, but - whether it's down to Zombie's writing and direction, or Scout Taylor Compton's performance - she just comes off extremely self-absorbed and unsympathetic, leaving us hard-pressed to care whether she makes it out alive. And that's the last thing you want from Laurie Strode.