Halloween II (2009)

You can’t keep a good supernatural serial killer down.

 

 

(Dimension) Scout Taylor-Compton, Tyler Mane, Malcolm McDowell, Danielle Harris, Brad Dourif, Howard Hesseman, Sheri Moon Zombie, Chase Vanek, Margot Kidder. Directed by Rob Zombie

 

Sequels can be very problematic. They’re almost never as good as the original, and when you throw in that it’s the sequel to the reboot of one of the classic horror series of all time, things get even more dicey.

 

Halloween II picks up where Zombie’s reboot left off, with Laurie Strode (Taylor-Compton) being pulled out of the house in an ambulance, while serial killer Michael Myers (Mane) is being carted off to the morgue, courtesy of a gunshot to the face by Miss Strode. However, you can’t keep a good serial killer horror film franchise down and Myers turns out to be not quite dead yet, escaping the ambulance that is transporting him to the county morgue when the unlucky ambulance hits a cow. Hey, Haddonfield is farm country don’tcha know.

 

He shows up back at the hospital where Laurie is being treated – a hospital that seems unrealistically understaffed – and hacks a few people to death, particularly a nurse whom he seems intent on pounding into hamburger. He corners her in a guard shack and – voila! – She wakes up from a dream. Actually, the sequence was an homage to the original Halloween II which took place entirely in a hospital. Zombie serves notice that this isn’t gonna be your pappy’s Michael Myers.

 

It’s two years after the events of the first film (although, strangely, the theatrical release portrayed it as being one year, but what’s a year between fiends) and Laurie is now living with Sheriff Brackett (Dourif) and his daughter Annie (Harris) who was the only other survivor of the Michael Myer’s previous Halloween rampage.

 

Halloween is approaching once again and Laurie has been beset by strange dreams. She confesses to her therapist (Kidder) that she’s concerned for her sanity, but she has no idea what kind of shellacking her sanity’s in for. That’s because Dr. Loomis (McDowell), Michael’s therapist from the first film, is on yet another book tour and in his new book he reveals that Laurie is actually Michael Myers’ sister (and Darth Vader is their father…but that didn’t make it into the movie). Since Laurie wasn’t aware of it, she goes bonkers and storms out of the Brackett’s happy home which is bad news for Laurie but good news for Michael, who is coming out for a family reunion, egged on by the Gothic ghost of his mom (Zombie) and the specter of his younger self (Vanek, taking over from Doug Faerch who had a growth spurt and became literally too big for the role).

 

All of this means there’s going to be mayhem in Haddonfield on Halloween, complete with strippers getting their face jammed into a mirror numerous times, a bouncer getting his head squashed in by Michael’s brogans, a couple of rednecks finding out the hard way why it is a very bad idea to mount antlers on the front of their pickup and a whole mess o’ carnage too disturbing to get into here.

 

There’s no doubt that Zombie is a visionary director – The Devil’s Rejects proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt as one of the best horror movies of the last decade. However, he seems oddly hamstrung here, which might have been due to the incredibly tight filming schedule (something which he mentions in the commentary track) or perhaps due to his own reluctance to do a sequel which he changed his mind about at the last moment, leading to said tight schedule. Either way, the movie doesn’t live up to most of his other work and has to rank as a disappointment.

 

That’s not to say it’s totally without redeeming qualities. For example, the violence here is excessive and realistic. When Michael Myers plunges the blade into a body, it is with full force, punctuated with an animal grunt. While that might make some queasy, it truly does work within the context of the movie and brings a new dimension of realism to the proceedings.

 

Where the movie doesn’t work is in the endless psychobabble that Zombie sees fit to insert, trying to get at the core of what drives Michael Myers. Now while I’m all for attempting to get inside the head of a serial killer, it gets a little too artsy fartsy for my way of thinking, with his mom showing up as a kind of Goth chick ghost in flowing white robes, accompanied by a white horse. It derails the oeuvre of the movie and takes audience right out of the mood.

 

He goes out of his way to make Laurie Strode shrill and unlikable. While this may be a realistic way of depicting someone who’s been through the kind of ordeal she has, what it also serves to do is alienate the audience from identifying with the heroine and that’s just bad juju. If the audience thinks the heroine is a whiny bitch, they’re not going to care what happens to her and if they don’t care what happens to her, there’s no reason to see the movie other than to watch Michael Myers carve up the citizens of Haddonfield and environs.

 

I also have to comment on the set design which is often incomprehensibly busy. Laurie’s room looks like the inside of a mental hospital cell, with a huge poster of Charlie Manson and spray painted graffiti reading “In Charlie We Trust.” This in the home of a town sheriff  mind you. Apparently Rob’s sense of realism and mine differ by quite a bit, so we’ll just leave it at that. In any case, you wind up with sensory overload in quite a few of the scenes, focusing in on the minutiae of the set design that you almost lose track of what the filmmaker’s trying to get you to notice. It kind of works at odds with Zombie’s vision.

 

I’m a big fan of Rob Zombie and the Halloween franchise both, so it is with a great deal of regret that I have to give this a poor review. I really, really wanted to like this movie and I just flat-out didn’t. While there is a third movie in the rebooted franchise slated for release next year, Zombie won’t be a part of it which may well turn out to be a good thing for both Zombie and the producers of Halloween – Zombie took an enormous amount of crap from the horror film fandom for this movie, much of it undeserved (for example, Michael is unmasked for much of the movie which many fanboys found to be sacrilegious) but some of it justified. I’m hoping his next project blows me away. This one didn’t do the job.

 

WHY RENT THIS: Some very effective scares, and a lot of insight into the background of Michael Myers. The violence is brutal and realistic.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: The set design is a bit of a mess, often so busy that it distracts from what’s going on onscreen. The plot meanders and gets a little too murky with the symbology.

FAMILY VALUES: The violence here is particularly brutal which works for the movie but may be difficult viewing for sensitive souls. There is also a good deal of crude language, female nudity and much sex. For teens there are scenes of teen drinking and implied drug use. All in all this is not for kids or for most teens.  

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Tyler Mane becomes only the second actor to play Michael Myers in more than one film (George Wilbur is the other one). 

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: There are six music videos from the fictitious band Captain Clegg and the Night Creatures. There are also some standup comedy performances from Jeff Daniel Phillips, a blooper reel and audition tapes.

 BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $39.3M on a $15M production budget; the movie made money.

FINAL RATING: 4/10

TOMORROW: Day Four of the Six Days of Darkness

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The Rocker

Rainn Wilson forgot his earplugs.

(20^th Century Fox) Rainn Wilson, Christina Appelgate, Josh Gad, Teddy Geiger, Jane Lynch, Emma Stone, Jason Sudeikis, Howard Hesseman, Jeff Garlin, Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett, Fred Armison. Directed by Peter Cattaneo

Dreams can carry us through our worst moments, but they can also be responsible for those worst moments, turning on us savagely and striking with the lethal efficiency of a cobra. That’s particularly true of rock and roll dreams.

Robert “Fish” Fishman (Wilson) had the ultimate rock and roll dream in his fingertips. His band, Vesuvius, was about to be signed by Matchbox Records midway through the ‘80s heyday of heavy metal, with all the AquaNet, headbands and spandex that implies. There was an unfortunate caveat to the deal, however – the nephew of a record company executive was to be inserted in the drum kit and Fish was left high and dry.

He never really recovered from it. Unable to maintain a relationship, barely able to retain a job for very long, he is reduced to living in his sister Lisa’s (Lynch) attic. Let us just say Lisa isn’t terribly sympathetic to her brother’s plight.

Her son Matt (Gad) is, however; he has a garage band with high school friends Curtis (Geiger) and Amelia (Stone) and they need a drummer for their gig at the high school prom. Fish is recruited and being a bit of a nitwit, resumes his role as a hard-drinking, rebellious rock and roller, arriving at the prom gig minutes before they’re to go onstage (“Headliners go on at 11,” he explains while Amelia replies laconically “It’s a prom; it’s over by 11”).

Fish is his own worst enemy, bringing the prom to a screeching halt with an ill-advised drum solo. He vows to make it up to his bandmates by getting them a real club gig which he does, in Indiana (the band lives in Cleveland) but neglects to ask his sister if he can borrow her van, ending up getting pulled over by the cops before they reach the state line.

A video of Fish practicing naked, however, surfaces on the Internet, leading to a buzz about “the Naked Drummer” which in turn gets the garage band (who is charmingly known as A.D.D.) noticed by none other than Matchbox Records, the same label as Vesuvius. A.D.D goes on the road, which after Fish gets them arrested for trashing a hotel room, includes Curtis’ mom Kim (Applegate) as chaperone. Is there a romance budding within the band? Will they finally get the rock stardom Fish has been waiting for two decades for? Will they blow Fish’s old band Vesuvius off the stage?

Cattaneo (The Full Monty) doesn’t seem to know whether he’s making a broad satire or a gentle sitcom-like comedy. At times, the humor is out there (as when an enraged Fish chases down his old bandmates in a moving van) and at times it’s somewhat pedantic. Even Wilson, who is best known for his work in “The Office,” doesn’t seem to know at all times who his character is.

It’s a shame because there certainly was a good movie to be had here. The music is surprisingly good, and Geiger, a real-life pop star who previously had some exposure on the short-lived NBC series “Love Monkey,” is an engaging presence who is given some pretty good material to sing. Stone, who recently gained some positive attention for her work in Easy A is sweet and acid at the same time in her role of Amelia, making her a cross between a schoolgirl and a confident rocker. Gad channels Jonah Hill somewhat, albeit on a lower key, is solid as a socially challenged overweight keyboardist.

The supporting cast is surprisingly strong, with Garlin as Fish’s hero-worshipping brother-in-law, Cooper, Armison and Arnette as his ex-bandmates in Vesuvius, Hesseman as a drug-addled bus driver and Sudeikis as a slimy record label exec. There are also cameos from Demitri Martin, Aziz Ansari and Jane Krakowski. In other words, there was plenty of talent in front of the camera.

Unfortunately the movie never really lives up to its potential, with the jokes being of the hit-or-miss variety. What The Rocker ends up being is an odd cross between This is Spinal Tap and School of Rock minus the biting satire and Jack Black (who in my estimation would have been a better choice of leads than Wilson). It is essentially harmless entertainment, which would seem to be the antithesis of what rock and roll is supposed to be.

WHY RENT THIS: Truthfully there is some heart here. The music and Teddy Geiger’s singing is faultless.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: The filmmakers were a bit schizophrenic in what kind of movie they wanted to make. Much of the humor falls flat.

FAMILY VALUES: There’s some male rear end nudity (not for the squeamish), a little bit of language and a few drug and sexual references, mostly pretty mild. In other words, probably safe for most teens and mature tweens.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Former Beatle Pete Best, who’s story this is loosely based on, makes a cameo early on in the movie reading a Rolling Stone with Vesuvius on the cover; true to form, most of his work ended up on the cutting room floor.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: For a movie that did poorly at the box office, there are plenty of extras on the Born to Rock special editions of both the DVD and Blu-Ray variety. There is a VH-1 Behind the Music-style documentary on Vesuvius, a music video for “I’m Not Bitter,” two separate gag reels, a featurette on the cast and crew members talking about their favorite concerts, and a kind of a one-joke clip in which most of the cast members ask if they can be in “The Office.”

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $8.8M on a $15M production budget; the movie was a flop.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

TOMORROW: The Six Days of Darkness begins with Let Me In

All About Steve

Bradley Cooper finds this movie as frustrating as we do.

(20^th Century Fox) Sandra Bullock, Bradley Cooper, Thomas Haden Church, Ken Jeong, DJ Qualls, Howard Hesseman, Katy Mixon, Keith David, Beth Grant. Directed by Phil Traill

We all are who we are; that is an unshakable fact. Sometimes, who we are falls a mite outside what most folks would consider normal. There’s nothing wrong with that but sometimes people fall so far outside of normal that they can’t even see normal from where they are. Again, nothing wrong with that – most of the time.

Mary Magdalene Horowitz (Bullock) – yes, she’s half-Jewish, half-Catholic – works as a crossword puzzle constructor (a.k.a. a cruciverbalist) for a Sacramento daily newspaper. She’s recently moved back home with dear old Mom and Dad, mainly because her own apartment is being fumigated. Mary is 40ish, and single. She pretty much has always been single. She has a nervous habit of talking non-stop using a ton of $5 words and spitting out trivial facts like they’re watermelon seeds at a country fair. She also wears a pair of shiny bright red disco boots everywhere that pretty much guarantee her that nobody will ever – and I mean ever – take her seriously.

Other than that, she’s a pretty decent-hearted woman who just needs to meet the right man, and she thinks she’s done that. His name is Steve (Cooper) and he works as a cameraman for a cable news channel. They meet on a blind date at which she is completely smitten by his charm. However, after she about rapes him in the cab of his truck at the date’s conclusion, his feelings for her are a lot less sanguine. As a matter of fact, his tiles squeal as he tries to drive away from her at warp speed. Scotty, push the engines ‘til they blow.

She loses her job after constructing a crossword puzzle in which every clue has something to do with her would-be boyfriend. With no obligations holding her back, she decides to follow him everywhere he goes from one big news story to the next, much to the bemusement of his smarmy on-camera reporter Hartman Hughes (Church) and their producer Angus (Jeong).

Along the way she is subjected to every indignity you can imagine (and a few you can’t). Now, I have nothing against putting characters in a comedy through the ringer, but some of the actions border on the cruel, like the bus driver who tricks her into getting off the bus, then drives away, stranding her in the middle of nowhere.

Part of the problem is that it’s Sandra Bullock, man. You want to like her and at times here I nearly do, but the character is so filled with quirks and ticks that you want to get far, far away from her, which is never a good thing either in a movie theater or at home.

This is a movie that should have worked and to be fair, some of it does. The cast here is one any casting director would be proud to assemble, but there’s not a lot of chemistry here. The humor is a little on the low-brow side and going for something edgy they wind up instead just make you wonder what the heck they were thinking.

There really isn’t one place to lay blame at. One gets the impression that there’s a lot of ad libbing going on, but the script and story aren’t that strong to begin with. There is certainly a good deal of overacting, kind of like silent cinema comedy in the 21^st century.

This movie was bookended by The Proposal and The Blind Side, the latter of which won Bullock her first Oscar. Unfortunately, this movie also won her a Razzie, making her the first actress to win one of each in the same year. That All About Steve sat on a studio shelf for two years should have been fair warning that this movie wasn’t going to be successful. Even if you’re a big fan of Miss Bullock as I am, you’re going to find a very hard time to find nice things to say about this one.

WHY RENT THIS: A very likable cast that appears to be having a good time makes you really want to like this movie.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: The cast tries just a little too hard sometimes to be funny and the script veers off from genuinely madcap to sincerely silly in places.

FAMILY VALUES: There is some sexual innuendo but for the most part it’s harmless; you might think twice about bringing the very young (i.e. preschoolers) but otherwise this is okay for most audiences.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: During the scene in which Mary is soaking in the bathtub, the song in the background is sung by Helga Bullock, Sandra’s real-life mom.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: There’s actually a surprising amount of material for a movie many figured would get the bare-bones treatment. There’s a mock behind-the-scenes interview with the terminally annoying Kerri Kenney as an “Access Hollywood”-type interviewer and a Fox Movie Channel program called “Life After Film School” in which three film students interview director Phil Traill.

FINAL RATING: 4/10

TOMORROW: A Perfect Getaway