HALLOWEEN II: UNRATED DIRECTOR'S CUT: More of the night you went home and cried into your pillow.

HALLOWEEN II: UNRATED DIRECTOR'S CUT
Starring Malcolm McDowell, Tyler Mane, Scout Taylor-Compton
Directed by Rob Zombie
Dimension Home Entertainment
Review by Louis Fowler

Every so often—and by so often, I mean continually—mindless bandwagon trends within the horror and/or genre communities break out and it becomes like high school all over again, only with an added air of patheticness for all parties involved because, well, they obviously haven't looked in a mirror recently.

It's a testament to the fact that, for a group of people who pride themselves on being outcasts to the point of making their Facebook quote “You laugh at me because I'm different, I laugh at you because you're all the same!”—which was a great t-shirt at Hot Topic, wasn't it?—they all want the same thing that the people they so desperately hate want: a wonderfully comforting sense of conformity that will lead them to acceptance. Everyone will love me, everyone will want to be my friend, everyone will invite me to the party. Hell, even my dad might return my calls, black nail-polish and boys' athletic cut “Team Jacob” shirt be damned!

Let me make this very clear: horror-fans are just as big of frauds as everyone else out there, needing love, validation and affirmation. Need proof? Look no further than the recent Two Minutes Hate that is not only the continual work of director Rob Zombie, but, more specifically, his recent exercise in post-traumatic stress disorder, HALLOWEEN 2, or, H2 as the marketing materials wanted us to call it.

Now, for all intent and purposes, H2 is everything that an intelligent, self-sufficient, free-thinking horror fan would want in a genre movie: heart-wrenching character depth, numerous unexpected twists and bizarre psychological tangents that should leave one puzzled, requiring another watch. Zombie is what Lars Von Trier would have been if raised on a diet of cheap beer, late night b-movies and a complete Diamond Head discography.

But, if I may bite the hand that feeds me for a moment, most horror-fans aren't intelligent, self-sufficient, free-thinkers. No, they want everything telegraphed out to them in such great detail that they might as well have written it themselves—though, of course, that would never happen. They don't want new ideas...they want small tits and fake blood and good-looking moonlighting GOSSIP GIRLS cast-members and they want them now!

HALLOWEEN 2 doesn't, at all, want to give that to you and, brilliantly enough, Zombie refuses to give it to you. He won't budge, you can't change his mind. Zombie's H2 is the most anarchic, punk-ethos-drenched horror-flick to be released by a mainstream studio since, well, in as long as I can remember. It is literally as though Zombie took all the cry-baby reviews of his first installment and said “OK, you didn't like that? Well, fuck it! You ain't gonna like this either!” He's the anti-Platinum Dunes and you hate him for it! Get in line and goose-step like a good minion of Michael Bay!

How badly is Zombie wanting to push your nose into the filth that you left on the floor? He starts off spectacularly by giving you a big sit-n-spin in the first fifteen minutes, teasing the audience with a direct remake of the original HALLOWEEN 2's hospital sequence, only to laugh and point as you squirm angrily in your chair because it was all a dream. HAHAHAHAHAHA! Too late, you already forked over your $12.75, dip-shits!

Probably the best thing about H2 is that it isn't about Myers at all, really. No, instead it's about victim-hood, trauma and the bitter realities of “the day after”. While yes, Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode was able to go toe-to-toe and knife-to-knife with Myers, often-times Ripley-style, it always rang false with me. I always have to ask myself: just how damaged would a 15-year-old girl's psyche be after something as horrific as not only being stalked and slashed by a hulking bogeyman, but discovering that everyone around, every rock you've ever known, was mowed down and butchered because of you and who you are?

In our desensitized culture, as much as we like to spill our most superficial of feelings on the various social networking sites available to us, no one really says what they truly feel. People nowadays go inward. They become insular. It's their excuse to change their entire life, in Laurie's case becoming a total punk rock brat or, in Annie's case, a reclusive put-upon wannabe mom-figure. You're gonna rebel against everything or you're gonna become a recluse. Ask me sometime about what I did when my dad died, maybe I'll tell you the truth.

But we don't want victimhood in our horror, do we? Those politically correct cultural taboos (that we claim to rebel against, natch) says that a random “final girl” needs to man up and stand stoic, stand strong, stand alone, against the unstoppable evil, vanquishing it just as the police arrive moments too late. Bullshit. That's nothing more than masturbatory fantasies for the Joss Whedon crowd. Real life very rarely works out like that and, in the universe of Zombie's HALLOWEEN, there are serious psychic retributions for every action and reaction. No one gets away clean. Especially the audience.

And while all that is well and good, perhaps my favorite personality change in H2 is what Zombie did to the character of Dr. Loomis. He did the unthinkable: he gave the erstwhile nemesis of Michael a new heaping helping—and deliciously self-serving—case of inflated self-esteem. It can be argued that, sure, that's his defense mechanism—I'll buy it—but, to me, it's the most realistic character change in the whole movie. Malcolm McDowell's Loomis started off as a do-gooder hippie doc, complete with pony-tail and feel-good rhetoric, who spent his whole life making his name off of young Michael and, with the generous wealth of publicity that came from the first film's murders, he capitalizes off of it, selling-out like all former hippies eventually do.

We live in a culture that prides celebrity above ALL things. It's a culture where a mother of eight appears on a dancing show because her husband cheats on her. It's a culture where a man fakes the possible death of his small child who might be tied to a runaway hot-air balloon. And what about those sex-tapes, huh? Knowing who I am and not having to really do anything for that notoriety is the main goal of just about everyone in this country, so why should Loomis be different? He has the chance to be the hero of his own story and he runs with that ball. It's honest. Scathing, sure, but honest. No one really wants to be the self-less hero anymore. No one has to be when there are TV cameras in your face and money to be made.

When HALLOWEEN 3: SEASON OF THE WITCH came out, it was just a reviled. But, look now: it's got a decent, healthy cult following and his heralded as a smart attempt to do something different with a well-worn franchise. Give H2 twenty or so years and those same hypocritical nimrods will be saying the same thing, loudly proclaiming to anyone within earshot that they “always loved it” and knew even then that it was “ahead of it's time”.

But, that's still twenty years away. Today? Mediocrity reigns supreme and it will have a long, healthy life. Give the people what they want, I say. But let's be honest about one thing: no matter how many hateful, red-eyed missives against Zombie you screed in your blog or podcasts, he'll always have the last laugh when, once again, you plunk down your said hard-earned $12.75 to see whatever he does next. If you're so abused by what he does, why do you go back? Because you're a hypocrite in need of an identity and that of a battered woman works oh-so-well for you. Don't worry, fella: a little concealer will cover up that shiner nicely.