After hitting it big with their 1978 independent horror flick "Halloween," director John Carpenter and writing/producing partner Debra Hill kept themselves busy in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s creating such cult hits as "The Fog," "Escape From New York" and an updated remake of Howard Hawks’ "The Thing." In the meantime every horror filmmaker with the right connections started ripping off "Halloween" left and right, to the point that financier Moustapha Akkad, Carpenter, Hill and the principal actors from the move were sweet-talked into creating a sequel. Released theatrically on Halloween eve 1981, "Halloween II" unfolds on the same night and immediate hours after Michael Myers’ massacre in the small Illinois town of Haddonfield. Read our DVD review of the first movie to catch-up on Myers’ handiwork and backstory up to this point of the "Halloween" saga.

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is taken to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital to recover from the wounds she suffered while being attacked by Myers, who’s on the loose and deadly dangerous (as a young woman discovers early on when her throat is slashed). Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence, overacting as if he were still in the set of the 1979 Italian flick "The Pumaman"), Myers psychiatrist turned hunter of his escaped evil doer patient, tags along with sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers) looking for the escaped maniac when they accidentally cause the death of a teenager that just happens to look like Michael Myers. Since the young man’s body is burned to a crisp the authorities initially assume Myers is dead, but Dr. Loomis’ paranoid rants convince police officers to keep looking for the killer. Eventually this leads Dr. Loomis and the cops to Haddonfield’s Elementary School where they discover a word scrolled in blood, ‘SAMHAIN’, that implies Myers has struck some of demonic deal with one of Halloween’s oldest demons of yore. Worse news shows up at the school via a representative from the State Governor, who (a) forces Dr. Loomis to leave town under threat of arrest and (b) discloses that Laurie Strode is actually Michael Myers’ sister!

With all the attention focused on the search for the killer of the teenagers from the first "Halloween" massacre few people notice or pay attention to the hospital where Laurie Strode is taken to after surviving Michael Myers’ attack, except of course for Myers himself. Most of "Halloween II" consists of the masked killer stalking and murdering everyone at Haddonfield Memorial as he goes about finding his sister, which is about as predictable and exciting as it sounds. Jamie Lee Curtis totally phones her performance as the drugged-into-stupor Laurie, who looks more like a middle-aged housewife than the smart teenager the actress played in the original "Halloween" three years prior. In fact, everyone in "Halloween II" acts several dozen IQ point below retard level; it’s almost as if director Rick Rosenthal (who also directed this year’s "Halloween: Resurrection" fiasco) wants to purposefully make these characters stereotypically dumb in order to elicit from the audience a violent reaction to their constant displays of stupidity. It’s a sharp contrast to the intelligence and restrain John Carpenter displayed with his actors in the prequel, where everyone at least behaved and reacted believably to the threats at hand.

What makes "Halloween II" easier to digest than many of its mindless future installments is the brutality with which the likes of Janet the nurse (Ana Alicia), Budd the ambulance driver (Leo Rossi), Karen the nurse (Pamela Susan Shoop) and seven other people in Haddonfield get dispatched by Myers. See the pictures to our right for an idea of the grisly way these people die, an apparent reaction by the producers at the time to try to out-gore the gore of the "Halloween" copycats, especially the then-young "Friday the 13th" series. The most priceless moment in "Halloween II" comes when Jimmy, the other ambulance driver at Haddonfield Memorial, slips over the pool of blood left by a nurse whose body has been drained of the liquid by Myers. Moments later, hemorrhaging from the blow to the head, Jimmy dies by collapsing over the steering wheel of the car in which Laurie is hiding from Michael Myers, thus honking the horn to let everyone know where the chased heroine was. It’s a perfect marriage of bloody gore, sublime comedy and the idiocy that overcomes characters when they’re trapped into the mechanisms of a horror flick.

The sequel also underscores how more effective the frights were in its prequel by making the Laurie Strode character a victim of circumstance (baby-sitting the wrong house in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time) instead of the persecuted victim of her own genealogy. Carpenter and Hill’s decision to make Laurie Stroder into Michael Myers’ sister effectively separated the "Halloween" saga into three camps: the superior stand-alone original (Laurie’s a victim of chance, evil triumphs at the end by Michael vanishing into thin air after being shot), all the sequels that featured Michael Myers chasing either Laurie Strode or related characters (Jason Vorhees’ territory of an immortal being that cannot die) and the imaginative stand-alone "Halloween III: Season Of The Witch" (in which the Myers character is abandoned). After shooting him in the eyes and burning him to death the producers of "Halloween" and "Halloween II" were through with Michael Myers as a viable movie character. Little did they know that their creation would mutate into a sequel-hungry monster far more terrifying than any of them imagined. Alas, that’s fodder for the DVD reviews of the "Halloween" movies that did not involve John Carpenter and Debra Hill; they’ll be coming your way later this month.

1/2