Halloween II (1981)

Directed by Rick Rosenthal. Starring Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, Lance Guest, Charles Cyphers, Pamela Susan Shoop, Tawny Moyer, Nancy Stephens, Dick Warlock, Hunter von Leer, Ana Alicia, Gloria Gifford. [R]

The Halloween night on which the Shape went on a rampage isn’t over yet; Laurie (Curtis, in a pretty obvious wig) is carted off to the hospital while Dr. Loomis (Pleasence) keeps yelling about how he shot Michael Myers six times (even though, in the movie’s most notorious goof, seven gunshots are heard while recapping the end of the last pic), and Myers stalks his way to the hospital to finish the work he started a couple hours earlier. This sequel was made in a post-Friday the 13th landscape, which means that the body count and gore are significantly raised…and the scares and atmosphere significantly diminished. Curtis spends about half the movie dog-tired and half-asleep, and barely even gets a chance to mount a stalwart defense (though she does get to prove that she’s spent a little time on the shooting range), which leaves more time for Pleasence’s mutterings and a series of somewhat creative but quite brutal murders. Only really interesting for the nonsensical decision to make Laurie the “secret” sister of Michael, and for gruesomely humorous asides like a trick-or-treater being rushed to the hospital for biting into a razorblade that had been slipped into his candy, and another trick-or-treater getting crushed and set ablaze by a T-bone auto collision! Co-written and co-produced by John Carpenter, but he’s sorely missed in the director’s chair. Look for a young Dana Carvey in a bit part as a paramedic.

47/100