Halloween II (2009) (Unrated Director's Cut)

31 Days of Horror

I didn't grow up a Michael Myers fan.  I'm more of a Jason guy, because I like my slasher films ridiculously stupid.  I have always liked the original Halloween (1978), though.  I've been slowly getting around to the rest of the Halloween series over the past few trick-or-treat seasons, and this year I watched Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007); it had its moments, certainly, but I thought it was an interesting failure instead of the bad-ass re-imagining that I was hoping for.  I had heard that Zombie went off on his own for the sequel, though, which sounded like something that would play to his strengths more.  Does it?

Halloween II (2009) picks up right where the last film left off.  The police have arrived at the scene, and they are packing everybody up in ambulances.  Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) is a hot mess of blood and tears, but she is alive and she has shot Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) in the goddamned face.  And chest.  And she's stabbed him a bunch.  Laurie is sent to the hospital to recover and Michael is sent off to the morgue.  But a funny thing happens on the way to the morgue --- the car crashes into a cow!  And, as the legends foretold, yonder bovine sacrifice will once again raise up he that is eeeveeel!!!  Or, in English, Michael wakes up and heads to the hospital to share a little stabby-stabby with Laurie and whoever else wants to share. 

Okay, now it's your turn to stab someone.  Yay, sharing!

And boy, does he share!  Security guards, doctors, nurses...Michael puts on a bit of a laceration seminar for the staff and just when he's about to do the same for Laurie, she wakes up.  That's right, we had ourselves an old-fashioned "it was only a dream" moment.  It turns out that Laurie did, indeed survive her encounter with Michael Myers one or two years ago.  Since her family was brutally murdered, she now lives with Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) and his daughter/her friend, Annie (Danielle Harris), who somehow survived the fact that she looked awfully dead in the last film.  The trauma hasn't been easy for anyone, but Laurie is on a nightmare-a-night diet and has turned into a (justifiably) angry young woman with finger-quotes rebellious new friends.

Whoa!  Those rebels got to pose for a picture with the lead singer of Soul Asylum?

While Laurie's been bitching and moaning about surviving what appears (to her) to be a motiveless crime, Michael Myers has also been recuperating.  Apparently, that whole cow revival bit actually happened, too.  Michael's been living in fields and in wooded areas, healing his wounds and growing a pretty enormous beard.

THIS is why homeless people are frightening

Michael has been having dreams, too, although they might just be hallucinations.  He sees his late mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) and his younger self (Chase Wright Vanek), often accompanied by a white horse and snow globe effects, and they tell Michael that it's time to bring Laurie home.  And by "home," they of course mean...well, that's not exactly clear.  "Murder," perhaps?  And why is this a pressing need after all this time?  Don't ask, because nobody else will.  Once again, on Halloween, Michael Myers returns to Haddonfield to murder anyone he meets on his way to finding Laurie.  And, once again, Laurie doesn't get why all this is happening.  But she's been having these crazy visions of a lady in white, with a blonde son and a white horse...

The acting in Halloween II isn't as good as the last film.  A big part of that is because Chase Wright Vanek replaced Daeg Faerch as Lil' Michael; replacing your best actor with a better-looking but less menacing one is not a winning choice.  I'm sure the change was made because Faerch literally outgrew his role, but that was still disappointing.  Vanek was okay, I guess, but his character's presence in this movie was waaay overplayed and nowhere near as clever as the script believed.  I was impressed by the more emotive performance from Tyler Mane, though; his furious grunts definitely disturbed me.  Sheri Moon Zombie was very...ethereal, I guess.  Her character didn't require much acting, and she didn't throw in any extra.

Kill, darling.  And shake the snow globe.

Taylor Scout-Compton had a lot juicier role in Halloween II than she had last time, and I really regret that.  She wasn't bad --- she did what I imagine the script asked of her quite well --- but she was annoying as all hell and I wanted her to die.  I was impressed by Danielle Harris' supporting role; Harris once again played a victim extremely well, but she also showed off some solid dramatic chops.  Malcolm McDowell's character had an abrupt shift from concerned doctor to complete prick, and it wasn't much fun to watch.  I liked seeing more of Brad Dourif in this film, even if he is far more capable than his role hints at.  He is the closest I have seen to a normal person in a Rob Zombie movie, and that was refreshing.

Just look at that handlebar and tell me he can't handle more!

As far as newcomers to the series go, I liked Brea Grant and Angela Trimbur as Laurie's rebel friends.  They were pretty easy parts to play, but they came across as young ladies who would have been fun/trouble in college.  They also had a pretty sweet set of Rocky Horror Halloween costumes.

Note: it is very difficult to find this when Google Image searching "Halloween II Rocky Horror"

In case you were wondering who the moron in the wolf man costume was, it was Matt Bush taking yet another stab at becoming this generation's Seth Green, and doing a pretty decent job of it.  Margot Kidder was this movie's first entry in the WTF casting Olympics, and she was fine as Laurie's therapist.  Howard Hesseman played against type *eyeroll* as an aging hippie somehow trapped in a Rob Zombie movie.  The other competitors were 'Weird Al' Yankovic and Chris Hardwick, who were fine on their own, but symbolic of a problem I had with the film.

"So...this is a scene from a Rob Zombie movie?  Gritty!"

Rob Zombie once again wrote and directed Halloween II (2009), this time without the burden of recreating a classic.  He did do a bit of an homage to Halloween II (1981), but that was limited to the dream sequence.  In all fairness, it was a pretty brutal and impressive homage, even if it was cheapened by the dream.  Zombie's direction is still nasty and grimy, so no real change there.  He also wrote almost all of the characters as unsympathetic assholes, but his handling of Sheriff Brackett and his daughter was surprisingly good.  Actually, I was impressed by some of the ideas Zombie brought up in this film.  This is the first time I have seen realistic fallout from a slasher movie, whether it be physical injuries or mental scars.

This is what happens after the credits?  Gross.

Here's the thing: I find the basic fallout from the last film very plausible, and that plausibility is a welcome surprise in a horror sequel.  And while I like the concept of Laurie being totally screwed in the head and Michael being more expressive after his frustration in the last film, the end result is just...abrasive.  And not in a shocking sense that makes you squirm uncomfortably, abrasive in that elaborately produced way, kind of like the naughty kid who shops for clothes at Hot Topic.

Anyone who spends this much time ruining their bathroom is an interior designer, not a rebel

Zombie also fails to focus in this movie.  The side plot with Dr. Loomis was uninteresting and unnecessary to the main story; all it did was take the decently interesting Loomis from the last film and make him completely despicable.  Also completely worthless was every single scene showing Lil' Michael and his mom.  Cut that crap out and you have a movie that is at least 40% better, 30 minutes shorter, and 100% less pretentious.

The violence was plentiful in Halloween II, so I don't have any complaints about that.  There isn't as much gore or uniqueness in the kills as you might expect --- aside from a head-smashing and a dog murder --- but Michael grunted and moaned while he killed in this movie, and that was unsettling.  The final scene with Annie was also pretty brutal, and --- I may be mistaken on this --- I think it's implied that Michael raped her to death/after death.  His weird "mommy vision" told him to "have fun" and the next time we see Annie is with her blood ALL OVER the room, and minus her panties.  I don't know why that disturbs me more than the other seventeen or so murders in this film, but it does.

Where Halloween II falls off the rails is in its portrayal of Michael.  It's that fundamental.  The emotionless, faceless killer with unknown motivations now has emotions, a face, and explicit motivations.  I'm no Halloween purist, but that's just...not Michael Myers.  Even if you give Zombie the benefit of the doubt to recreate MM however he sees fit, the things we learn about Michael by seeing things through his eyes are stupid and boring.  Do you like vaguely defined dream imagery? 

"If I say yes, can it pop up every ten minutes for no goddamned reason?"

What if it was awkward, clumsy, and felt out of place in the movie?  Then this is the movie for you, friend!  Zombie wasn't far off the mark with his dream sequences, but they were a missed opportunity.  Instead of some white horse bullshit, we could have had some weird, twisted Tim Burton-esque dreamscape where Michael's actions actually make sense.  Knowing what Michael sees and how far beyond crazy he is would have separated this film from the other Halloweens and still might have been interesting.  In the unrated director's cut, the ending was changed to actually have Michael speak.  It's not as interesting as it sounds, and Michael's anger seems curiously misplaced.  It was not too surprising for a mass murderer, but it was an odd climax to a movie.

There are other weaknesses in the film, too, of course.  Rob Zombie's inability to make you care about anyone on the screen is a big one.  He doubles down on Michael and Laurie, but the things he adds --- dreams and unexplained shared visions --- are just awful.  The complete lack of suspense was another miss.  Explaining that Michael is just after Laurie, and yet he makes several pit stops along the way to murder people --- that doesn't make any sense and doesn't fit the character.

Laurie doesn't even know most of the victims, so it can't be to get priceless reaction shots like this

Overall, this was just an unpleasant experience with a few moments that gave me hope that something cool would happen.  The concept of emotional fallout from the first film was one highlight, and the Rocky Horror costumes were another.  I'm very happy that this movie did not try to recreate Halloween II (1981), but the fact of the matter is that the scenes that pay homage to that movie are some of the most brutal and fast-paced in the film.  If some of your best scenes come from a fake-out, you have a problem.  There is just so much that goes wrong in Halloween II (2009).  It wants to be smart, but comes off idiotic.  It wants to be disturbing, but instead becomes grating.  I think it is supposed to be scary, but without any suspense or characters to care about, that's a tall order.  As I watched it, I felt like Halloween II (2009) was trying to punish me for wanting to learn more about Michael Myers.  This is a movie that put a lot of effort in to make me hate it.  If it wasn't for those few, scattered moments of potential, I would rank this as one of my most hated movies.

Piranha 3DD

Since the campy Piranha 3D made over $80 million (!!!) in the box office, it was inevitable that it would spawn a sequel. It's a difficult task to follow up a stupid hit with an inevitably stupider sequel, but the filmmakers got off on the right foot when they named the sequel Piranha 3DD.  That is simply sublime.  I don't think there is a better way to distill what this movie should be about than that: killer fish and big boobs.  Somebody give that title guy a raise!  Truly, this will live out its days with the royalty of movie sequel titles, like Electric Boogaloo and Die Harder.  Here's the thing, though: I didn't really like Piranha 3D.  Sure, it was campy and had some cheap nudity and gore, but it was too aware of its crappiness to for me to truly enjoy laughing at it.  I hate laughing with bad movies --- I want to laugh at them.  What are the odds that Piranha 3DD will be stupid, but still stupid-fun?

I started off liking Piranha 3DD's choices, right off the bat.  Piranha 3D set the stage for the inevitable sequel, but 3DD opts to completely ignore the ending of that movie; in a brilliant move, they acknowledge that some people died in a lake, thanks to some fish, but it's probably unrelated to what's happening in this film.  So, if you were hoping for some tighter continuity in this series, you're absolutely adorable.  And out of luck.  The story kicks off with Maddy (Danielle Panabaker) returning home from college, only to discover that the water park she co-owns with her step-father, Chet (David Koechner), is about to grand open with an all-adult section and a brand new name: "Big Wet."  That's a lot to take in at one time, I know, but try to digest it all.  Yes, a college student co-owns a water park.  Yes, it is creepy that her step-father is setting up a raunchy zone in said water park.  And, following that logic, the lifeguards in the adult section will be strippers.

"And the lifeguards can drop their kids off in the main pool while they're pool stripping!  Genius!"

As the days count down to the grand opening of the park, Maddy and her friends start to notice some strange things happening at the lake that is located near the park.  Luckily, Maddy is a marine biologist and quickly realizes that super-piranhas are entering the lake, somehow.  But that's just the lake.  It couldn't possibly affect the water park, unless it happened to be illegally siphoning water from that lake.

But then...how did...oh, I get it now.

One of the unexpected strengths of Piranha 3D was its surprisingly legit cast.  Piranha 3DD doesn't quite match its prequel in that department.  Danielle Panabaker was fine, I guess, as the character with the closest thing that passes for brains in this movie.I don't know why, but I keep expecting her to have a breakout performance one of these days, despite the fact that she doesn't even stand out in this crap.  Her romantic interests are played by Matt Bush and Chris Zylka; Bush appears to be doing his best impression of a young Seth Green here, while Zylka continues to play teenage jerks.  Both were fine for what their roles called for, but neither was particularly interesting.  Meagan Tandy and Jean-Lu Bilodeau  were only in the film briefly, but they were void of personality.  Paul James Jordan would have been completely forgettable, if not for the scene where he cuts off his penis to keep a piranha from eating him.

I don't know if I would be that calm, sir

David Koechner was his usual bawdy self, and it actually made sense for him to show up in this film.  He wasn't funny, but I kind of hate seeing him in movies, so this matches my opinion of his talents quite well.  I was a little surprised that Ving Rhames reprised his role from the first movie (as did Paul Scheer), but at least his small part had a moderately funny moment. 

...that had already been done in Planet Terror

Gary Busey and Clu Gulager showed up in the introductory scene and were reasonably amusing as idiot rednecks.  Ever since Scream revived the "kill the recognizable actor in the opening scene" film trope, I have enjoyed seeing how different films have embraced the tradition; I'm fairly sure that Clu Gulager is the most obscure horror actor I have seen in a scene like that, but I am definitely not complaining.  It may be nepotism on the part of the director, but it's obscure and fun nepotism.  I will complain about Christopher Lloyd's choice to return, though; for an actor that is as occasionally hilarious as Lloyd, he sure knows how to stoop to the level of whatever movie he's in.  He could have been one of the shining moments of this film, and he definitely was not.  David Hasselhoff was shockingly not terrible playing himself.  I definitely like his work in the Spongebob movie better, but his singing threesome scene was enough to balance out most of his all-too-aware-of-its-campiness part.  When you get right down to it, the only actor I liked in the movie was Katrina Bowden.  Her character was too stupid and sincere for words, but the more I see of her, the more I am impressed by her excellent comedic timing.  Plus, she had the best line in the entire film:

John Gulager directed Piranha 3DD, and it was written by his buddies Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan; the three worked together on all three of the Feast movies.  In case you're unfamiliar with those movies, Melton and Dunstan have also co-written the last four Saw movies, so if anyone knows how to make a stupid movie funny, it's...the guys who write torture porn?  That doesn't sound right.

If only they had this picture to inspire them to greater heights...

I'm not going to bother commenting on normal directorial stuff, like cinematography, editing, or tone, because this movie doesn't care about any of that.  Instead, I'll judge Piranha 3DD on what it obviously values.  It had to be campy, gory, prominently feature large breasts, and, as the sequel to an already unlikely and campy movie, it had to be pretty darn stupid.  If that doesn't sound difficult to you, think of the last movie you watched that was intentionally so-bad-it's-good.  They're rarer beasts than you might think.  So, how did Gulager do?  This movie certainly was campy, but nowhere near as funny as it seemed to think it was. 

Example page from the script: Jiggle, jiggle, jiggle [WAIT FOR APPLAUSE TO DIE DOWN]

Aside from Hasselhoff's narration-singing and bizarre post-credits scene, the only time I laughed was with the whole piranha-in-my-vagina explanation.  That's not a good thing, especially when you consider how many other characters are in this movie.  Instead of being ridiculous, like Piranha 3D, this movie was stupid, and then had the nerve to elbow the audience in the stomach and ask if they "got it."  As for the gore, there definitely was some.  My personal favorite moments included an annoying child's head being eaten, a cow carcass exploding, and (of course) piranhagina (AKA pussanha).

Thank God this didn't start with "This one time, in band camp..."

The rest of the gore was surprisingly tame.  There was a lot of fake blood in the water, but it definitely felt less explicit than the original film, and it sure was a lot less original.  The filmmakers went out of their way to show gratuitous nude shots at the beginning of the film, but I was surprised by how rarely I saw unnecessary nudity as the story wore on.  Wasn't the entire point of making this an "adult" water park to constantly have topless girls splashing in the background of scenes?  It seems like such an obviously exploitative move, and yet it was used so sparingly. 

Why is Botox 'n' Balloon Chest Barbie even in this movie if she's clothed?

How about the plot?  Yes, that was dumb.  I know, I know, the filmmakers had to come up with a way to get piranhas into a water park, and they did it.  I have no problem with whatever stupid justification they needed to get Jason into space piranhas into the water park.  My problem is that the writers felt that they needed to build up to that.  That meant there was less time spent in the novelty location (the water park) and more time spent rehashing the last film in and around a lake.  This is a movie about killer fish in a water park; if I needed a plausible concept, then I wouldn't be watching a movie about killer fish in a water park. 

Correction: a movie about killer fish in a water park that features Gary Busey exploding a cow

When it gets down to brass tacks, Piranha 3DD feels like the poor man's version of Piranha 3D, instead of the bigger and stupider movie that all sequels strive to be.  It wants to be dumb enough to love, that much is clear.  It is just missing the charm, wit, and tongue-in-cheek knowing humor that earned Piranha 3D 3.5 stars (out of 10) from me.  In other words, this movie sucks, even when compared to a movie I didn't like.  The humor is cruder, the tone was more irritating than campy, there were human villains for some reason, and there wasn't enough creative gore or nudity to keep me interested.  It just.  Wasn't.  Fun. 

When 60% of your jokes come from the Hoff, you have a bad script

This isn't just a bad horror movie, it's a bad horror movie when you compare it to bad horror movies.  I almost wish I had given Piranha 3D a better rating, just to illustrate how much worse this sequel is.  How about this: Piranha 3DD made about 10% of Piranha 3D's box office gross.  Ouch.  Comparing it to Piranha 3D isn't even an apples-to-apples argument, because that movie actually achieved its goal of being dumb fun.  This is a lot closer to Shark Night 3D; both movies tried to capitalize on the success of the last Piranha, but couldn't be bothered to be ridiculously over the top.  This was lazy and boring instead of dumb fun. 

"I'll have to scrub for days to get all the shame off me"

On the bright side, this isn't a movie that deserves active hatred, it had a few worthwhile moments, and about fifteen minutes of its runtime was devoted to the end credits/gag reel, so the pain was short-lived.  Let's just hope we don't see another sequel for a while.