Halloween II Directors Cut

I was one of the five people who genuinely liked Rob Zombie’s Halloween II (down from being one of the dozen people who liked his original). Hell I liked it so much I bought the album by the fake psychobilly band featured in the film. Now for the record I’m a pretty big Rob Zombie Apologist. I was one of the few folks who liked his original Halloween remake for all its flaws, The Devil’s Rejects is a truly great horror film, and House Of 1000 Corpses is fun to watch when your drunk. Hell I even found nice things to say about his direct to video goofy practical joke of a cartoon The Haunted World Of El Super Beasto. Not many nice things true, but I found them. And I think I might literally be the only one on that account.

While most thought Halloween II was nothing but two hours of gore and white trash behaving badly, which to be fair isn’t entirely untrue. I found it to be one of the best most original (and yes I know that writing that word in conjunction to a sequel to a sequel to a remake takes me to Armond White levels of crazy) slasher films of the decade. A nasty, occasionally truly scary horror movie, with a perverse imagination, and some really disturbing imagery (The movie’s worth seeing if only for a brief silent film interlude involving a family of shrunken pumpkin heads). While a lot of people where bothered by Zombie’s stylistic excess, cast of rehensable rednecks, and stiff middle finger to series canon, I couldn’t help but find the whole thing pretty exhilarating.

Zombie’s directors cut complicates things thought. It makes his problematic film even more problematic. All the nice things I have to say about the flick are true, and I still say it has a few of the most effective horror sequences this side of The Strangers, but now it has some problems I can’t quite justify.

Not that all the blame can go on the additions. The film was always flawed, between The Strip Club Massacre that manages not to merely be the definition of gratuitous but indeed the thesaurus of it. To the fact that nearly every character demonstrates at one point or another the ability to teleport, to the charaters who might as well have fodder written on their foreheads, and Michael Myer’s new preternatural ability to hunt down and slaughter anyone who has ever so much as served Laurie Strode at Taco Bell, Halloween II was always kind of a sloppy movie. The added hateful bitchery just kind of exacerbates things (that means make em worse Shaun).

The great Outlaw Vern summed it up thusly

The new cut is quite a bit different, but mostly what’s added is unpleasantness to make you not like the characters or enjoy the experience of watching the movie. There are several scenes and extensions added so that Laurie – who had a sweet friendship with fellow survivor Annie in the theatrical cut – is angry at Annie and they’re always fighting. Most of the new material involves Laurie screaming, crying and swearing, getting in arguments with Annie, then screaming FUUUUCKKKK!

...

But all it does is emphasize Zombie’s biggest weakness as a writer: he seems to think that having sympathetic characters is some kind of sell out move and that it’s somehow subversive to bum you out by forcing you to watch obnoxious, hateful people swear at each other.

The film “restores” fifteen minutes to Zombie's runtime and I’m willing to bet that fourteen of them are Strode screaming fuck at the people who care about her like an unconscionable bitch. The rest is used to make his bizarre ass ending even more bizarre ass. The added hatefullness in Laurie's character does make the ending twist come less out of nowhere, but that doesn't make it anymore pleasant to actually watch.

The thing is that Zombie appears to have forgotten what made his first Halloween remake work. The thing that made me forgive that movies many flaws was the fact that at the end of the day, I liked The Strodes, and didn't want to see anything bad happen to them. And when Myer's attacked the pit of my stomach dropped not because "It was about to get fucked up!" but because I truly dreaded what was happening. There's none of that here. (with the exception of Brad Douriff)

But despite all this, the thing I like about Zombie’s movies is they’re so tactile. Exaggerated yes, but like the nineteen thirties cartoons and black and white horror films he loves to put in the backgrounds of his movies, his movies feel deliberate, hand made. Places like the Java Hole, where Strode works, feel like a place you would actually like to hang out. The bar where the climatic halloween party is held is over the top yeah, but at the same time its kind of cool. I don’t know about you but I’d like to go to that Halloween party. Psychobilly, naked women, booze, and costumes that look like they where put together by a Hollywood production designer. I could go with that.

Say what you will about them but Zombie’s films aren’t antiseptic. And Yeah occasionally this aesthetic makes him do stupid things like hang a picture of Charles Mason above Laurie Strodes bed, despite the fact that a woman whose entire family was butchered by a serial killer wouldn’t be likely to let a huge potrait of a serial killer dominate her room. But they occasionally stumble across a feeling of reality There’s something about his images I just like to watch. They’re tactile.

Still despite all the flaws, both original and additional, I stubbornly like Halloween II. For all the stuff we like to talk about in regards to movies, something remains very primal and binary about them. They work or they don’t. Halloween II for whatever reason, despite all its problems works for me. I hope whoever follows up for the third go round has the balls to follow through on the genuinely mean twist Zombie pulls at the end of the film.

Halloween II remains enormously flawed as a film, and Rob Zombie flawed as a filmmaker, but damnit I kind of like them both.