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Many horror fans balked in 2007 at the thought of anyone remaking the seemingly untouchable slasher prototype Halloween, much less divisive director Rob Zombie. However, the remake turned out to be a bona fide hit, and it should've come as a surprise to no one when plans were announced for a sequel. Michael Myers, after all, is one tough nut to kill.

The Plot

One year ago, insane asylum patient Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) escaped and slashed his way through his hometown of Haddonfield in an effort to kill his little sister, Angel Myers, who'd long ago been adopted and renamed Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton).

A year later, would-be victim Laurie is struggling to recover from the ordeal. She's on medication, regularly attends psychiatric sessions and with her parents dead, she's moved in with best friend Annie (Danielle Harris) and Annie's father, the town sheriff (Brad Douriff). What safer place to be, right?

Although everyone claims that Michael is dead -- and he certainly appeared so at the end of the first film -- his body was somehow "lost." It turns out that he's very much alive and seems to have been roaming the Earth for a year, growing a ZZ Top beard and feeding on raw dog, waiting for a sign to resume his pursuit of Laurie.

As Halloween -- the one year anniversary of his killing spree -- approaches, he gets his sign through visions of his dead mother, not to mention images of a white horse, himself as a child and an assortment of oddball characters who serve little purpose. So, he packs up his butcher knife, dons his trademark mask (now tattered beyond recognition) and hoofs it back to Haddonfield to wreak havoc.

At the same time, another monster comes to town. Michael's former shrink Dr. Loomis, on a book tour to promote his tell-all account of the Halloween killings, stops off to try to drum up some blood money, much to the chagrin of the families who lost loved ones a year earlier. Michael, Loomis and Laurie thus end up on a collision course, and those caught in the middle suffer the same fate as the victims of the first massacre.

The End Result

As is expected with a sequel, Halloween II pales in comparison to the first film. However, since the first wasn't that great to begin with, this movie ends up being a tedious chore to watch, a drab, dull exercise in futility that only fuels the fire of Zombie's critics.

As both writer and director, Zombie deserves the lion's share of the blame for the movie's shortcomings. The writing portion, which gave us a fairly intriguing peek into Michael's childhood in the previous movie, this time around proves pointless. The only semblance of innovation for the franchise is the attempt to get inside Michael's head to see what he sees. However, that only provides the opportunity to pad the movie with endless visions that tell us nothing other than Michael thinks his mother wants him to kill his sister. The rest of the bloated story is further padded with scenes of Michael trekking across the countryside and Loomis doing promotion for his book -- trying to cover up the fact that there's so little plot in the movie.

As a director, Rob Zombie is, well, Rob Zombie. He actively seeks out grime and discomfort, to the point where he ends up as contrived and stylized as the slick Hollywood directors he no doubt despises. He spends so much time making sure every character has exquisitely unkempt hair, tattoos, a love for hard rock and an "F.U." attitude that he not only neglects any sort of depth, but he makes them feel fake and unlikeable. (Laurie is particularly grating, spending the entire movie throwing a pity party for herself.)

Beyond his tiresome trailer park aesthetic, Zombie's direction of action sequences leaves something to be desired. As he's done in every one of his movies, he confuses brutality and ugliness with scares, as the normally cool and calculated Michael stabs his victims repeatedly with pent-up aggression (and grunts) while Zombie resorts to shaking the camera just as violently. "This is extreme!" he seems to be shouting to anyone who'll listen. But it's not scary, and it seems as if the director isn't even going for scary, trying instead to unnerve -- and succeeding only to annoy.