Friday, October 31, 2014

Halloween 2 (1981)

Picking up immediately after the events of the first film, Laurie Strode is taken to the Haddonfield Memorial Hospital to tend to the wounds inflicted on her by escaped psychopath Michael Myers. In the meantime, Dr. Loomis and the Haddonfield Sheriff's Department continue the search for Michael, who evidently survived being shot six times (or seven, if you're counting carefully in the recap in part 2) and falling from a second story window.

At the hospital. Laurie is stitched up, her broken ankle is wrapped, and she is given painkillers and sedatives. The hospital staff, consisting largely of inattentive teenaged nurses and a drunken E.R. doctor, are easy prey for Michael Myers, who has tracked Laurie down and intends to finish what he started.

Laurie herself is in no shape to face Michael, but face him she must. She has to use her wits and her will to overcome her near helplessness to finish off Michael for good. (Except not really, since there are a whole bunch more of these movies.)

Halloween 2 has almost entirely no story to it by itself. It is simply and entirely a continuation of the events of that same night presented in the first Halloween. There's only one new plot element - a revelation presented late in the movie - and it has no bearing on the action at hand. But I really don't see that as a problem.

Halloween 2 economically gets to the action, knowing that there is little need to re-explain the situation outside of a quick recap of the first movie shown right up front. Once that's out of the way, we can get right to the good stuff.

The first Halloween came at the forefront of the slasher subgenre, and as such, was more about the suspense than a body count. By the time Halloween 2 came out three years later, the slasher boom was in full effect and the imitators were piling up the corpses by the dozens. So it's no surprise that Halloween 2 ups the ante into the double-digits. Indeed, near the end a cop asks. "What's the count?" and the response is, "Ten, so far." which seems like a commentary on the perceived need for a high body count and possibly a nod to the idea that future sequels might be in the offing.

Of course, the story goes that they did not actually want to continue with Michael Myers in a sequel. Instead, they made a bat-shit movie about rubber Halloween masks that turned kids' heads into bugs and snakes and called it Halloween 3. When that failed to blow up the box office, they went back to the Michael Myers well and the franchise was off and running for years to come.

But while future sequels would expand on the Myers mythology to absurd degrees and create one of the most confusing and convoluted story-lines in horror, this first sequel maintains a welcome purity of concept. Michael's still out there from the first movie, he's still stalking Laurie, and she and Dr. Loomis have to survive and overcome.

Halloween 2 is really a lot of fun. It ups the body-count in a classic slasher sort of way, as well as amping up the craziness of the kills. But it doesn't stray too far afield from the original in tone (at least not as far as the rest of the sequels) and it feels nicely connected to the first movie. It's well worth your time if you enjoy the classic era of slasher movies. As for the other sequels - that's a story for another Halloween.

No comments:

Post a Comment