Sibling Rivalry

There is no scarier place place to set a horror story in than an elementary school or a hospital. The makers of Silent Hill knew this. So did John Carpenter when he wrote Halloween II. As is well known, there are few sequels that can even even hold a candle to the original (what does that expression mean anyway?). This film is no different. While being a decent slasher flick, it lost the suspense and charm of the first. Instead, it was replaced with gore and cheap scares. However, considering the movies that followed it, I can’t rate it too low. None of the Halloween sequels after Season of the Witch are even worth my time. That might be a risky thing to say on a horror review site, but it’s the way I feel.

Halloween II picks up exactly where the first one left off. Dr. Sam Loomis just unloaded a gun into Michael Myers, who had escaped from a mental hospital the night before. He falls off of a second story balcony, only to get up and escape again. Laurie is immediately brought to the local hospital to treat the wounds that she sustained in the first film, but Michael follows her to finish the job. The girl just can’t catch a break.

As I stated earlier, the film lacks all of the qualities that made the first one great. It is filled with jump scares, including the hand on the shoulder that you think belongs to the killer but actually belongs to someone else gag. It even has a cat scare. That’s right. A cat scare. I want to make a movie where the killer gets scared by a shrieking cat… Or a movie with a killer cat where the victims keep getting scared by people jumping out.

The movie also has excessive amounts of gore. This is not a bad thing in itself, but part of the reason the first Halloween was so terrifying was because of the lack of gore. It had gruesome deaths, but the audience mostly just saw the aftermath. In the sequel, TWO characters get stabbed in the eye with a hypodermic needle. There is a pair of beautiful breasts that get their face scalded by being repeatedly dunked into boiling water. Myers even takes the time to strap a nurse to a table and drains her blood using an intravenous needle and tube. This is not the Michael Myers we came to love in the first film.

The movie isn’t all bad though. There are many parts worth noting, including the scene where Myers breaks through a glass door without breaking his stride. There’s also the hilarious scene where a character slips in the pool of the nurse’s blood and cracks his head. All of these pale in comparison to the revelation that Laurie is actually Michael Myers’ little sister, regardless of the horrible exposition that reveals it. This is the reason the sequel has any merit in my opinion.

If you know anything about Halloween franchise, you would know that the film was never intended to have a sequel, let alone seven. It was originally meant to be the first part of a series of films to be released every year during Halloween, each with a different, unrelated story. However, due to studio greed a sequel was made. It is painfully obvious by the way movie ends that this film was never intended to be made into a franchise. Loomis sacrifices himself to kill Myers by blowing them both up. It completely brought the notion of Samhain full circle and was a fitting ending to the story. Instead, the studio decided to turn one of the most terrifying villains into a joke. I mean, he was even defeated by Busta Rhymes…