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Yahoo!As mass killers go, Michael Myers abides by a policy of overkill. Not one given to subtlety or creativity, he generally dispatches his deadly task with multiple stab wounds, occasionally changing things up. He's lumbering but dogged, a thuggish and taciturn killing machine, and he's back, thanks to writer/director Rob Zombie's grim and wobbly guilty pleasure of a sequel to his remake of the horror-film classic. The narrative nuisance of Myers's presumed death after the original Halloween is quickly dispensed with through a plot twist about a mishap on the ride to the morgue-and Myers's return to the killing fields of Haddonfield.
Within the first 10 minutes of Zombie's grisly and occasionally self-referential and humorous concoction, we've seen a high body count (including a cow) and a head removed from its perch. Clearly this film has much more (or less) on its mind than character development or feel-good elements, but Zombie tries nonetheless to lure us into a semblance of empathy for our nightmare-haunted protagonist, Myers's teenaged sister (Scout Taylor-Compton), who we hope won't join the body count. Also Brad (Wise Blood) Dourif shows up as a cop trying to serve and protect under duress, and Sheri Moon Zombie appears as Myers's ghostly and mayhem-directing mother, doing an acting job that's so bad it's good.
A secondary villain in the story comes in the form of a psychologist-turned-exploitative author who has written a book about Myers's mass murder, played with slick skill by Malcolm McDowell, he of the "old ultra-violence." McDowell plays the kind of suave but sadistic Brit whom Americans presumably love to hate and would like to see come to a nasty end. Zombie is careful to present McDowell's character in neat, clean, and swanky settings, in stark contrast to the dark woodsy lurkscape of the killer's world. But alas, their worlds are bound to collide. It seems here, at least, collision is the name of Zombie's game, from a "meatwagon" and a cow killing to the repeated meeting of blade and flesh.
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