There's no excuse for neglecting a blog. None whatsoever. But it happens, especially in a summer where movies have not inspired me to write much.
In short order, though I did love 500 Days of Summer and the new Transformers, though for vastly different reasons. I refused to watch G.I. Joe, it's sheer awfulness revealed in the trailer, which is never a good sign.
And finally, there's Rob Zombie's Halloween II. Two years ago, Zombie gave us back Michael Myers, the William Shatner-wearing mass murderer that stalked Jamie Lee Curtis in that 1978 movie. It was a brutal, slash-happy remake, brought down only by Zombie's insistence that we must understand the monster. Monsters are not made to be understood. They are made to kill and scare the living crap out of us.
The sequel picks up where the last movie left us, with Laurie Strobe (this time played by Scott Taylor-Compton) all bloody and hysterical and in the hospital. But unlike the original Halloween II, this movie takes up the action a year later.
Laurie Strobe is in therapy and haunted by nightmares, and our dear Dr. Loomis is hawking a book on Michael Myers in which he reveals that Strobe is Michael Myers' long-lost sister, Angel.
Of course, Michael Myers, bullet-proof as he is, isn't dead, as some insist. He's alive and just waiting to come back to Haddonfield to kill some more and reclaim his sister.
Zombie is good at creating tension from dark hallways and blood-soaked floors. The violence is immediate and undeniably in-your-face.
And it is often unnecessarily graphic. Myers plunges his knife into his victims a sickening number of times that it ceases to be scary and becomes increasingly just gross.
We even see Myers eat a dog. That's just too much.
But when Zombie focuses on Myers' bloody reign of terror, the movie works. The acting is a bit over-the-top but effective. We get a sense of how a traumatic event changes people.
And there's a clever (okay, somewhat clever) twist at the end that brings the whole thing home and maybe, maybe, makes room for a sequel.
