REVIEW: Halloween II (1981)

Halloween II begins mere moments after the thrilling conclusion of the seminal classic, as Laurie is taken to the hospital for treatment and Loomis continues his hunt for his escaped patient.

I have quite a history with Halloween II, as for MANY years, it was my favorite film in the franchise. Not favorite sequel, favorite FILM in the series. I loved the malevolent ambience created by the dimly lit hospital setting, Carpenter and newcomer Alan Howarth’s fantastic musical score, and Warlock’s slow, almost demonic walk as The Shape. Nowadays, my opinion of the film has definitely become more mixed, and varies on rewatch. Even preparing for this review I found myself conflicted because I watched the movie twice and felt a bit different each time.

Following the pre-credits recap (one of the better versions of one in the slasher genre), Halloween II picks up with The Shape stalking the back alleys of Haddonfield, searching for a weapon. This sequence, filmed once again in glorious point of view, sucks us back into the world Carpenter and co. created in 1978. It genuinely feels like it is part of that first film, and that’s an impressive feat. However, within this sequence is one of the first moments that has that feeling falter a bit. We see Myers enter a house and retrieve a knife from a cutting board before walking next door to the neighbor's house where a teenage girl is home alone on the phone. The girl is discussing the murders that have just been discovered down the street. This scene has some genuine tension because you know Myers is near. However, when Myers kills the girl, when you get over the adrenaline of being startled, you realize this is the first person Myers has killed in either film that doesn't really serve a purpose. You can argue for any other kill going forward that it's picking off people who are in his way or to isolate Laurie…but not this one. It’s a superfluous kill, there for no other reason than to add one more to the bodycount. For some this isn’t an issue, and I can understand that. But to me, adding on superfluous kills begins to reduce The Shape to just another slasher villain of the bodycount era. Once you learn that this was a reshoot that was added in just to pump up bloodshed, it starts to make sense. It’s a bit irritating for sure, but it is not something that outright tanks the film for me.

Meanwhile, Loomis and Brackett are riding around, at their wits end, looking for Myers after he vanished into the night. Brackett is getting fed up with Loomis, blaming him for letting Myers out. Just as they are arguing, they come upon someone in a very similar looking mask to the one Loomis’ patient was wearing that night. Loomis and Brackett barrel towards the masked man, causing him to fearfully cross into the street and into traffic, where he’s struck and set ablaze when he is crashed into a van, engulfed in the fiery explosion. Loomis is unsure as to whether or not the burning corpse was his patient but before he can make any determination, one of Brackett’s deputies, Deputy Hunt, pulls up and informs him of what we already know: his daughter Annie is dead. A little time later, we pull up to the Wallace house and Brackett sees underneath the sheet that it is his daughter Annie, dead with her throat slit. He goes to go home to his wife, but not before angrily blaming Loomis for this. This moment made me wish Brackett had not gone home, that we could have seen more from him. But this is where he exits the film, and this franchise until 2021’s Halloween Kills. However, Deputy Hunt (ha!) takes up the task for him, and once Loomis has convinced him (through yet another wonderfully delivered monologue) that there is a good chance Myers is still on the loose, they head downtown to check the dental records of the burned corpse from earlier. During all of this, Laurie is taken to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, where she is to be treated for her injuries. Here we are introduced to the rest of our cast of characters, the hospital staff and the lone two EMT workers. Here Laurie begins to gain access to repressed memories that hint at a darker past and motive for The Shape stalking her. As the workers get picked off one by one, Myers is on a collision course with Laurie and her life will never be the same.

An important aspect about Halloween II that should be obvious from my synopsizing is that the cast of characters is much larger this time around, and the storytelling has more plot than the previous film. You have the standard slasher parts with Michael stalking around and killing off people left and right, as well as Loomis and Hunt’s investigation, and finally Laurie’s repressed memories tying her back to the Myers family. This is where my chief complaint with Halloween II comes in: the script is a bit messy, particularly in the handling of Michael’s motives. This can easily be traced back to Carpenter himself, who used Halloween II as an opportunity to secure other passion projects. Famously he has revealed that the big plot twist: that Michael and Laurie are actually siblings, came from a long night of writing and too many beers. Its execution makes that all the more believable. Whilst the plot continues, and in between Myers picking people off, on two fronts we are being led towards this eventuality. Loomis investigates an elementary school where Michael has broken in, stabbed a knife into a drawing of a family and scrawled the word “samhain” on the chalkboard in blood. This all seems quite random to me. If he’s hunting his sister, as it is revealed, why would he take this time to divert to leave these clues to his motives? Further, once Nurse Marion shows up, she delivers the big reveal: a hidden file has revealed that Laurie is Michael’s sister. Meanwhile, Laurie will go on to have a dream sequence (repressed memory?) of herself visiting Michael at Smiths Grove and her (foster)mother telling her that she isn’t her mother. Laurie’s reaction to these revelations is one of zero emotion. There is no opportunity after she has this revelation for it to be processed, she never talks about it. It feels extremely contrived on both parts. For Loomis, they sealed this record and it just happened to be unsealed so a random nurse could tell him? I get why Carpenter regrets this choice, and even though I prefer The Shape to be mostly motiveless, you could have made this work but in its present state, it lands with a resounding thud, especially on rewatch.

All of this builds to a surprisingly strong finale, with Loomis going off the handle, threatening a US Marshall with his revolver, desperate to turn their car around and head towards Haddonfield Memorial Hospital to save Laurie, who is being chased by Michael at this point. Once our principal characters get back to one another, Michael busts in like a man possessed, being gunned down. The US Marshall doesn’t listen to Loomis’ order to stay away from the seemingly dead slasher and pays dearly for it, having his throat slashed out. This leads to the climactic showdown in the operating room, where Michael stabs his doctor before summarily having both eyes shot out by Laurie. Loomis begins opening the valves on all the oxygen tanks in the room, telling Laurie to run before blowing the room sky high as she gets to safety. Patient and Doctor go up in smoke in an incredibly courageous and heroic sacrifice.

I’m happy to say that I like most of Halloween II’s cast of characters. I obviously love the returning cast, especially Donald Pleasance’s Samuel Loomis, who is still in top form here and even more desperate. Him going as far as to prepare to shoot the imposter Michael without any confirmation or forcing the Marshall to turn around at gunpoint just shows how terrified Michael makes him and how far he’ll go to see that he’ll never hurt anyone again, whether he needs to die himself to seal Michael’s fate or not. Pleasance is off the chain here, continuing to sell fantastic monologues and convincing doomsayings. He’s joined, however briefly, by Charles Cyphers’ Sheriff Brackett. He exits quickly but I think his final lines to Loomis are really strong, and convincing as a father who just lost his only child. Hunter von Leer’s Deputy Hunt takes over for him and he’s a pretty solid replacement for him, proactively working with Loomis to continue the search, and showing a real empathy for the situation. Particularly at the Myers house, where they learn that the guy in the imposter mask was most likely teenaged Ben Tramer. His response, holding it together for the boy's friend before the armor cracks, is a small moment but a solid one. I think a lot of the fun comes in with the hospital staff. Mostly I really want to touch on the two EMT workers, Jimmy and Bud, as well as Nurses Karen and Janet. Lance Guest’s baby faced and sweet Jimmy is a really solid love interest for Laurie. He knows her already, which makes their development a bit easier, and he just has this really sweet presence. It makes me really sad that theatrically he dies, and his death is extremely lackluster. Leo Rossi’s Bud is a completely different animal. The east coast transplant shows up with a ton of charisma, and has some really iconic lines like the “Amazing Grace” song. Every time he’s on screen, being a wiseass or playing around with Nurse Karen, I’m having a great time. Speaking of, Pamela Susan Shoop is so good as Nurse Karen. From her first moments on screen she has such a warm and fun presence. This is the only film I’ve ever seen her in and I think she’s confident enough on screen and fun enough that I hope she got to lead her own movie at some point. Ana Alicia’s Janet was fun to watch this time around. I usually refer to her as the “goodie goodie nurse” because of her heated scene with Bud swearing, but even more entertaining is her scenes on the walkie talkie with Security Guard Mr. Garrett, where she proceeds to twist every knob and press buttons when she can’t figure out how to work the walkie. For some reason, the past couple times I’ve watched Halloween II, that has never failed to make me laugh

If we’re discussing characters, I should definitely touch on our new Michael Myers, Dick Warlock. When I first saw this when I was a kid, and through my teen years, I really dug his Myers. I found his slower walk and more deliberate pace to be more robotic and malevolent and scarier. As I have rewatched Halloween II over the past few years, I have slowly but surely changed my tune on it. I’ve grown to find his slowness to be very frustrating. It takes sequences that otherwise might have been suspenseful and mostly scrubs the tension away for me. Castle’s take didn't run or anything, but he seemed to walk at a decent enough clip that I believe he could catch up to people and remain intimidating. In Halloween II, particularly in the basement chase between The Shape and Laurie, he only seems to catch up to Laurie through editing rather than believable character movement. Outside of that, Warlock does showcase some good mannerisms, and despite generally not wanting to see Michael’s eyes, Warlock seems to use them to convey almost a sense of anger and his murderous stares are quite effective.

Seeing as this is much more of an 80s bodycount slasher, I think it would be right to discuss the kills. They aren’t the craziest in the genre, and the makeup effects are not quite as gory as in, say Friday the 13th, but they’re very effective nonetheless. Be it throat slashings or Karen’s scalding/drowning with some pretty nasty melted skin effects. The needle to Dr. Mixter’s eye is the one that gets me the most. A little fact about me and slasher/horror films: eye trauma is easily the form of violence in film that skeeves me out the most. Here, we only see the aftermath, a needle jammed into the late doctor’s pupil, but the quick closeup Rosenthal gives us is plenty to make me squirm. There’s also the hammer kill that takes out poor Mr. Garrett. The build to it is really strong, the effect is great, but for me it’s the sound design that takes it over the top. It sounds so freaking brutal.

Speaking of sound, Carpenter and Howarth went for a much more synth heavy sound this time around, and for the film I think it really works. It brings the sound into the 80s, but also delivers a real sense of foreboding and suspense. I particularly really dig the revamped main theme, Laurie’s Theme, Still He Kills, The Shape Stalks Again, and Operation Room. The added synth really adds a spooky quality to it, and it often feels even more propulsive at times than the previous film. Paired with the consistently strong visuals, Carpenter and Howard really enhances the film, maintaining the auditory continuity of the first film, while carving out an identity all its own. Dean Cundey returned to maintain the visual continuity of the first film, while also utilizing their bigger budget to add a larger sense of scale to the film. The POV photography continues to dazzle, but I really appreciated the usage of crane shots especially. The incorporation of extras, particularly outside the house as they roll Laurie out on a gurney or the mob outside of the Myers house conveys a larger world than that of the one Carpenter gave us a window into in the first film. Halloween II’s lighting also does a lot in tandem with the camerawork to maintain the continuity while also setting up some great suspense sequences. I have always particularly enjoyed how they chose to handle the storeroom sequence with Mr. Garrett, the dim lighting with that hint of cool blue just really nails the spook factor. The shot of Michael lid in red toward the end of the film as Laurie is running back into the hospital has always stuck out in my mind, as if the red lighting is almost danger personified. Warlock’s The Shape just looks scary as hell in that shot. We also can't talk about iconic imagery in the film without talking about the fantastic bleeding eyes sequence. Sure, with 1080p/4K resolution, it's much easier to see that the blood is being piped down above Warlock’s eyes, but I can’t deny the power of the image of the Myers mask, porcelain white, crying tears of red blood. It’s incredibly striking and it's the first thing I think about whenever Halloween II is brought up.

While it's a couple steps down from its incredible predecessor, Halloween II is an entertaining follow up that works really well as a double feature. Cundey’s cinematography is outstanding, the score is wonderful, and it’s got some really amusing characters. It’s a shame that the decisions made with the character of Michael Myers are so mishandled with a bit of a messy script. I still watch this movie every year and despite my issues with it, still wholeheartedly recommend giving it a watch if you loved the first and haven’t seen this sequel before.

What did you think of Halloween II (1981)? Do you think the Myers/Laurie reveal was better than I did? Do you wish it was never made in the first place? Let me know, and join me next time when we discuss the black sheep of the franchise: Halloween III: Season of the Witch!