A Year of Bad Movies # 3 — “Halloween 2″
Halloween II — 2009
Metacritic Score: 46 out of 100
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 22 out of 100
IMDB Score: 5.6 out of 10
I’ll be the first to admit I wasn’t too impressed with writer/director Rob Zombie’s initial take at the “Halloween” franchise.
Am I the only one who thinks that Michael Myers is starting to look more like Rob Zombie then Michael Myers?
Too much emphasis on the back story during the first half of the movie and a relatively by-the-books representation of the original film’s story during the second half left me underwhelmed and just a little bored.
I didn’t watch the film in the theater, though. And I was a fan of Zombie’s other two films, “House of 1000 Corpses” and “The Devil’s Rejects.” These two qualifiers convinced me to take a chance on “Halloween II” in the hopes I wouldn’t have to include it in my “Year of Bad Movies” experiment.
Mr. Zombie, you let me down.
Or maybe I let myself down.
“Halloween II” is a well-shot, atmospheric movie that offers an interesting take on a classic horror film monster. It is exactly the type of film I would have loved ten years ago. Today, though, I was struck by how tedious and joyless the film played.
Now some might be shocked at my desire to find joy in a film that features a masked man (wearing a William Shatner mask no less, tying it in to yesterday’s film) killing helpless teenagers, but we’re talking a different kind of joy here.
When I was a younger kid, I loved horror movies — the more dark and twisted the better. For a while there, my favorite type of horror film was the slasher film. While I was too young to enjoy the genre’s heyday during the ‘80s, I was still able to experience the second renaissance slasher films found in the late ‘90s.
As my sister and I consumed every new cheesy, low-budget slasher film that was made available for our eager eyes’ viewing pleasure, I found myself loosing touch with reality.
Now, I’ll never make the claim that horror films corrupt the minds of the youth (provided they are watched with parental guidance), but there is no denying that a childhood spent watching horror films left me desensitized to violence.
The result of this phenomenon has left me constantly searching for a scary movie that will actually scare me. I actually get jealous when I hear friends talking about how they don’t watch horror movies because they get scared too easily.
All I can do is sit back and remember being a child cowering under the covers during “The Omen.”
Still being a fan of horror movies, I have been left with no choice but to modify my approach when judging what is and what isn’t a good scary movie. I can’t base this on scares alone so I am left looking for joy.
In horror movies, I search for a sense of fun (either from humor written into the script to counteract the scares or proof that the filmmakers had a blast making the movie as evidenced by inventive death sequences or creative twists on old clichés).
“Halloween II,” for all its cinematic impressiveness, came off as a joyless, trip down a bloody path that offered no new sights or sounds. It was the same tired kills that seemed designed only to scare teenagers and tantalize those twisted psychos who get off on violence. In other words, it just wasn’t for me anymore.
