It is a tremendously big ask to follow such a cultural and cinematic landmark as Halloween, especially as the imitators (Prom Night and Friday the 13th had upped the ante the year before) were generating hits and making their own contributions to the tropes of the genre. However, written by Debra Hill and John Carpenter, I think the film stands up pretty well on its own.
The influence of the early slashers the original begat is most clear in that they put a lot more emphasis on creativity of the kills and getting them clearly on camera and making sure they come early and often, away from the more stark to-the-point unstoppable violence of the original. You can argue this takes away from the true horror of the original, and I probably would, but there is also the argument to be made that few people who watch slashers are watching it because they genuinely want to be scared but because they wanna see the kills. There’s a reason the Final Destination movies got away with using the exact same plot 5 times. Much more than the original, this delivers in probably too clever kills, making one wonder how Michael Myers learned how to operate a hospital hot tub or probably insert an IV in which to drain somebody’s blood for no reason. But they are more visceral than the original and much more likely to end up in a YouTube compilation called “GREAT HORROR KILLS PART 4!!!!”
It is a great looking movie. Rick Rosenthal went on to a pretty obscure career as a director, but he clearly had a great eye, scenes are staged well, look attractive, and here and there even add splashes of giallo-like bold colored lights like green and red. He took the style John Carpenter established in the original and did at least a worthy imitation of it, so many of the scenes are quite lovely compositions.
The hospital setting is the real genius of the film. While they certainly take liberties with how dark and quiet a hospital on Halloween night would be, it is worth it for the instantly foreboding atmosphere it gives to the picture. A seemingly half-empty late night hospital with a skeleton crew is a perfect set up to the film, although they do get a little caught up on syringes and scalpels as murder weapons when there’s so much you could use in such a setting. It drives off the natural unease being confined to the hospital brings anybody, and the lingering feeling of death that often reside there.
Of course we get just as much time with Dr. Loomis, and Donald Pleasance is just full on shouting most of the time or giving midnight drunk-sounding monologues about druids and the nature of evil, whatever respectability he had in the first film is full lunacy mode in this film, he almost guns down a teenager in the street and shoots out the window of a cop car. He’s a madman, and every second he is on screen is pure magic. However, this is a really thankless role for Jamie Lee Curtis who barely has any lines for the vast majority of the film, spends half of it in a bed, and the rest of it mostly crawling or limping around barefoot. Gone is the character development of the original, they barely even allow her to flirt back with creepy hospital guy touching her while she was asleep (the chief nurse was right to keep chasing that predator out of the teenage girl’s room). I don’t know who she pissed off, but somebody wasn’t about to let her acting skills flourish in this film even if it actually does make it a much more tense film in effect.
No movie can be the original Halloween, many have followed and none even came close, but while this total rewatch may change my opinion in previous views I’ve always thought this one came the closest and is the platonic ideal of what a Halloween sequel should be. Stylish, fun, just a bit insane, reasonably well written. It is one that I am glad I own a physical copy of (packaged with Halloween III which I am not revisiting for this rewatch, but might pull out in October) I can pull out at any time. It isn’t the original, but it is still clearly one of the most well made slashers of its era.
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