Halloween II (2009)

Rob Zombie's Halloween II arrives as the tenth entry in a franchise that has been exhumed, embalmed, and propped back on its feet more times than anyone cares to count. This one concerns Laurie Strode, one year after the Haddonfield killings, shuffling through therapy and hallucinations while her brother Michael drifts toward town for another family reunion. The film is grimy, mean-spirited, and shot with an indifference to beauty that borders on hostility. It is also, and this matters for our ledger, almost entirely free of instruction. Nobody here is trying to improve us.

The closest thing to a thesis is Dr. Loomis, reworked as a sellout who tours bookstores signing copies about the murders he failed to prevent. The public jeers him, and the film takes a modest pleasure in watching a man monetize other people's grief. That is character assassination, not economic argument, and it never hardens into a systemic complaint. The trauma material is handled with the same disinterest in advocacy. Laurie's PTSD, her visions, her eventual confinement in a psychiatric ward, all of it exists to generate dread and one final, unsettling grin. We are not being taught anything about mental health. We are being sold a haunted house.

Elsewhere there is nothing to report. The cast is white, the town is white, and no one pauses to remark on it. Race does not enter the frame as a subject. Neither does the climate, the body, or the closet. There is no revisionist impulse toward the historical record, and no sermon waits at the end. Zombie has made a picture that wants to disturb us and nothing else, which in this particular accounting is its own kind of distinction. The survivors suffer, the killer kills, and the credits roll without a single lesson attached. We have seen worse. We have also seen more earnest, and earnestness is the heavier burden.

A grim, gory exercise with no interest in the culture wars it might have joined, Halloween II sits near the bottom of our scale, and it seems perfectly content there. The film offers violence, a white horse, and a ghost mother, and declines to explain any of them. We respect the refusal, even as we note the poverty of everything else. It is not a good film. It is not a preachy one either, which is a different matter, and for our purposes the only matter that counts. Some vintages are simply sour, and no amount of solemn tasting will improve them. We score it accordingly and move on to the next bottle.

That concludes the assessment. No further notes are required, and none will be offered. The cellar is dark, the shelves are dusty, and the evening is late. We file this one under horror, mean-spirited, and unbothered by the concerns of its moment. It will not be revisited. It was not asked to be. The record stands as written, and we close the book on Haddonfield with a steady hand and a tired sigh, ready for whatever the next screening demands of us and our dwindling patience.

In closing, the film is what it is: a slasher sequel that never once lectures its audience, never once asks to be praised for its sensitivity, and never once pretends to be anything other than a bloody, unpleasant night at the movies. We can work with that. We have worked with far less. The evaluation is complete, the score is logged, and the sommelier's glass is empty. Good evening to the Myers family, wherever they may be. We are done here, and we mean it this time, until the next installment arrives to disturb our rest and test our resolve once more. The end. Truly. We have nothing further to add to the record, and no appetite left for another pour. Goodnight.