Bovine University

I've been gone for months. Sorry. I wrote this recently, and figured I'd throw it up here before I lost August. O, sweet August, you have always been good to me.

I will not forsake you.

---

Halloween II




I said it when I watched Rob Zombie's first take on the Halloween franchise, and by God I'll say the same for this movie. I absolutely loved this film. I think it's great, and I think everyone should see it at least once.

It is hilarious.

Halloween II, like its precursor, is the laugh riot you've been waiting for all summer. I don't even know who Judd Apatow is anymore. Rob Zombie has captured comedy in a bottle, and to see just how he's done that is an amazing journey.

Halloween II begins focused on family, continuing to explore the psychology of Michael Myers as a boy, played by Chase Wright Vanek, in a stilted and strange scene shared with Zombie's wife and ill-advised quintessential leading lady Sheri Moon Zombie. Also featuring strongly in the movie is Myers' long-lost sister Laurie, played by Scout Taylor-Compton.

Chase Wright. Sheri Moon. Scout. Taylor. Hyphen. Compton.

Does it cause this generations' parents physical pain to name their children Mary, or Amanda, or even Michael? Does every family have to have a son named "Ranger" and a daughter named "The Hantavirus?" Sarah. Daniel.

Bob.

A quick search of Amazon.com offered 22,388 results for books on baby names, and I'm sure they're not all "Android" and "Philibuster." Seriously, invest in your children's future.

The image of a white horse is repeated throughout the film, and is particularly significant because, in dreams, a white horse represents rage and violence. I don't know that because I have studied the analysis and subtext of film using Jung's psychology and Freud's extensive dream analysis. I know that because Rob Zombie was thoughtful enough to include a title card with the explanation of the symbolism as the opening of the film. This then leads almost immediately to a young Mike Myers explaining to his mother that he has dreams about a white horse. You see.




Is it subtext if the director hands it to you on a silver platter? And then uses the platter to bash the idea into your goddamn brains?

After the title cards, Zombie reaches into his limited deck of everlasting film tropes existent in the slasher sub-genre of horror films when Mike Myers, presumed dead and being transported by van, is brought back to life after an unexpected and gruesome collision with a cow in the middle of the road.

Let's put aside the ridiculousness of that fact for a moment.

The film plays out pretty much as anyone who has ever seen a movie without the word "Princess" or "Adventure" in the title could guess. Myers unstoppably slaughters a population equivalent to Lollapalooza and is then stopped by his long-lost sister. I would have warned you about spoilers, but if that is a spoiler to you then you are ten, and should not be reading such malicious invective as this to begin with. Go finish your homework and tell your mother you love her.

Or... you know... she'll come back as a ghost towing a white horse and make you kill people. Or something.

What amazes me the most about this film is, as unconcerned as Zombie is with plot and as diligently as he attempts to include as little of it as possible in this exercise, the points he does choose to accentuate are so bizarre and disjointed. Apart from being the long-lost sister of Michael Myers, Laurie is revealed to be violently vegetarian, vomiting when a piece of meat touches her veggie pizza.

Also confusing is Michael's mother and the manifestation of him as a child, which appear not only to him but eventually to Laurie herself, at one point physically restraining her. This means the film is either about ghosts or about the shared psychic resonance between Michael Myers and his sister.

Neither of these options offer any explanation about what the hell is going on in this movie.

A too-long sequence juxtaposing the family's pizza feast with Myers' eating a recently slaughtered dog is one of the more inexplicable moments of the film, and seems to be the attempted narrative equivalent of watching Faces of Death while sitting naked on a pile of bees. Zombie sincerely seems less interested in truly terrifying us and more in showing us pictures of dead kittens or rubbing dirt in our face. Man, doesn't that shit make you uncomfortable, America?

Truly disturbing is just how uninspired these "gory" and "horrific" sequences come across. He's really trying to challenge us with Myers stabbing someone over and over. Grunting while he's doing it, throwing out the eerie and perpetual silence of any previous incarnation. Then, just when you think you've had enough, he stabs someone else, and the background designer and makeup artist throw about three gallons worth of clotted corn syrup around the set and call it a revolution in horror cinema.

It's 2009, Rob. I have the internet, and I have a lot more free time than you. I have seen shit that would un-rat your dreds.




But am I prepared to write off this movie based on the at-best-average murders and inexplicable attempts at any kind of plot where they are for now? Can we call it a hilarious attempt at horror and move on?

No. Good people, because I am the only man in America who understands what Halloween is really all about. I mean, I really get it.

Let us look, for a moment, at the events leading up to the violent impetus of Halloween 2.

Soon after the film begins and we are out of the dream sequence (and dear God, Rob Zombie, do you even understand what a film cliche' is?), the newly resurrected Myers meanders around for about a year doing little more, it would seem, than growing a beard and looming. The footage we see of Myers before he returns to his time-honored homicidal tendencies is of a peaceful and pensive being, wandering through fields and occasionally entering barns to catch glimpses of the semi-hallucinated apparition of his mother and younger self. He only truly begins his rampage after a year of silence, when he is assaulted by a clan of rednecks in front of the antler-adorned fender of their pickup truck.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Michael Myers is possessed by a cow.





The body of Mike Myers, ostensibly and demonstrably dead in the back of a van, is waylaid en route to the morgue by a rogue heifer in the middle of the road. The spirit of this cow, cut down in the prime of its uneventful life, enters the deceased husk of Myers and exacts swift and brutal vengeance on its assailants, the van's occupants.

Don't believe me?

Every time we see Myers he is wandering aimlessly through farmland. He seeks out a barn for shelter. He is enraged at being attacked by a group of shitkickers who bear evidence of hunting and slaying his horned brethren.

Michael Myers is a cow out for revenge.



Perhaps the most notable piece of evidence toward this end is the one time Zombie chooses to buck (pun intended?) typical horror film boilerplate, when the only person spared from the wrath of this murderous steer is not someone who has abstained from sex, drinking or drugs. No, the largest sin that Myers can contemplate is the consumption of his own, and thus the only person left alive is his sister, Laurie, who Zombie takes careful time to point out is a vegetarian.

As a Halloween movie, it's laughably bad. Any homage or attempt at fidelity to the original, all the things that made Michael Myers terrifying and stoic, are taken out and replaced with bad puns and poorly-concieved notions of how actual people speak to each other. There really doesn't need to be any Michael Myers imagery in the film at all. Get a different mask, change the killer's name, and you have a completely different movie, indistinguishable from anything remotely related to the Halloween franchise. In fact, go ahead and do that, Rob. Take fifteen minutes to iron out the rewrite and you could have your own completely original, albeit hysterical, addition to horror cinema.

Call it Mad Cow.

Rob Zombie has taken the slasher film to a new and amazing height in that he himself has become the rampaging, directionless psychopath, turning his rage on the genre itself. He is no different than Mike Myers in the singular, insistent, and unmotivated brutality he visits on the only milieu that he, in his persona as Living Dead Director, has allowed himself. Congratulations, Rob. You did what Jamie Lee Curtis could never do no matter how hard she tried, how loud and obnoxiously she screamed, or how many sequels she attempted as a rematch.

You killed Michael Myers.