Michael Myers is back and he brought his mom and her ghost horse! That one sentence pretty much wraps up Rob Zombie’s Halloween II in a neat little package. Zombie’s sequel starts off in familiar territory – Haddonfield Asylum. We flash back to little Mikey having a heart to heart with his momma. Michael tells his mother about a dream he had where she looked like a beautiful ghost and arrived on a white horse to take him home. Then we pick up where Zombie’s Halloween remake left off. Laurie Strode is bloodcaked and screaming murder and Michael Myers is apparently dead.

Paramedics arrive and take Laurie to the hospital. Michael is strapped onto a gurney and hauled off to the morgue. A freak accident caused by a conversation about necrophilia and the random appearance of a cow gives Michael the perfect opportunity to come back to life and snuff the sole surviving paramedic. Then the boogeyman beats a path to the hospital to find Laurie. The next several scenes play out like a hyper-violent remake of Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II as Michael snuffs everyone who crosses his path. Just when things seem especially grim for Laurie she wakes up…and it was all just a dream! Don’t you hate it when that happens? Well get used to it.

It’s now about one year after the night that HE came home and Laurie Strode is slowly adjusting back to reality. She now lives with her best pal Anne and her father the Sheriff. She even rocks Black Flag t-shirts and works at a punk rock coffee shop with her sexy gal pals. But Laurie is clearly not well. She wakes up screaming every night and can’t seem to get Michael Myers out of her head. Doctor Loomis on the other hand has cashed in nicely on the Myers tragedy and sips cocktails in his limo in between book signings. Laurie’s attempt at having a normal life comes to a crashing end on Halloween when Loomis’s book hits stores and she learns that she is actually Angel Myers – the sister of Michael Myers. As she struggles to come to terms with her discovery her big brother shows up and starts carving up her friends like pumpkins.

My favorite part of the movie was the scene stealing performance from Leo Rossi as a perverted paramedic named Mac who smokes a joint in the hospital, sings “Amazing Grace, come sit on my face,” and gets killed while fucking in the therapy room. Oh wait, that was the original Halloween II. This shit gets incredibly confusing. What you have here is a sequel to a remake…that wasn’t really a remake. This certainly isn’t a remake of Rick Rosenthal’s 1981 film Halloween II. Rob Zombie gets another crack at helming a Halloween entry, and this time around he makes no effort at all to recreate the wheel. Hell, Carpenter’s classic Halloween theme doesn’t even make an appearance until the end credits!

What you have here is the most violent and surreal entry in the Halloween franchise. People who complained about how gory or violent Zombie’s remake was will want to steer clear of this sequel. The death scenes are all quite lengthy, almost to the point of being excessive. Zombie never cuts away until the knife rips flesh over and over again. Michael Myers grunts a lot when he kills people this time around. Between the grunting, tattered mask, and brief appearance of Caroline “STRETCH” Williams, I was having serious Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 flashbacks.

This flick has an unmistakable grungy white trash feel to it. Only Rob Zombie could dream up a Halloween film where Laurie Strode is a grubby looking punker chick who lives in a house full of pentagrams and Alice Cooper and Charles Manson posters. Take a second to take a deep breath and analyze that last sentence. At this point you should have your mind firmly made up if you want to see this movie or not. People who hated Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake are going to hate his sequel. It’s that simple. I wish there was a fun way I could try to sway people with this review, but it’s not going to happen.

But for every die hard Halloween-head who despises Rob Zombie and what he has done to the series, there is a Rob Zombie fan who loves the remake and wanted to see a sequel. My biggest complaint about the remake was the fact that the film felt rushed and sort of fell apart after Mikey made it back to Haddonfield. I thought the original backstory for Micheal Myers that Zombie created was great, but I wasn’t as impressed with the scenes that were direct recreations from Carpenter’s film. This sequel really feels more like an original Rob Zombie movie than a Halloween movie.

The added element of seeing Michael’s fantasies and in particular the WHITE HORSE are going to be hard for Halloween fans to swallow. This is clearly going to be a love it or hate it type of experience. I thought this was a better film than his remake because it owes nothing at all to John Carpenter or the original series. This is entirely Rob Zombie’s creation, and I for one would rather see a combination of hardcore violence and bizarre fantasy than schlock involving the cult of thorn.

As far as the controversial appearance of Weird Al…well, I rather see him wisecracking with Loomis on a talk show than watch Busta Rhymes kicking Mikey’s ass and calling him a bitch. This is a Halloween movie full of brutal violence and it has Motorhead on the soundtrack. There is really no way in Hell this wouldn’t be 100% Brain Hammer approved! GO SEE IT!!!

KEEP THE BLOOD FLOWING!!!