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63Halloween II, writer-director Rob Zombie's completely unsettling but incompletely satisfying continuation of his 2007 reboot, offers up a rush of fiercely imagined nightmare images. Be warned: It's one of the most gruesome films of the year.
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60Zombie walks the walk, you can't deny it. And he's found the medium where he can let his freak flag fly highest. Now, he can proudly put that battered old William Shatner Halloween mask on a stick, too, and let it rip.
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60Laurie's story holds interest thanks to Taylor-Compton's intense, nontrivializing dedication to the role, especially when the character's feral brother comes calling.
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If only he (Zombie) had more on his mind than his love of 1970s Italian horror films, his meticulous color schemes and his body count. Halloween II is full of in jokes and references but nearly devoid of wit.
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What Halloween II does have, though, is Zombie's claustrophobic visual style; he half-drowns his actors in shadow, then tracks them through windows and around corners like a focused predator. If only we cared about the prey.
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58Zombie does a lot extremely well. Maybe someday he'll find a movie into which it all fits.
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50Perhaps reflecting the filmmaker's other career as a recording artist, many of the film's scares come as much from the ultra-vivid horrifying sound effects as the gore itself.
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50The movie lacks the strong vision and memorable carnage of Zombie's masterpiece, "The Devil's Rejects."
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50With his new sequel, Zombie spends less time paying tribute and more time getting inventive, with mixed results.
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50With Halloween II, it was all about graphic, grisly murders and a high body count - lessons learned at the box office. And that disparity, more than anything else, illustrates why "Halloween" is a classic and its first sequel is a sloppy afterthought.
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50When it's good, it's because it's imitating its predecessor (but it suffers from tired spilled blood) and when it's bad, it's because it's imitating its own imitators.
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50This time, Zombie doesn't appear to have many deep thoughts, so Michael doesn't just stab his victims, he slices and chomps them into gooey pulp -- an overkill motif that actually feels false to the character and quickly becomes a depressing bore.
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What you won't feel is genuine horror, because unlike John Carpenter -- whose original 1978 film is a sly game of nerve-racking peekaboo -- Zombie isn't out to engage fans of the genre with a slaughterhouse bonbon like "Halloween II."
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Could be the work of any journeyman, give or take a few hundred gratuitous pop-culture references. Let no one accuse Zombie of stinting on the gore, however.
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40The visual style--the orange-and-blue color scheme, the elegant 'Scope compositions, the graceful tracking shots, and the shrewd use of shallow focus--has been reproduced almost perfectly from John Carpenter's original, yet the wit and intelligence are gone.
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30A totally unnecessary and extremely poor sequel to the original "Halloween". Although Dean Cundey's photography goes a long way toward recapturing the look of the first film, director Rick Rosenthal is no Carpenter, and the emphasis here is on graphic blood and gore rather than the skillful manipulation of the audience.
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30It's visceral bloodbathery at its most repellent, but worse than that, it's horrific like the aftermath of a suicide bombing instead of terrifying like the bomb beneath the table or the knife behind the back.
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A bad sequel to a good movie...The main concentration is on gross-out effects and lame chase scenes.
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10There are incredibly almost never any really terrific scares in 92 minutes - just multiple shots of violence and gore that are more gruesome than anything else.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 33 out of 74
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Mixed: 11 out of 74
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Negative: 30 out of 74
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