The Night HE Came Home

Year: 2009

Director: Rob Zombie

Cast: Scout Taylor-Compton, Tyler Mane, Malcolm McDowell

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Trick or treat, mother f**kers! It may have taken a year longer than it was supposed to, but my All Hallow’s Eve present for you all is the final entry in our Halloween marathon! To be completely honest, I would have gotten to it sooner, but I’ve seen Rob Zombie’s Halloween II before and knew better than to approach it unarmed. It took me so long to psychologically prepare that it was almost the next October, so I decided to save it up to use as an endcap to my all-too brief Exorcist marathon.

[EN: For the record, this review is of the Director’s Cut, which seems to be the version that’s most readily available these days.]

So, Halloween II. Back in the days when a remake could actually get a theatrical sequel, not that it happened much anyway. The only one I can recall is the prequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, and then a handful of DTV follow-ups to Fright Night and I Spit On Your Grave for some reason. I can see why Rob Zombie’s Halloween was one of the lucky few. As shrill and mean-spirited as it is, it struck a chord with the edgier youth demographic. It’s popular with a small but rabid group, and it’s the prerogative of the Akkad family to keep pumping these films out as long as there are wallets to receive them. But boy do I wish they hadn’t made Halloween II, because that story had nowhere to go and it does exactly that.

At least there’s no Ken Foree diarrhea scene.

In Halloween II, Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) is living with the only other survivor of the Michal Myers (Tyler Mane) rampage two years ago – Annie (Danielle Harris) – and her dad, Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif). Still dealing with the trauma of that fateful Halloween night and newly reeling from the revelation in fame-hungry Dr. Loomis’ (Malcolm McDowell) tell-all book that she’s Michael Myers’ sister, Laurie goes through life vaulting between the equally pleasant poles of Nasal Shouting and Complete Emotional Breakdown. 

She’s plagued by nightmares, and of course Michael picks this moment to show up again, emerging from the backwoods looking beardy, filthy, and uncannily like Rob Zombie himself. He wreaks havoc by killing her new friends whose names I didn’t bother to learn, as well as some amusingly random townsfolk. So yeah, Michael is haunted by visions of his mom (Sheri Moon Zombie), who’s convincing him to kill people, kidnap his sister, and also hang with a dream horse, because hey- Rob Zombie had to fit his wife in there somewhere, I guess.

And she needed an excuse to dress like she was going to a Fleetwood Mac concert.

One thing I will say about Halloween II is that it improves greatly upon its predecessor, though that bar is so low you could crawl over it. But in attempting to craft his twisted new mythology for the Myers siblings, Zombie finally lets go of the alit vestiges of John Carpenter’s property, freeing himself from slavishly copying the original film, only with more Annoying. The unsettlingly brutal kills are toned down, as is the lewd clowning of every single character. In fact, everything is toned down, because Halloween II is barely a movie.

Once you get through the 25-minute dream sequence that opens the movie (it’s supposed to be jarring, but it’s mostly just an excuse to replace exposition with chase sequences and give Octavia Spencer one of her final sassy Black Coworker roles before she starred in The Help – this scene is so obviously not trying that her character is actually named “Octavia”), you’re stuck on a rockabilly merry-go-round for an hour, cycling endlessly between any of these three scenes:

1) Dr. Loomis is a giant, throbbing asshole to his publicist while on tour for his book, simultaneously adding nothing to the narrative and demolishing his character from the ground up.

2) Laurie Strode shrieks/cries/vomits at/on her friends/therapist/self.

3) Somebody around town does vulgar, despicable things for 2 ½ minutes, then Michael Myers teleports in and murders them.

The actual plot, insofar as this shattered pile of unfathomable motivations can be called a “plot,” doesn’t kick in until the final 20 minutes. It’s actually pretty reminiscent of the dire Halloween 5, down to the detail that the characters go to a pointless barn dance in the beginning of Act 3, only to lazily drift over to the true location of the finale. And then it’s just… over.

I guess I should thank it for not sticking around.

Although Halloween II is less grating overall than Halloween 2007, that doesn’t mean Zombie’s not up to his usual “Tobe Hooper turned up to 11” tricks. Every single cluttered, dingy set either looks like a punk club’s bathroom or an episode of Atlanta Trailer Park Hoarders. And every single character is an unlikeable fountain of vitriol, whether they’re facing a serial killer or eating pizza at the kitchen table. People in Halloween II don’t talk. They either shout or they whine or they die. There’s no in between, no calm before the storm. Everything is just storm.

It certainly doesn’t help that the ensemble has less of a grip on the material this time around. Harris and Taylor-Compton can’t find the shreds of humanity they clung to in their roles last time, because there aren’t any. And Malcolm McDowell is completely wasted in a role that violates continuity to resurrect him, only to have him do nothing useful at all (to be fair, that’s  pretty much what they did with Donald Pleasance the last three times). Then there’s Sheri Moon Zombie, who talks to her onscreen son like he’s a girlfriend she ran into a Starbucks. Even the infallible Brad Dourif can’t find his footing and serves up a huge tray of ham during a supposedly heartfelt moment.

While I could go on and on about the obvious metaphors, the mask that makes Myers look like Sideshow Bob, or the ultimate violation of the character by having him speak, and any number of vicious complaints, let’s end the review on an uncharacteristically positive note, shall we? Rob Zombie really does know how to shoot moonlit streets at night, and Halloween II is chock full of beautiful suburban imagery with pristine, almost elegant lighting. So that’s nice, I guess. It certainly helps in making this sequel much more bearable It’s undoubtedly a bad movie, but its bisected narrative helps it fly by and the jagged tonal edges are at least sanded down a little bit. ¡Viva Halloween II!

Killer: Michael Myers (Tyler Mane)

Final Girl: Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton)

Best Kill: Michael Myers dies, meaning we won’t have to deal with this incarnation of him anymore.

Sign of the Times: The fact that this remake sequel even exists is a pretty clear sign it’s the 2000’s.

Scariest Moment: After a car crash, a paramedic spits blood from his mouth and shouts the F word for approximately five minutes, and you realize this is how the movie is gonna be the whole time.

Weirdest Moment: Weird Al Yankovic has a cameo in this movie

Champion Dialogue: “Bad taste is the petrol that drives the American dream.”

Body Count: 19

1. Coroner Hooks dies in a car crash.
2. Gary Scott is decapitated with a glass shard.
3. Nurse Octavia is stabbed to death.
4. Nurse has her eyes gouged out offscreen.
5. Buddy is axed in the back.
6. Floyd is impaled on antlers.
7. Sherman is stabbed to death.
8. Jazlean is stabbed to death. 
9. Howard has his face stamped in.
10. Lou has his head smashed into a wall.
11. Misty Dawn is repeatedly mashed into a glass case.
12. Wolfie is stabbed in the back.
13. Harley is strangled.
14. Deputy Neale has his neck snapped.
15. Annie is stabbed to death.
16. Mya is stabbed in the stomach.
17. Becks is thrown through a windshield.
18. Dr. Loomis is stabbed in the gut.
19. Michael Myers is shot to death.

TL;DR: Halloween II is boring, vulgar, and mishandled, but at least it's better than the last one.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1366
Reviews In This Series
Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1989)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)

Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)

Christmas In July: Slay Bells Ring, Are You Listening?

Year: 2012

Director: Steven C. Miller

Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Jaime King, Donal Logue

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Yeah, they remade Silent Night, Deadly Night. It’s one that kind of slipped through the cracks, late to the remake party in 2012. Although the retitled Silent Night is a loose remake if there ever was one (and boy have there been a few), it shares enough elements with the original (like a Santa killer punishing the naughty, which some of the sequels couldn’t even manage, as well as an antler-based kill, a child gifted with a bloody weapon, etc.) that it at least proves that the original was on its mind, as opposed to the Sex Kitten romps of Prom Night and Sorority Row. That’s by far the best thing I can say about it, because – keeping in tone with the rest of the franchise – it kinda really sucks.

I’m so glad I’m finished with these garbage fires they called movies.

In Silent Night, Deputy Aubrey Bradimore (Jaime King) is forced to work on Christmas Eve when her coworker fails to show up. A line is dropped about this being her first Christmas without her husband, and by “dropped” I mean “hurled off a cliff” because this is literally never mentioned again. Together, she and Sheriff Cooper (Malcolm McDowell, essentially reprising his role as the scenery-masticating Dr. Loomis in Rob Zombie’s Halloween) discover that a killer dressed as Santa Claus has been rampaging through their little town of Cryer, Wisconsin punishing the naughty. This being a slasher movie (a subgenre we finally return to after two hyperbolically bizarre detours), Cooper elects not to call the FBI and handle the threat on his own.

Their search is hampered by a parade in which nearly every able-bodied adult man in town is asked to don a Santa suit, but they narrow down the suspects to a group of bad Santas that would make Fred Claus proud, including a wandering vagrant and a local coke dealer.

You’d think they’d find the killer with ease, considering he’s wearing giant steampunk goggles, but you would be wrong.

To be fair, Silent Night has a lot in common with SNDN1. It’s just as mean-spirited and poorly acted, but it lacks that veneer of 80’s charm that makes the original an enduring mainstay of the slasher genre. While SNDN featured a few too many rape scenes for my taste, it was a loopy, idiosyncratic film that told a strangely detailed, unwittingly compelling story about the societal ills that molded our apple-cheeked Santa killer. Silent Night just pulls a reverse Rob Zombie, stripping away the villain’s backstory and filling in that extra run time with an extra helping of nasty-minded sleaze.

There’s just something deeply depressing about watching a horde of wooden, amateur hour performers get chopped up in 2012 rather than 1984. It might just be the buffer of time making the legwarmered, permed 80’s seem a couple degrees askew from reality, but I think I can blame two movies in particular: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003 for igniting the remake boom, and Scream for rendering it basically impossible to make a straightforward slasher ever again. By virtue of being a remake, a movie openly challenges the original film with the unspoken claim that it will either be better or at least satisfyingly different. When it is neither, it doubles down on disappointment. And Silent Night is neither in a spectacularly unpleasant way.

This movie is just plain vicious. In addition to being callously exploitative (a topless woman runs around for what feels like hours before being fed into a wood chipper; while slasher movies are best known for boobs and blood, titillation and mutilation are actually pretty rarely in the same frame save for the sleazier entries – The Prowler, Bloody Moon, etc.), it’s horribly misguided.

Horror films always need to walk on eggshells when it comes to killing a child, and while certain slashers have succeeded (SNDN among them), the death of a minor here is despicably prolonged, involving electrocuting her with a cattle prod until she stars foaming at the mouth before finishing her off. It is at this point where the over-the-top violence of Silent Night crosses the line. Hell, it throws a tarp over the line hoping you won’t notice, and dashes right on over it. Its obscene, boundary-free eagerness for butchery is vaguely sickening.

And I’m someone who watched Maniac without batting an eye.

I will, however, give Silent Night points for its occasional doses of pure, inexplicable lunacy.  There’s certainly a whiff of bad-good charm around Malcolm McDowell’s flagrant disinterest in the project, but by far my favorite scene belongs to the pre-slaughtered 13-year-old- girl and her mom. The spoiled little brat knocks her mother’s heart medication to the floor (!) and demands “F**k church! I want to go to the mall!” instantly becoming the most compellingly unlikeable child this side of Veruca Salt. She’s awesome. And then of course we have a whole scene lit with red and green emergency lights like it’s a Saw holiday special, and then there’s the fact that every time Jaime King walks through her impossibly idyllic small town, greeting everyone she sees and smiling at the whirl of Christmas activity, you expect her to burst into song à la Belle in Beauty and the Beast.

As you well know, I am a sucker for crazy camp, so this goes a long way toward helping me survive the dismal disarray of the rest of the film. And to be fair, there is some incredible gore that would be a real treat if Silent Night hadn’t poisoned the well by frontloading its most distasteful killings. A gushing leg wound and a head split by an axe are two particularly convincing Grand Guignol effects of the highest order.

The movie would at least be a passable horror roller coaster if it weren’t for the out-of-control tone that nose dives into torture porny grunge every chance it gets. Or the story that aimlessly wanders around, sloughing off subplots like a snake shedding its skin. Or the anonymous killer performer that lumbers around like a plumber who just soiled his pants. Ugh, what a waste. I’m terribly disappointed to end our Christmas in July segment like this, but Silent Night is just another abortive holiday thriller with enough potential energy to keep me on the hook, but not enough ambition and drive to do anything with it.

TL;DR: Silent Night is a thoroughly unpleasant, mean-spirited watch.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1094
Reviews In This Series
Silent Night, Deadly Night (Sellier Jr., 1984)
Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (Harry, 1987)
Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (Hellman, 1989)
Silent Night, Deadly Night IV: Initiation (Yuzna, 1990)
Silent Night, Deadly Night V: The Toy Maker (Kitrosser, 1991)
Silent Night (Miller, 2012)

You Can't Kill The Boogeyman

Year: 2007

Director: Rob Zombie

Cast: Scout Taylor-Compton, Malcolm McDowell, Tyler Mane

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Steady breathing helped me through Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. During Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, I bit the bullet so hard that I blew off my lower jaw. But if there’s a franchise film waiting for me that is somehow more unendurably agonizing than Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of Halloween, I’d rather slit my own throat with a steak knife like Kellan Lutz in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 than put it in my eyes.

I actually tried to approach this one with an open mind, considering that I knew it was inevitable in my marathon and that my opinion may have changed in the six years since I saw this film. Guess what? It didn’t. It makes me physically ill to think about the fact that I own this film, curse my completionist compulsions. Well, might as well get this review over with, so I never have to think about this film ever again.

Let the healing process begin.

Halloween tells the sordid tale of masked murderer Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) and his pursuit of Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) and her friends Annie (Danielle Harris, who played seven-year-old Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4 and 5) and Lynda (Kristina Klebe) one fateful Halloween night in Haddonfield, Illinois. Oh, but first let’s give that faceless cypher of pure evil a backstory – because we saw Halloween but didn’t actually understand it. Could it even be possible that Dr. Loomis didn’t monologue hard enough on that topic?

Cue 45 minutes of pointless shrieking and bloodshed, where young Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch) deals with his stripper mom, his abusive stepdad, his skanky sister, and school bullies while trying to care for his baby sister Laurie. Yep, of all the things to grab from the Halloween sequels, they picked that little nugget. Why not just throw in Paul Rudd and the Cult of Thorn for good measure? I could accept this meaningless diversion as a new, if unappealing, take on an iconic character except for the fact that, halfway through, the film abruptly slams into a Cliff’s Notes speedthrough of John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Laurie Strode’s greatest hits play out, careening from scene to scene with exact shot matching and dialogue quotations. This crude summation of the source material completely undermines the opening sequence. It’s difficult to imply that your serial killer has a dark backstory when you’re carbon copying a story that requires none at all. The film’s absurd sympathy for its central psychopath utterly obliterates the character of Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), who is yoked to the psychological damage perspective of the material yet forced to contort into the Donald Pleasance mold of frantic harbinger of doom. It’s an embarrassing mess too keen on paying grubby homage to the original to properly tend to its own machinations.

I guess it’s too much to ask that one of these marathons end on a high note.

To say that this film tarnishes the legacy of the original is to merely scratch the surface of its film-disintegrating flaws. Rob Zombie extends every sequence to a punishing length, attempting to drive his points home via sheer quantity. This is a relatively streamlined slasher tale that takes 110 grueling minutes to tell, all because Zombie can’t throttle his self-indulgent excess. Halloween is a monument to the director’s inflated ego, and I didn’t even watch the extended cut, many scenes of which are actually necessary to understand the chopped-up storyline, but which sours the pot with an unnecessary, ugly rape sequence. Also, it’s not like I’m champing at the bit to spend more time with this flick. It’s sweltering this far up Rob Zombie’s ass.

The experience of watching Halloween is just brutal. Not in a Last House on the Left “show me violence to abhor violence” way, but in a pointlessly mean attempt at shoving the series over the top. Michael’s relentless pounding (he traffics in Costco kills – you might only need one stab or head slam, but you’re gonna get twenty) pushes and pushes until it’s just a dull, monotonous roar that ceases to be unsettling or even recognizable as distinct action. Of course, this is a damn sight preferable to the actual roar of noise that accompanies the film, a ceaseless cacophony of demented shouting, sirens, screaming, screeching, and thumping that will takes twelve Advils and a lifetime of therapy to forget.

It’s – quite literally in some cases – overkill.

Of course, this all plays into Rob Zombie’s deranged redneck aesthetic. In his world, every human being is either a lewd, angry lowlife or a lewd, shrieking harpy. His M.O. seems to be “do exactly the same thing as before, only more vulgar.” We get a wholly arbitrary scene of Michael’s mom stripping, implied incest, a sweatily extended topless sequence of almost every female character (including Danielle Harris, who is definitely not seven years old anymore), and a heaping pile of F-bombs thrown at innocuous scenes – including the “grave is missing” and “get me a beer” sequences, inexplicably. 

Some lines seem to be constructed entirely by spinning  wheel of vulgarities, like the sublimely nonsensical [NSFW “That’s some deep-ass serious faggoty-ass shit.”] Even virginal Laurie is a shrill wretch who likes to joke about molestation and mock her babysittee Tommy Doyal (who is also a little turd, though his screen time is far shorter). They even manage to muck up offscreen sweetheart Ben Traemer. It’s heartbreaking.

Unfortunately, Zombie’s attempt to create a Tobe Hooper-esque atmosphere of cultural depravity merely fosters an environment where the evil of Michael Myers utterly fails to stand out. Among this leering, lecherous bunch, Michael is about as provocative as Mr. Bean. And with Laurie off pretending to bang Annie in front of some third graders, there’s no force of good to root for either. Halloween is completely rudderless.

It’s downright repugnant, but worst of all, it’s graceless. I could handle a nasty flick with dirty intentions, but the thing isn’t even made particularly well at most levels. The script is a bludgeoning tool, slamming the audience with exposition like Laurie telling Tommy, “I’m your babysitter.” The documentary-like shooting style only surfaces when it will most wrench you out of the movie (sometimes obscuring entire scenes behind irrelevant foreground objects). And it has the sheer gall to drag Carpenter’s score into this mess, lifting entire tracks in a futile attempt to polish the turd. 

The film’s wretched devotion to the original even forces the young actresses to use corded phones, which are about as foreign to 2007 as the cotton gin. I don’t know which is worse, the blatant copying or the tactless additions. Every second you watch this movie without turning it off, the devil’s fist grips your soul a little tighter.

They even disembowel “Mr. Sandman” when you least expect it. RIP.

OK, now’s the time where my shriveled heart grows three sizes and I scrape up some reluctant praise. Occasionally, Zombie will compose a shot that doesn’t repel the eye – including my favorite, a frozen-in-time shot of the paramedics arriving at the Myers house. Though of course it is deflated by a finale that sees young Michael turn directly to the camera like he’s Kevin Spacey in House of Cards. And I must admit there’s some pretty decent acting going on. 

Taylor-Compton has enough charisma to garner a modicum of sympathy for her plight (though she isn’t even in the same dimension as Jamie Lee Curtis), Danielle Harris throws herself full tilt into the physicality of her role so well that she earned an unscripted survival for her character, and Malcolm McDowell does what he can to keep the Loomis character from totally splitting in two, and delivers one of the film’s funniest lines with an excellent, off-the-cuff earnestness. Of course, he butchers the iconic Boogeyman line. Though let it be know that I blame absolutely none of the actors for any deficiencies in bringing this putrid, inhuman script to life.

OK, I’m calming down. The one unequivocally good element of the film is Michael Myers’ design and stature. Tyler Mane is a staggering hulk of a man and his sheer size provides intimidation that the scrip can only reach in its wet dreams. Honestly, the scariest thing about the film is that Mane is actually that size in real life. 

I’d hate to have been on his high school basketball team. 

And the mask itself is a pretty slick design, with an edgy decayed look that actually helps me understand what Rob Zombie was attempting to accomplish when he set out on his project. Then there's the rest of the film, which just makes me want to rage vomit. 

So there you have it, Michael Myers has been pulled into the modern age, however unsuccessfully it may be. I’d be celebrating the end of another successful marathon, but of course this puddle of donkey milk was so lucrative, they went ahead and asked Rob Zombie to shoot a sequel.

Scratch what I said. Pure evil is real.

Killer: Michael Myers (Tyler Mane)

Final Girl: Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton)

Best Kill: About five seconds in, the spirit of John Carpenter’s Halloween is eviscerated.

Sign of the Times: Awful remakes were pretty much the cinematic currency of the mid to late 2000’s.

Scariest Moment: Right when it seems to end, you realize there’s 20 minutes left.

Weirdest Moment: Michael performs his first murder in a KISS T-shirt.

Champion Dialogue: “I got a Taco Deluxe Supreme talkin’ back at me, so I’m gonna be a while.”

Body Count: (Before reading this number, remember that high body counts are usually a sign of desperation and that the original Halloween boasts a measly 5) 21, not including 2 bloody attempted murders.

1. Wesley is beaten to death with a tree branch.
2. Ronnie gets his throat slit.
3. Steven is beaten to death with a bat.
4. Judith is stabbed in the gut and slashed to death.
5. Nurse has her throat slashed.
6. Mrs. Myers shoots herself.
7. Security Guard #1 is smashed with a chain.
8. Security Guard #2 is smashed with a chain.
9. Security Guard #3 has his head smashed into a wall.
10. Security Guard #4 is shot.
11. Security Guard #5 has her throat slit.
12. Gloria has her throat slit.
13. Ismael is downed and has a TV slammed onto his head.
14. Joe Grizzly is stabbed in the gut.
15. Bob is pinned to a wall through the chest.
16. Lynda is strangled.
17. Mr. Strode is punched in the face with a knife.
18. Mrs. Strode has her neck snapped.
19. Paul is stabbed to death.
20. Cop #1 is stabbed in the back.
21. Cop #2 is stabbed to death.

TL;DR: Halloween is a vicious, inept film that destroys every last bit of goodwill the franchise had left, which wasn't much to begin with.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1818
Reviews In This Series
Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1989)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)

Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)