I didn't hate Rob Zombie's Halloween II. That's bad news for anyone hoping for a repeat of my infamous 'Fuck You out of 10' review for the original remake, since I'm not going to tear it a new one or revolutionize the CHUD grading system.

Which isn't to say that I liked the movie. Maybe some of it comes from low expectations - having sat through the first Halloween, there's no way this film could be any worse - but I think it comes from Zombie feeling more free to do the movie his way. One of the biggest problems I had with the original is that just when I was getting used to the director's ridiculous vision for the character of Michael Myers he went and threw it all away and just did a by the book remake of the first in twenty minutes. This time it's just Zombie's vision, which can be intriguing as well as annoying, and which can be actually good... as well as laugh out loud ridiculous.

You know you're in for an... interesting experience when your slasher movie opens with text explaining the psychological and symbolic meaning of a white horse appearing in a dream. I haven't encountered opening text quite as giggle worthy as this since Uwe Boll's Alone in the Dark (still, without a doubt, the funniest non-parodic opening text crawl of any movie). That white horse appears a couple of times in the film, and what it really represents is that Rob Zombie has a very deep idea about what drives Michael Myers and is utterly unable to express it. This is the driving force of the film - a complete inability, on the part of both the killer and his director, to make his thoughts known. Michael takes it out on his victims by savagely stabbing them to death while Zombie takes it out on his audience by making these movies.

But while Zombie's big ideas simply do not work, I like that he has them in there. Halloween II is trying to be something more than 'just' a slasher movie, and while I don't think it's ever in any danger of succeeding I respect the fact that the guy tried. Zombie has refined his Myers; now really a hillbilly, the kind of characters he recognizes from his youth in Haverhill, Massachusetts (the town, by the way, that served as the inspiration for Riverdale, the town in which Archie Andrews of Archie Comics lives), Mike is also now all about rage. Simple, inchoate rage. While Myers vocalized during his kills in the first film here he's just about shouting with each stab. And these aren't even really stabs - the guy is punching poor motherfuckers with a knife. I don't remember the first film well enough to recall if the kills are this forcefully brutal, but I feel like the sequel has ramped up the palpable anger behind each of Myer's strikes. That, of course, is the exact opposite of what John Carpenter's blankly dispassionate Shape did in the original film, but Zombie's already torn down Halloween; now he's rebuilding it in his own image.

Which is what any filmmaker should do anyway. It's why I was always against Terry Gilliam getting his mitts on Watchmen - what you would have seen onscreen would have been only partially recognizable as the comic, since a really visionary director will always impose themselves on the material. It's auterism, and as silly as it sounds, Zombie is an auteur. That's not a judgment of quality, simply a statement of irrefutable fact - each of Zombie's films represents his personal vision, unmistakably so. He didn't fully commit to that in the first Halloween - it's like he got chicken right at the end and swerved off into the recognizable, suburban Haddonfield that obviously has no interest for him - but this film finds him defiantly doing his Rob Zombie thing almost from the start.

It almost works. There are a couple of prologues - a flashback to Baby Mikey in the mental hospital, the aftermath of the first Halloween, with Laurie in the hospital and Michael's body suddenly and inexplicably coming back to life after the meat wagon slams into a cow (killing two of the most irritating scumbags in the Zombie ouevre, and if you're familiar with the guy's canon you know that's saying something), the first appearance of the white horse and the ghost of Mike's mom, and then a lengthy dream where Laurie is stalked in the hospital by Mike. When Laurie wakes up it's a year later, and we're treated to some interesting looks at how the surviving characters have changed. Laurie has terrible nightmares, but she's also become some kind of 1980s style hard rocker (seriously, between the Alice Cooper posters and endless AM radio rock that Zombie has in this film he should have just made it a period piece). Her parents dead, she now lives with Sheriff Brackett and his daughter Annie, whose near-death experience has turned her into a health food freak. Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis - mysteriously unscarred after having his eyes poked out in the last movie - has become a crass exploiter of the tragedy, writing another book about Myers and even coming to Haddonfield to sign copies on the book's October 31st release date. This stuff is interesting (although I simply don't buy Laurie having a Charles Manson poster over her bed. I could see her getting into rebellion and everything, but I would think murderers would leave a bad taste in her mouth after her parents and all her friends were, you know, murdered. This is really indicative of the problems with Zombie's filmmaking - he's far too interested in getting in stuff that he thinks is 'cool' or 'fucked up' to worry if it rings true at all), and for the first time these characters feel like characters. Instead of wasting time with Michael, Zombie wisely builds these people up so that they feel rounded out and real. This way you'll possibly actually care if they live or die.

But Zombie never figures out how to make a movie out of all of this. He has Michael seeing visions of his mother and himself as a young boy on the night that he killed his sister, and he has the survivors going about their business, but except for the fact that you know Myers has to show up in town there feels like no good reason for any of it. None of it builds to anything - my friend Brian Collins noted that you could rearrange almost any of Myers' scenes and it would be impossible to tell the difference - and so the whole film, as it comes to third act, feels like a slog. There are good moments - I liked the scene of Loomis' book signing, where he has to deal with both a weirdo serial killer fan and an angry parent of one of Myers' victims - but if ever a film felt scriptless and formless, it's this one. The good scenes are lost in the larger narrative, which meanders slowly along.

When Myers does get to Haddonfield, the deaths are brutal and gory. One guy gets his face stomped in and a stripper gets smashed to death against a mirror (is this some kind of commentary about vanity or the destructive power of the gaze or something? It's just garbled enough to make me think that Zombie intends it to mean something). As a gorehound I liked the kills, although there's something about the ugliness of them that feels weirdly old-fashioned right now. I try to stay abreast of the horror zeitgeist, and I feel like truly horrific, painful, violent kills are a touch passe at the moment. Fun, shocking, laugh-inducing kills are of the now, but Zombie doesn't truck in that and so every kill is bone crunching. But they're also a touch repetitive. Michael Myers is too angry to get creative with his kills, and the impact that you get from watching him slam a knife into someone's skull in the beginning is lost by the end.

So about those visions: what do they mean? What's Zombie trying to say? They allow him to do some interesting visual work, and the movie actually often looks wonderful. There's a clarity to the scenes with the mother and Lil Mikey that the rest of the grainy film doesn't have, and I like the idea that these are the clearest moments. Zombie tends to shoot too many close-ups - some conversations consist of just impossibly tight shots of people's faces with no context - and his camerwork gets too herky jerky in some of the more intense scenes, but he also takes lots of interesting chances. Slow motion in the beginning of the film is silly, but later on he uses it to great effect. A scene when Michael comes after Annie in her bathroom is incredibly powerful when played very, very slow and almost silently. There are also some terrific dream sequences that gives Zombie a chance to play around with style and to get weirder than even his already fairly weird movie could otherwise hold. One shot in particular, of Laurie running through a dark forest that is illuminated by brilliant blue spears of light, is downright gorgeous and evocative.

But all of the great cinematography in the world doesn't clear up what he's getting at with these visions. His version of Myers has a serious mama complex (coupled with his love of the wood and the rednecks who live in them, doesn't it seem like Zombie should have just gone for the Friday the 13th remake? He's in the wrong franchise), so that makes sense, but what about the young Mike? If mom is a ghost, what is Lil Mikey? I thought maybe he was the ghost of the boy who 'died' the night he killed his sister, but that doesn't really make sense, thematically or contextually. This Lil Mikey is a servant of the mother, who herself is urging Michael on his killing spree. She also keeps his calendar, at one point telling him it's almost Halloween (I wonder if she wakes him in the morning, too). So Lil Mikey is just as bloodthirsty as Big Mikey, and just as much as Mom (at one point Mom tells Michael to 'have fun;' we don't see the ensuing murder fully, but the victim ends up naked - did Michael rape her? That's something I would actually expect from Zombie, I just wouldn't expect him to be so circumspect about it), so I don't get what the fuck he's doing there. I imagine the real answer is that Zombie thought it would be cool looking.

And that's what a lot of the film boils down to - what Zombie thinks is cool. If he had more time, or maybe more inclination to think about it, I think Zombie could have done something really special with this film. He's certainly on that path. But every aspect that really worked is stuck between three or four others that just fall flat, or are ridiculous. And the 'deeper' aspects of the film are, finally, half-baked. I kept waiting for all of the vision stuff to coalesce into something, and it almost does when Laurie starts seeing visions as well... but even that makes no sense. Maybe she would see her birth mother's ghost, but Michael's little self? At the end of the movie she's being held down by Lil Mikey, although no one else can see him - what the fuck does this mean? Watching the muddled, anticlimactic finale I get the impression this was not the ending that Zombie set out to make; I had heard very credible rumors that the original ending was far weirder, and everything leading up to the final shot lends credence to those rumors. In the end, though, it all plays out as ideas that were too big for Zombie to wrap his screenplay around mixed in with shit he thought was kewl.

One thing I'll say for this movie - it inspired me to write this much. And if I was writing with spoilers, I think I could go even longer. To me a film that gives you this much to chew on can't be simply classified as a bad film, and with few exceptions, Zombie's a good filmmaker. His style is strong, and he can build scenes that work, but he can't string them together into anything that goes anywhere or has meaning. He's crippled by his own major limitations as a screenwriter, and I kept wishing that someone had sat down with Zombie to hammer out this script in a way where it would work. Again, there are concepts here, scenes here, characters here that are terrific, but they're lost in a mess.

I know that Rob Zombie hates his critics - he has Loomis deliver his thoughts on journalists in the film - but I wish that he would take this criticism to heart. He's not a bad filmmaker, even if he might be one limited by his own interests (which, in many ways is what Woody Allen is), but he needs better screenplays. The raw material is in Halloween II to make a film that I could heartily recommend, but Zombie has only managed to use them to construct a movie I didn't hate.