Michael Myers isn't simply back, he's madder than ever, yet his fury puts plenty of gore on the screen but little blood into Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN II. Sequelizing his own take on the unstoppable franchise (which he once said he'd never do), the rocker turned writer-director actually tries to accomplish a plot coup the previous, dead-ended HALLOWEEN franchise failed or feared to attempt: Zombie takes the family lineage of Michael Myers to its ultimate extreme with his terrorized prey, Laurie Strode.  Alas his bold move is too little too late to elevate this tale above its well-meant potential. Zombie offers a promising concept of the Haddonfield terror as a grim, gruesome family tragedy, but the bloody meat of this franchise's taboo is mistakenly saved as a final plot twist instead of fueling this sibling battle from the start.  It's a flaw which guts what could have been a HALLOWEEN treat for fans who hoped for better and not just more.

HALLOWEEN II picks up nearly at the moment Zombie's first film left off, with Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) surviving her horrific holiday night by shooting Michael Myers dead, or so everyone thought.  What turns out to be a long, expositional dream sequence recaps Laurie in the aftermath of the shooting, undergoing extensive surgery for her wounds (nice fleshwork by make up maven Wayne Toth) but recovering much more slowly from her psychological trauma.  Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) haunts her very mind even after his presumed death, though once the coroner's van crashes in the middle of nowhere, quite undead Michael arises to murder the corpse couriers and wanders into the night.   Exactly how he survived his fatal gunshot by Laurie is never explained, but then again why would it be justified?  It's HALLOWEEN.

The body of the story takes place a year later, just days before the anniversary of the Halloween massacre, and Laurie is still suffering post-traumatic nightmares.  She now lives with fellow survivor Annie (franchise veteran Danielle Harris) and her father, Haddonfield's own Sheriff Brackett in the guise of returning actor Brad Dourif, who lends emotional authenticity to the forthcoming terror.  They continue to care for Laurie though they're both among the walking wounded after Michael's previous rampage, so they offer little comfort to her.  Certainly Laurie's shrink (cameo by Margot Kidder) struggles in her uphill battle to save the girl's slashed psyche, and this bloody anniversary amps up Laurie's anxiety.

In fact all of Haddonfield has fallen out of the light, as the production move to film in Georgia — coupled with Brandon Trost's underlit, dark side of the moon cinematography — makes this one of the darkest HALLOWEEN film entries both visually and thematically.  I applaud Zombie's intention to exact Michael's wrath on the fate of the entire town, but wish it had been applied with more dramatic impact than subtext.  It's one thing for Myers' evil to have sucked the life out of Haddonfield, but he appears to have sucked the lighting out of the film itself, which ceases to inspire fear when viewers are just fighting to see the action.  Location swapping also changes the look of Haddonfield, which admittedly first resembled Pasadena, California instead of midwest Illinois, but now is much more a barren, backwoods wasteland by comparison.  Just one of several parallels to HALLOWEEN 4 which occurs, culminating in the finale. 

Unfortunately, the first half of the film sets up the slow, land surveying return of Michael Myers in his rotting mask, intercut with Laurie's repetitive nightmares that Myers still pursues her.  Neither side of this equation truly propels the story since Michael's murders-on-the-way illustrate only his animal rage in killing (gaining style points but not meaning), while one dream sequence of Laurie's psychological terror made the point clearly and additional examples fail to make it any sharper.

If I haven't mentioned Dr. Sam Loomis yet, it's because he's a side plot adjunct to Laurie's heart of the tale. While Malcolm McDowell works hard to make his character professionally despicable by exploiting his gravy train case, he's sitting on the bench waiting for this collision of siblings to explode.  In Zombie's first film, the changes made to Loomis hurt the highly effective dramatic triangle which made the 1978 film dramatically relevant: Loomis must be at the core of the story because he is the bridge between Michael's hell and our everyday world.  Not unlike Captain Ahab, in Haddonfield Loomis wages battle in the shadowy realm between mortals and the demon god.  Zombie's scripts in both films go to lengths to modernize Loomis as a pop culture huckster, a talk show pimp selling others' horror for his own profit.  That's fine as a character revision, but when this craven egotism removes Loomis from his duty as the gatekeeper between earth and hell, the story has one less leg to stand on.  Worse in this case, his withdrawal from the action and his own responsibility makes his final efforts to enact justice less believable and meaningful.  I thought Zombie had it right two years ago during interviews: he always suspected Loomis was crazier than Michael, and in Donald Pleasence's performance, this was both true and an invaluable asset to HALLOWEEN's dark tragedy.  Loomis pays a terrible price for seeing the terrifying truth inside Michael, and part of that price is that no one else will believe such horror exists.  Here, McDowell's Loomis suffers only show biz skewering of his greed; instead of a prophet of doom, he's just a mean prick and the storytelling pays the price.

Yet Zombie does interject his own wrinkle into Michael's murderous soul which, I presume, illustrates the killer giant's imploding insanity: a flashback of Young Michael (now played by Chase Vanek) reveals the incarcerated boy's recurring dream of his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie in a dour return) dressed in ghostly white accompanied by a white horse.  Zombie's text prologue must tell us that this horse is a symbol of unbridled rage and chaos, and the filmmaker certainly makes good on his own definition.  Since adult Michael remains mute, his continued visions of ghostly Mama and Little Mike repetitively urge him to hack his way through the population until he finds his sister, Angel (i.e. Laurie).  With no means of expressing himself other than expanding his resume of exotic kills, such visions offer less insight into the tragic family and become tedious reminders by phantoms who, like Michael himself, have failed to evolve in the sequel.

If anything, this is the fatal wound of HALLOWEEN II: neither its heroine or villain have elevated the horrible game being played in extra innings.  Michael dispatches a who-cares list of victims on his way to finding his twisted sister, with Laurie's new friends (Brea Grant and Angela Trimbur) among others simply providing shallow slasher fodder.  Dramatic opportunities are missed in such acts, as in Dan Roebuck's reprisal of Big Lou Martini, owner of the Rabbit in Red strip club where Deborah Myers worked to support her family.  Michael's return to dispatch Lou and his girlfriend never dramatically relates to the boy's childhood shame and anger over the exploitation of his mother, they're just two more bodies in his way.  Michael expresses no extra joy or satisfaction in murdering the creep who sold his mother's bumps and grinds to ogling men, he simply throttles Lou to pulp.  Zombie sure made Tyler Manework double hard on these kills in the sequel, but this beastly rage doesn't add any extra meaning to the murders, it merely jacks up the gory violence instead of the horror.  In stark contrast to the prior film, Mane's work as Michael (and the scripted character) was vastly more expressive, involving and engaging as a silent role.  Instead of progression, HALLOWEEN II seems devoted to devolution of its characters and their world, which sure saps much of the potential horror fun from the film. 

Zombie made it clear he was not filming a remake of Rick Rosenthal's 1981 sequel to Carpenter's classic, and he spoke the truth but also fell into the same trap of keeping Laurie just a shattered victim on the run for ninety minutes.  Until this sequel's end, that is, when the franchise really hits the fan.  Family is forever says the tag line of HALLOWEEN II, and in Zombie's world this promise becomes a threat of eternal damnation — again, a swell idea which never gets executed in the script to live up to its dramatic potential.  Why?  Because Laurie is kept in the dark about her true identity as Michael's sister until too late in the story.  Only ghostly visions make the connection relevant for Michael who drives the action, Loomis knows the truth but saves it to sell his latest book while washing his hands of the bloody results, and Laurie reads it for herself so late that she only has time to react with nihilistic acceptance of her living lie.  In short, what should have, could have been a mind-bending, heart-pounding Greek family tragedy is fractured into disconnected fragments for most of the film, then abruptly shoved back together at its climax. 

Had Laurie discovered the truth about her family earlier in the story, her fall would have been compelling and perhaps truly tragic.  Then again, in Zombie's vision of Haddonfield, everyone within Michael's striking range has already fallen from grace, and if all one's characters are hanging from the bottom rung at the start of the show, their fall can only be a short and disappointing drop at the end.  All of Michael's vicious, animalistic slashing, crushing and dismembering fails to elicit horror if there isn't one pure life remaining to protect from his wrath.  Accordingly, Laurie's ultimate fall sadly becomes just the next inevitable step in her pre-ruined life, and the bloody confrontation with her family curse becomes an empty cipher instead of a iconic symbol of the horror at play.

What should have been better becomes merely more in HALLOWEEN II, a disappointing result for a rebooted franchise that was literally killed off when the prior owners stamped Michael Myers with the franchise tag and diluted a true horror cinema treasure.  I can't tell if Dimension Films cuffed Rob Zombie's creative growth to secure their own golden goose or if Zombie's heart was true but his aim off-target, but this sequel fails to achieve its potential on all fronts.  I continue to believe Rob Zombie has the goods as a filmmaker if he can follow his own vision unfettered by a franchise's demands, and HALLOWEEN II proves both aspects to be true.