Halloween always struck me as one of those movies that didn't need a sequel. It was scary enough knowing that Michael Myers was still out there, lurking and ready to make you his next victim. Inevitably, sequels always destroy a lot of the mystique surrounding the original film and they answer too many questions. Typically, the answers we came up with in our heads were more interesting or frightening than what a bunch of studio execs dreamt up.
Halloween II proves to suffer a bit of sequelitis here and there - namely with a completely silly twist towards the end involving Laurie and Michael's connection which squeezed the rest of the series into a bit of a creative dead end. Still, there's a lot to love about the film.
It seamlessly picks up right where the original ended and thanks to Dean Cundey returning as the director of photography, the film's look matches very well with the original film, helping bridge that gap. Jamie Lee Curtis' wig for Laurie doesn't match quite as well, but you forget about it after awhile mainly because Laurie is sidelined in a hospital under sedation for most of the film until the finale. This leaves the film with the increasingly mad Loomis as the closest thing we have to a protagonist in the story. The rest of the hospital staff might as well be made of cardboard or walking slabs of meat for Michael Myers to carve up.
And carve he does! Michael has gotten a bit more creative since we last saw him and he's not above giving his trusty kitchen knife a rest and using hypodermic needles, hammers, scalding hot water, and scalpels to inflict various types of bodily harm to anyone unfortunate enough to enter his sight lines.
The finale is well executed with some true suspense and it would have been a satisfying enough conclusion to the Michael Myers saga if they'd left it at his, but you know Hollywood...
Halloween II proves to suffer a bit of sequelitis here and there - namely with a completely silly twist towards the end involving Laurie and Michael's connection which squeezed the rest of the series into a bit of a creative dead end. Still, there's a lot to love about the film.
It seamlessly picks up right where the original ended and thanks to Dean Cundey returning as the director of photography, the film's look matches very well with the original film, helping bridge that gap. Jamie Lee Curtis' wig for Laurie doesn't match quite as well, but you forget about it after awhile mainly because Laurie is sidelined in a hospital under sedation for most of the film until the finale. This leaves the film with the increasingly mad Loomis as the closest thing we have to a protagonist in the story. The rest of the hospital staff might as well be made of cardboard or walking slabs of meat for Michael Myers to carve up.
And carve he does! Michael has gotten a bit more creative since we last saw him and he's not above giving his trusty kitchen knife a rest and using hypodermic needles, hammers, scalding hot water, and scalpels to inflict various types of bodily harm to anyone unfortunate enough to enter his sight lines.
The finale is well executed with some true suspense and it would have been a satisfying enough conclusion to the Michael Myers saga if they'd left it at his, but you know Hollywood...