On Friday, I went to see Halloween 2, and while the date went fine, the movie was, sadly, NOT GOOD. I generally like Rob Zombie as a director. I enjoyed House of 1000 Corpses. The Devil’s Rejects showed improvement by leaps and bounds. His ‘Halloween’ remake was, frankly, amazing. Which ultimately makes Halloween 2 all the more disappointing.

First things first–Zombie has a flair for characterization. The seedy, foul-mouthed Hellbilly Deluxe jackasses that inevitably make an appearance are trashily delightful and delightfully trashy. The actors are competent and mostly believable. The ‘tea party’ vision/nightmare was visually stunning.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much more to be delighted about in this film. The entire opening sequence is a ‘gotcha’ dream cop-out. Michael Meyers showed up exactly when you expected him to, unfailingly, so there was nothing innately scary about the attacks*, which essentially reduces them to gore porn. The murders themselves were unerringly gruesome, some of which made even me, the self-crowned Queen of Horror Films cringe. It furthermore seems this time that Zombie has invested Meyers with teleportation abilities, as it is the only reasonable explanation for how he goes from walking past an upstairs window to outside on the front porch in a stealthy attack in a matter of seconds.

The symbolism was overdone to the extreme: if you need to open your film with an explanation of what your symbol means, well, perhaps it isn’t very overtly symbolic. It got to the point where every time I saw a ‘ghostly’ Sherri Moon Zombie bedecked in a flowing white gown, leading a white horse somewhere, it felt like I was watching a Fleetwood Mac video.

Theoretically, this movie is about the ensuing madness and legacy that comes from a shattered family life and I can almost buy it…but not quite.

I would’ve much preferred to see Zombie take the Halloween franchise down the path that Carpenter originally intended–as an anthology series that released a new Halloween-themed storyline yearly, instead of yet again reviving a monster whom you’ve taken great pains to set up as a fragile-minded human, and pushing him into the realm of the supernatural, because no human walks away after having round after round of ammunition pumped into his chest. And if Michael Meyers is NOT human, well, then all of the human psyche symbolism truly devolves into nothing.

*As I wrote this, there was a man I don’t know standing outside my office window attempting to peek in, and that scared me much more than anything in this movie.