After the near-unprecedented success of John Carpenter's original Halloween, it was perhaps inevitable that there would be a sequel. But back then, such things were less common, and Carpenter, having felt he'd done everything he'd wanted to do with the film the first time around, at first resisted the allure- and the money- of coming back for more.
But Halloween, which had become one of the most profitable independent films of all time - a record it would retain until The Blair Witch Project came along in 1999 - hadn't just changed the landscape of horror, it started a cottage industry in the process. Before you knew it, holiday-themed horror flooded the market, from My Bloody Valentine to April Fools' Day to Silent Night, Deadly Night, as well as horror revolving around other significant dates, like Friday the 13th, Prom Night and Graduation Day.
When Hollywood basically ran out of notable dates, they began to focus on locales, such as in Terror Train, Sleepaway Camp, Sorority House Massacre and The Dorm That Dripped Blood. Producer Irwin Yablans was always keen on doing another film, but Carpenter and co-writer/producer Debra Hill were initially hesitant.
Finally, after having enjoyed some success with their follow-up films, The Fog and Escape from New York, the two relented and agreed to hammer out a script for the project. However, while the two would remain on-board as producers and writers, with Carpenter also agreeing to compose a new score for the film, he outright refused to direct.
Instead, Carpenter passed the buck to newcomer Rick Rosenthal after his associate Tommy Lee Wallace, who had worked on the original Halloween, summarily declined. (Wallace, for better or worse, would end up doing Halloween III instead.) The relatively inexperienced director caught Carpenter and Hill's eye after seeing his short film, The Toyer.
The pair originally planned to set the film several years later after the events of the first film, with Laurie living in a high-rise apartment and Michael Myers tracking her down and terrorizing the denizens of the building and anyone else who got in the way. They also toyed with shooting the film in 3D, but the idea was nixed for being too complicated, least of all for a first-time feature film director, not to mention too expensive.
Eventually, the two decided to instead pick up the film where the first one left off, a novel idea that has rarely been done since, save maybe in the opening sequences of a few films. This one takes place entirely on the same night of the original, a rarity in horror films, and one that would help the film become a favorite double-feature to watch alongside the first Halloween.
However, Yablans was disappointed with the result of the first script, finding it to be just a retread of the original and rote and predictable. Finally, by his own admission, after perhaps a few too many beers, Carpenter concocted a ludicrous twist that would nonetheless be accepted as canon by future installments: that of Laurie being Michael Myers' sister.
Recognizing that this didn't make a lot of sense, he tried to ret-con it before such things were common by adding a scene to the original for the TV version where Dr. Loomis discovers that, before escaping Smith's Grove, Michael had scrawled the word "Sister" on the door, thus implying that he was going after his "other" sister.
In addition, Carpenter shoehorned in a flashback sequence in the sequel, in which Laurie, under the influence of medication while in the hospital, suddenly "remembers" that Michael was her brother and that she had interacted with him as a child before he was sent away to Smith's Grove.
This, of course, doesn't line up with what we know of the original film, which had Michael sent away at the age of six, which would have actually made Laurie practically a toddler at the time if she actually existed, instead of the decidedly older child we see her as in the flashback. Unless we are to presume her adoptive mother took her to visit her murderous brother in the sanitarium, which seems dubious.
Carpenter later expressed regret over the choice, but was able to get over it when he declared that Myers was definitively dead, so it didn't really matter anymore. Little did he know Myers would be back for more in 1988, after Carpenter's plans to turn Halloween into an anthology franchise failed with the third installment.
Yablans, however, loved the twist and green-lighted the film, along with financiers Moustapha Akkad and Dino De Laurentis, who co-produced, ponying up a whopping $2.5 million for the budget, much more than the original film's comparatively paltry $325,000.
Original cinematographer Dean Cundey also signed on to shoot the new film as well, turning down a chance to shoot Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist out of loyalty to Carpenter and Hill. Much of the same crew from the original also came on-board, making it a bit of a reunion of sorts.
In addition, Rosenthal went out of his way to make sure the film had the same essential vibe as the original, focusing on Myers constantly lurking in the shadows, and even adopting his POV in the opening sequence, as a sort of callback to the original's famed opening scene. He also vowed to keep violence at a minimum, out of respect for the original film's approach.
However, in post-production, it was Carpenter himself who deemed the film just wasn't scary- amusingly echoing Yablan's own complaints about the original before the music was added, taking the film to another level. Deeming it about as frightening as an "episode of Quincy," then then-popular TV show about a doctor who helped solve crimes, he asked for and got additional funds to do some re-shoots, with the intention to beef up the gore quotient of the film, in light of how popular the slasher film had become in the years since the original Halloween had been released.
Director Rosenthal was not pleased, claiming that Carpenter had "ruined" his film, turning it from a carefully-paced thriller into just another in the long line of splatter films that had risen in popularity since Halloween first hit the scene. It didn't exactly help with the critical reception of the film, either, with many citing it as a decided step down from the quality of the original.
However, it certainly didn't hurt the box office, with film going on to gross over $25 million- not too shabby a return for a film that only cost $2.5 million. (Rosenthal would get another shot at things when he came back to the franchise to direct Halloween: Resurrection, for better or for worse.)
Be all of the above as it may, the film is pretty enjoyable on the whole. The idea of setting the action on the same night as the original was a novel one, and if the "sister" twist was pretty silly, it didn't change the fact that the film was nonetheless a fun watch, enhanced by the then-unique setting of a hospital (more hospital horror would soon follow, like Hospital Massacre, aka X-Ray, Visiting Hours, Bad Dreams and The Dead Pit) and yes, the effectively gory scenes.
Notable among them was the death by hypodermic needle to the eye, as seen above, which is still pretty cringe-inducing, and the one where the nurse is hoisted in the air by Michael's scalpel and her shoes drop off as her body goes limp.
But perhaps the hardest to watch was the fate of the lovely Pamela Susan Shoop (Empire of the Ants), who, after taking a sexy nude dip in a therapy bath, is plunged into dangerously hot waters by Michael, which burns the skin off her face before Michael drowns her for good. Ouch!
But the film's biggest debit isn't the gore, which fans mostly embraced, but rather, the diminished presence of Final Girl favorite Laurie, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. As her character is in a drug-induced haze for pretty much the entire film, she doesn't get to be nearly as proactive as she is in the original film, making the indignity of a man having to save her in the end all the more readily apparent. As such, it's a bit of a thankless role, though through no fault of Curtis' own.
On the plus side, the man in question, Dr. Loomis- as played by Donald Pleasence, also back for a second round- is much more gleefully unhinged here, setting the stage for what the character would later become in future installments, notably the fifth one. Carpenter gives Pleasence some wonderfully ripe dialogue here, that is in keeping with his purple prose in the original, but even more demented.
Some great examples:
After being told by a neighbor that he's "been trick-or-treated to death tonight" and asked if this is a joke, Loomis barks: "You don't know what death is!"
On Michael: "He's not human!'
On his gun: "Heightens my sense of security."
On Samhain: "In order to appease the gods, the Druid priests held fire rituals. Prisoners of war, criminals, the insane-animals-were burned alive. By observing how they died the Druids believed they could predict omens of the future. Ten thousand years later we've come no further. Samhain isn't goblins or evil spirits. It isn't witches or ghosts. It's the unconscious mind. We're all afraid of the dark inside ourselves."
In addition, Dr. Loomis inadvertently causes the premature death of poor Ben Tramer, the guy Laurie had a crush on in the original Halloween, and fires a warning shot out the window of a cop car to get the US Marshal to turn the car around and take him to the hospital that Laurie's at, in a presumably unintentionally amusing scene. Mental Dr. Loomis is truly the best, lol.
Also, be sure to keep an eye- and in one case, an ear- out for a few familiar favorites. In a brief cameo in the scene where Shoop's character, Karen, begrudgingly agrees to give a friend a ride home, that's Anne-Marie Martin (aka Eddie Benton) in an un-credited role. Martin had just co-starred the year before with Jamie Lee Curtis in another fave slasher, Prom Night.
This film also marks the film debut of none other than comedian Dana Carvey, who would shortly thereafter go onto super-stardom on TV's SNL, perhaps best known as Garth on Wayne's World. If you blink, you'll miss him in a small role as an aide to a local reporter in a couple of scenes.
Finally, there's also a brief bit with Nancy Loomis, aka Nancy Kyes, reprising her role as Annie, who, of course, died in the first film. But did you also know that, in the scene with the girl Michael kills early on in the film- which was one of the scenes added by Carpenter after initial shooting ended- that the girl she's talking to on the phone is also Loomis, back from the dead to lend her vocal talents to the film?
Speaking of additional scenes, as with the first film, Halloween II features some "new" scenes added to the TV version of the film to pad out the running time and make up for the scenes that had to be heavily censored. However, unlike the first film, which Carpenter had to shoot all-new scenes for- shot concurrently with this film, in fact- the initial cut of the film ran long as it was, by around fifteen minutes, so it was just a matter of putting some stuff back in, instead of shooting new footage.
Interestingly, most of this footage is comprised of scenes that actually plug up some holes in the plot nicely, showing that some of this movie isn't as nonsensical as it seems at times. For instance, Michael is shown cutting the power lines, which explains the dead phones, followed by a generator automatically coming on, restoring power otherwise to the hospital. It also explains why the hospital is so dark later on in the movie.
We also get a few new character moments with the hospital staff, which is nice if you're a fan of the movie, and helps flesh them out a good bit more than they are in the final film. In one, Nurse Alves (Gloria Gifford) actually tells Jimmy (Lance Guest) she can visit Laurie, but only for a few minutes. This is why she says "Time's up" to him when she comes in later on.
We also see Alves more actively trying to contact Laurie's parents- who the doctor says were at the party he attended before coming into work (thus implying he was drunk when he came in, which we also see more evidence of). Furthermore, Jimmy delivers on the Coke he promised Laurie, and we get a little more of Laurie in general.
On the negative side, the kills are heavily edited, certain scenes are compressed to shorten them for time and others are moved around to different places in the film which sometimes don't make sense (i.e. Janet using the phone AFTER Michael cuts the lines) or removed altogether (like the scene where Jimmy gets in the car with Laurie), and sometimes awkward alternate dialogue, some of it horribly dubbed, is used in place of the original film's dialogue, for some unknown reason.
The most obvious one being the flashback with a young Laurie and Michael. In the TV cut, Laurie says something to the effect of "Please, don't hurt me, Michael, I'm your sister!" which isn't in the original cut and makes the scene even more laughable than it already is. There's also some random voice-over bits, ostensibly from a TV news reporter.
However, on the plus side, we do get an alternate ending, in which we discover Jimmy's ultimate fate, after he slips and falls in Nurse Alves' blood. In the original, it seems like he might have killed himself via a concussion, as seen in the later scene where he gets in the car with Laurie and passes out, which has to be one of the lamest deaths in a slasher ever. In the TV version, it looks like the explosion from Dr. Loomis blowing up Michael (and himself) causes Jimmy to slip and fall.
In addition, the car scene is removed, and instead, we get one last scare in the ambulance as Jimmy rises up from the back of it under a sheet with a bandage on his head and Laurie jumps, then tells Jimmy: "We made it," and they hold hands as "Mr. Sandman" plays us out. It would have been better to leave the falling scene where it should have been, then included the car scene and then the final scene in the the ambulance, not to mention it would have made more sense overall.
Even worse, the TV cut leaves a lot of the other character's fates uncertain, as it cuts out the deaths of Janet, Dr. Mixter and, to a large extent, Nurse Alves, not to mention the girl, Alice, in the opening scene talking on the phone I mentioned before. On the other hand, it kind of implies that Michael kills the old lady he takes the knife from, as we see him enter the kitchen, grab the knife and then hear her scream from outside, instead of her screaming because she saw the knife missing and the blood.
While some have likened this version to what Rosenthal may have intended with his cut, rather than the one that resulted after Carpenter got involved and did his re-shoots, I think that this cut was actually done by someone else, which is why it's so sloppy and lamely thought out. It was clearly a rush job.
It would actually be better if someone re-edited all of this deleted footage back in, in a way that made more sense, and restored the kills, the same way that it was done on the Limited Edition DVD of the original Halloween, which featured its additional scenes added to the original cut, not the heavily-censored TV cut version.
That said, the TV cut is indeed now more readily available, thanks to the so-called "Complete Halloween Collection," which features all ten films to date (not including the new one, which just came out, obviously), with the TV cuts of both this film, the original, and the infamous "Producer's Cut" of the much-maligned Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. (It does not, however, feature the theatrical cuts of the Rob Zombie films, which is too bad, as many prefer those to his longer, uncensored cuts- myself included.)
Last but not least, the score, by Carpenter, in association with cohort Alan Howarth, is pretty fantastic. It takes the more simplistic, albeit extremely effective score from the original and fleshes it out considerably, adding more layers of synths and percussion to make it even more eerie, driving and relentless. I wouldn't go so far as to call it better, per se, just different in a really cool way. The soundtrack is certainly well-worth owning, regardless.
Halloween II is an imperfect film, marred by characters that aren't well thought-out, even if they fare a little better in the TV cut. Worse still, it all but side-lines our heroine, Laurie, for nearly the entire film, rendering her far less combative than she was in the original. As much fun as Donald Pleasence is, this is where the films start to turn Dr. Loomis into a bit of a cartoon, which isn't great, either.
Still, the film is beautifully shot by Dean Cundey, with rich colors that even more resemble Italian giallos than the original, particularly the chase scenes with Laurie (one bit of which seems to be directly inspired by Dario Argento's Suspiria, just as one bit in the original seemed informed by his Deep Red).
Add to that the great soundtrack, the nifty title sequence and some solid kill scenes and you have a better-than-average slasher flick that may not hold a candle to the original, but is, at the very least, a cut above most of the slashers of the time, which is better than nothing. Yes, the big twist is silly, but I don't know if the whole "high-rise" slasher thing would have been any better, either. It is what it is, I suppose.
And, as it stands, I like H2 just fine, and often watch it in tandem with the original, thanks in large part to it picking up where the first one leaves off. For that reason, it has become fairly essential over time for me, so it's hard for me to dismiss it, even if it isn't perfect. What film is, really?
Join me next for my take on Jamie Lee Curtis' first return to the franchise after leaving it for many years after this film- the throwback slasher that is Halloween: 20 Years Later, aka H2O. Is it better than this one, or the many others that followed? Tune in to find out! 🎃
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