Sebring Cinema

LONELY AND MISUNDERSTOOD: Michael Myers reflects on his handiwork in Halloween II, playing at the Fairmount Cinema 6.

PHOTO COURTESY OF DIMENSION FILMS

Horror fans, prepare yourselves for a hopeless, humorless world created by rocker turned film director Rob Zombie.

Can’t say there are no scares in Halloween II, for the screams of teens and young adults in the audience showed they were surprised by gut-ripping knife plunges and bone-cracking face stomps more than once.

Zombie’s Halloween II has none of the spooky surrealism of John Carpenter’s original, despite the interjection of the Jason-esque theme of the bloodthirsty dead mama calling her spawn to bring the trashy Myers family back together again.

Where Zombie horrifies you is with his vision of the real world, one that his lens captures painted in red, pale yellow, and dark shadowy tones and spray-painted with graffiti and satanic symbols; and one filled with disturbed characters disconnected from any sense of law or order and attired and cosmeticized as if they all lived at an industrial rock convention. Take, for instance, “Uncle Meat’s Java Hole,” a Haddonfield staple haunted by the town’s dysfunctional metal-pierced faces and an old fart from the LSD farm. It’s as bleak and dark as the underside of an overpass in the Bronx. The “Java Hole” is no Brewster’s Coffee House.

In short, there is nothing and no one normal in Haddonfield, so we are glad when Michael, depicted here as raw rage incarnate (like Jason, he becomes a lost kid dominated by his  mother in place of Carpenter’s silent, remorseless evil that marvels at its own bloodshedding), gets rid of them. It was ridiculous to see tiny men hurl their insults and threats at 7-foot-tall Michael (played by Tyler Manes) only to pay the price, just as it was laughable to see drizzles of blood on the walls near Michael’s victims, the decorative effect of cake tubes. The police do not see the trail of bodies pointing to Haddonfield, and Michael’s psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis, egregiously overplayed by Malcolm McDowell, lacks even the remotest particle of professionalism.

There is a fuzzy twist at the end, but it’s hardly worth the wait.

You won’t find much craft in Zombie’s derivative, hollow Halloween II, but plenty of crap. Caveat emptor.

Halloween II is rated R for extreme violence and gore, profanity.
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