Come one, come all! Step right up - if you dare! It's that magical wonderful time again! If you think you're more human than human then hop into your Dragula and you're never gone stop demon speeding until you take a left at the House of 1,000 Corpses where you'll find your way into the hypnagogic world of Rob Zombie's Hobo Halloween Skull Fuckin' Hell Yeah!-A-Thon 2009. The hillbilly deluxe-in-chief cordially invites you to his second excursion into the scum of the earth abyss that is his seedy one-note imagination as he once again molds a classic horror movie into his own warped surreal-ality of BRUTAL~! violence, white trash mien, 1970's pop culture, meaningless symbolism, geographical bewilderment, and enough uses of the f-word to make the salesmen of GLENGARY GLEN ROSS blush. This year, as an extra added bonus, for a limited time only, gawk at the addition of Mrs. Sheri Moon Zombie as a living dead girl with empty staring retard eyes and her dreamy white wonder horse of hate, Helldalgo. It's a phantasmagorical voyage into a gritty grindhouse-scape where logic doesn't exist, people appear to teleport from place to place, you're not even sure what year it is, the f-word is your only friend, and in the end you feel so numb. Rob Zombie's Hobo Halloween Skull Fuckin' Hell Yeah!-A-Thon 2009 - the Halloween event of 2009! Arriving just in time for…Labor Day weekend? Be there or they'll do it again next year in 3-D.

Rob Zombie presents... "It's the Great Pumpkin, Michael Myers"

Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN 2... Oh, dear.

To this day whenever I read or hear someone say they liked Rob Zombie's first stab at remaking HALLOWEEN I always find myself having to call into question their very taste in cinema, and this is coming from a guy that gave THE GINGERDEAD MAN a four star review. Zombie's HALLOWEEN was my pick for the worst horror movie of 2007 and was in neck-and-neck for my pick of the worst overall movie of that year. Now we get a sequel and this time it would appear that Rob Zombie was completely unshackled by the studio to do whatever he damn well pleased just so long as he made sure it was BRUTAL~! The result...

To quote Charlie Brown, "I got a rock."

HALLOWEEN 2 is a train wreck to behold, though I can't really say you should behold it. Give Zombie his due, though. He does have an eye as a director. But as a screenwriter he veers headlong into Uwe Boll gibberish - HALLOWEEN 2 only slightly more lucid than ALONE IN THE DARK. I'd call the film a train wreck but given Rob Zombie's vocabulary he probably would deem that wording not BRUTAL~! enough so - Hell Yeah! - only the term clusterfuck can be deemed appropriate.

On the plus side, at least he didn't just spend half the movie doing a sped up, dumbed down rehashing of John Carpenter's original. Nor did he turn his sequel in a sped up, dumbed down rehashing of the original HALLOWEEN II. An epic clusterfuck of a film so overloaded with nonsensical idiosyncratic gobbledygook that it's hard to believe that Nicolas Cage was not the star of it. This is the HALLOWEEN movie David Lynch would have made if David Lynch were an angry shit-kickin' redneck who dropped out of high school and suffered from Tourette's syndrome. Logic is in short supply in Rob Zombie land. Characters teleport. Time exists in a polyester vacuum. The only reason I came out of HALLOWEEN 2 not hating it is because the film is so strange, so loopy, so far into WTF?! territory at times that I could not take my eyes off it. I honestly had no idea where Rob Zombie was going with any of it and as the closing credits began to roll as the iconic HALLOWEEN theme music began playing for the first and only time mixed with the complaining voices of multiple patrons filing out that they should have gone to see THE FINAL DESTINATION 3-D instead, all I could do was just sit there honestly believing that Zombie himself never had any idea where the hell he was going with it. He was trying to do something with this sequel; what that something was will be debated about by drug-addled gorehounds for years to come.

Defenders of this sequel will argue that it's all about what's going on inside of the minds of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode and you just have to pay attention to understand what Zombie was getting at. I paid attention and can assure you this movie has less to do with what's going on inside the heads of any of its characters and more to do with how Rob Zombie's mind works. This becomes most evident when Loomis treats us to a brief rant about his disdain of critics. Rob Zombie, Uwe Boll, Kevin Smith, and M. Night Shyamalan need to form a support group. Or box each other. Either one is fine with me.

Back atcha, buddy!

Having successfully treated the HALLOWEEN franchise with all the tender loving care of a drunken Ike Turner, Rob Zombie is now off to gift the world with his "dark", "scary", "BRUTAL~!" remake of THE BLOB that from what he's saying right now will not actually have a blob in it. And the producers have announced their plans to make another HALLOWEEN sequel for next year, even though this one tanked at the box office, but that's okay because this next one will be in 3-D, Rob Zombie will not be involved, and it will not be a continuation of whatever the hell Zombie was trying to do with the previous two.

Which of the following phrases do you think the previous paragraph best typifies?

A) Failing upwards
B) Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it
C) Hollywood sucks

I will warn you right now that from this point on everything I have written is probably going to be a bit random and scattershot. I do so in honor of Zombie's sequel. There is no point to recapping it in vivid detail. There is no point to dissecting it scene-by-scene. There is no point to anything in HALLOWEEN 2.

But if that's what you really want, when you finish with this Foyeurism you can have a listen to the super-sized 93-minute Dread Central Dinner For Fiends vivisection of Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN 2 (including the first appearance of my pissed off, horror fanboy hating, Rob Zombie loving alter ego "The Zomwonder") by CLICKING HERE. For those that don't want to listen to the entire podcast, the NSFW H2 fun doesn't full kick-in until around the 33-minute mark and the "Zomwonder" only lasts about 20-minutes before storming out in a hail of obscenities. Hell Yeah!

HALLOWEEN 2 opens with text detailing to us the psychological explanation about visions of white horses in dreams representing the psyche's manifestation of anger and hostility. You have to admire Rob Zombie for wanting us to make absolute certain we fully understand that all this white horse bullshit has a real basis in psychotherapy and dream interpretations and is not just some inane bullshit Zombie made up, even though his use of this white horse imagery and everything surrounding it is in fact just a whole lot of bullshit Rob Zombie made up.

Case in point, it would appear that Haddonfield, Illinois is still in Illinois yet from the looks and sounds of things you would swear it was actually located somewhere in the backwoods of Arkansas. It also appears to be stuck in some sort of mid-Seventies time warp; everything from television sets to facial hair appears to have come straight out of the Ford administration era. Periodically, such modernities creep in like Blackberries and "Weird" Al Yankovic. You've heard of cyberpunk and steampunk? This is That 70's Punk. With a splash of redneck sheik thrown in, too, because deep down Rob Zombie is really just Ozzy Osbourne with a Larry the Cable Guy complex.

Things pick up where they left off at the end of the previous film. Michael Myers' corpse is being carted to the morgue in the back of a van traveling through the middle of nowhere pastures because, apparently, Haddonfield is such a podunk town it doesn't even have its own hospital. They experience a violent collision with a cow that instantly kills the driver. It must have been the combined might of the scent of exploded bovine and the melodic sound of a guy saying "Fuck!" over and over for upwards of 45-seconds that awakens the sleeping giant.

Still in his mask, because removing the mask from a seemingly dead homicidal maniac following a massacre would violate his civil rights and bring down the wrath of the ACLU, Michael Myers awakens, calmly decapitates the foul-mouthed paramedic who had spent the entire car ride talking about wanting to commit necrophilia on the big breasted dead woman also in the back, and then walks off into the night, beckoned on by the ghostly image of a white horse being led by his deceased mother (Sheri Moon Zombie made up to look like an albino Morticia Addams).

This is why they don't let Rob Zombie design snowglobes.

Laurie Strode (the annoyingly chirpy Scout Taylor-Compton, she'll spend the entire movie either screaming, crying, or whining) has been transported to the hospital where Michael Myers will show up for an abbreviated homage to the original HALLOWEEN II. This 10-minute sequence is the most effective of the entire film; the closest Zombie ever comes to generating actual suspense. So, of course, it all turns out to be a dream sequence.

Rob Zombie tries so hard to avoid the modern horror clichés of making the death creatively comical in lieu of making them jarringly BRUTAL~! that he nearly comes full circle. Myers doesn't just stab people with a knife, he punches them full-force with the knife with such rage-soaked fury that the sound effect is nearly the same as that of Rocky Balboa smacking a side of frozen beef. You're taken aback the first time this occurs because it really is fairly BRUTAL~! but it quickly becomes repetitive and less BRUTAL~! with each bludgeoning kill. Sure, literally stomping a mud hole in someone's face and walking it dry is an unexpectedly vicious kill, but that's just one deviation from his otherwise preferred meat tenderizing stabbings. There's artistry to the craft of slasher movie killings. If Jason Voorhees is the Van Gogh of movie slashers and Freddy Kruger the Salvador Dali, I'm afraid Michael Myers is merely the guy who painted the dogs playing poker.

Michael Myers' body has vanished and the guy in the passenger seat clearly had his head cleaved off in a manner unnatural even by violent car wreck standards, yet nobody thinks anything of Michael Myers' missing corpse. The car didn't land in a river or burst into flames so you can't blame it on floating away or burning up. They never found his body yet everyone insists he is dead and gone. Where did his body go they don’t ask? Loomis hints at police incompetence and makes glib comments about it being the subject of tabloid speculation, but if you ask him straight up if Michael Myers might still be alive he'll fly into a rage and more or less tell you to fuck off. The sheriff takes more offense at Loomis calling the police inept than he does in wanting to know just what did become of Michael Myers' corpse following the crash. That's some mighty fine detective work.

One would think Dr. Loomis of all people would be more open to the possibility of Michael Myers still being alive since he too miraculously returned from the dead having had his skull crushed at the end of the first film. Now Dr. Loomis is just a pompous ass enjoying fame and fortune by riding the Michael Myers gravy train with a new potential best-selling book detailing the circumstances surrounding the massacre a year earlier. On the plus side, Malcolm McDowell playing a pompous ass is always entertaining to watch.

"Ladies and gentlemen, every day in America a Culkin goes hungry. Won't you please help me feed the Culkin's?

Kind of hard for Loomis not to be a bit angry since everywhere he goes he gets blamed for the massacre and looked down upon for profiteering from pain. Even on an entertainment talk show both the host and guest "Weird" Al Yankovic take turns pointing out what a horrible human being Loomis is. When you lose "Weird" Al Yankovic, you've lost America.

When does anything like this ever happen in real life? For goodness sake, people, I remember watching Mary Hart interview Christian Slater on an edition of Entertainment Tonight back in 1997 after Slater was released from jail following his drunken rampage during which he bit a police officer. To hear Hart's sympathetic softball questions you'd think Slater was the victim. I sat there thinking instead of boo-hooing about how awful this period must have been for him she should have been asking him about why he attempted to eat a policeman. You really think Mary Hart would rip on a guy like Loomis for writing a salacious tell-all chronicling a killing spree? You think any tabloid or talk shows would give him the third degree like seen in this movie? Paris Hilton could piss AIDS into the open wounds of the Octomom's kids and she still wouldn't get as much verbal abuse as Loomis gets for merely writing a book about a series of brutal murders.

They don't just rag on Loomis for being an egotistical prick capitalizing on the suffering of others with an exploitive new book; they outright blame him for the murders Michael Myers committed. A hulking homicidal maniac escapes from a mental institution, goes on a killing spree, and everyone blames the psychiatrist afterwards, even having a scene where the father of a girl killed in the previous film pulls a gun on Loomis at a book signing while screaming it was all his fault. How is it his entire fault? Are we sure Rob Zombie isn't secretly a Scientologist?

Even the "Michael Myers Hostage Situation" shack-in-the-middle-of-nowhere finale paints Loomis' psychiatric skills in a questionable light. Loomis magically teleports in from wherever the hell he had been insisting they let him help so he can make amends for being a douche. Inside he spots Laurie Strode on the ground writhing, being held down by young Michael's ghost while ghost mom taunts her about coming home and adult Michael just stands off to the side appearing to be as confused as the rest of us. Loomis only sees Laurie writing on the ground and applies the tried and true method of repeating the same phrase over and over again until it leads to a breakthrough. It's as if Dr. Loomis learned everything he needs to know about psychology from watching GOOD WILL HUNTING.

Zombie even cameos Margot Kidder as Laurie's psychologist for one brief scene. Given Kidder's very public mental meltdown a few years back casting her as a therapist strikes me as sarcastic stunt casting and again supports my theory that Rob Zombie is secretly a Scientologist who designed this entire movie to be one giant fuck you directed at the field of psychology. When Tom Cruise begins singing the praises of HALLOWEEN 2 we'll know for certain.

The big revelation in the book is that Laurie Strode is Michael Myers' baby sister, a fact that nobody bothered to tell her in the past year and wasn't revealed until after the publication of the book. Loomis never bothered to reveal this to her. She would have somehow been told this in advance. Her reaction to learning this news: cry, cry some more, get pissed off, start crying again, go partying, get freaked out, get stumbling drunk, and sober up just in time to relive her worst nightmare. Oops. I think I just spoiled most of the film's third act. Did I mention Michael Myers is randomly killing people the whole time she's going through all that? Darn. Now I've really gone and spoiled it.

Zombie even pulls off a two-fer for the finale, simultaneously borrowing from the ending of HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS before outright sampling - as they say in the music biz - the end of PSYCHO with Laurie Strode in the world's longest mental asylum white room being visited by the horse ghost of Halloween past and flashing us a little Norman Bates "He wouldn't hurt a fly smile". All this truly needed was a fly to land on Laurie, a voiceover by Rob Zombie saying "She'd never hurt a fly", and then Laurie proceeds to smash a fly to bits with her fist that landed on her nose which would now be gushing gallons of blood. 'Cause that's how Rob Zombie rolls, motherfucker!

In a moment of deep confusion, Rob Zombie paid himself $100,000 to purchase the rights to Dr. Loomis' book and announced plans to make it the basis of HALLOWEEN 3. When Dimension film executives attempted to convince Rob that he had finally blurred the line between reality and fiction and they were deeply concerned about his mental state, Zombie just began pumping his fists wildly and screaming "Hell Yeah!" over and over.

I have to express my shock that the movie did not end with Laurie running for her life being chased by Michael Myers riding a white horse. Better yet, make Michael Myers stalking the denizens of Haddonfield around Halloween on a white horse and turn the entire sequel into Rob Zombie’s hillbilly slasher remix of THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW.

Anyway, after walking away from that crash, Michael Myers either spent the next year just wandering about, sort of like Forrest Gump after Jenny left and he went jogging back and forth across America, and ended up somewhere in the American South, or there is a section of rural Illinois populated by rednecks that talk with Southern accents, listen to Lynard Skynard, and drive pick-up trucks with deer horns adorning the front bumper. These rednecks are mean to Michael Myers, now a hoodie-wearing Rob Zombie look-a-like psychopathic gadabout, so he puts the mask back on, whips out his trusty kitchen knife, and murders the hell out of them. It's okay for him to kill again because just minutes earlier his dead mommy with the white horse alarm went off to let him know it was three days until Halloween and he had to go back home to make the family whole again or some crap like that. Michael then heads off on his quest to either kill Laurie Strode or toss Gollum into the volcanoes of Mordor, who can say for sure given the overhead cinematography of Michael walking through the fields. Whatever his starting point was it takes him two days to get from where he's at to Haddonfield but at the end when he brings Laurie back to this shack, somehow it will only take him a few minutes to get there.

Michael Myers eats a dog. I didn't even know he was Korean.

Howard Hessemen appears as an aging hippie who appears just long enough to provide a kooky rant about the status quo and then is never seen or heard from again. Kind of a metaphor for his career if you think about it.

In the year since, Laurie Strode now lives with schoolmate, best friend, and fellow survivor Annie (32-year old Danielle Harris attempting to replace Dick Clark as the world's oldest living teenager) and her father, Sheriff Brackett (the always great Brad Dourif, the only character in the film that actually comes across as a human being in possession of a soul). Laurie has since turned rebellious with tattoos and a Charles Manson poster above her bed. You'd think the survivor of a massacre who still experiences constant nightmares about the murderer coming after her, is still in therapy dealing with the trauma of this event, and is on all sorts of psych meds would not be a Charles Manson fan girl. Have you seen any survivors of the Columbine school shooting dressing in a black trenchcoat? Remember, this movie is all about what Rob Zombie thinks is bad ass, so, yes, there are Charlie Manson posters in her bedroom, Alice Cooper posters lurking everywhere, a crudely painted pentagram adorning the door of the bathroom where she has her violent freak outs hallucinating Sheri Moon Zombie posing crucified, and everyone gathers round the dinner table for a family dinner where the young'ins say "Fuck!" a lot and the father figure re-enacts scenes from Lee Marvin westerns.

The three are all happily living in a house that looks to be in such rough shape I kept waiting for Ty Pennington and the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition crew to show up to build them a new one. They would too. Could you imagine what that TV show could do with the theme of building a new home for people that survived a rampage by a homicidal maniac? That program loves turning misery into maudlin. Imagine the tears that would flow seeing their beautiful new house. Imagine the number of times Laurie would utter "Oh my god!" upon seeing her new Seventies rock themed bedroom and then Alice Cooper himself shows up to perform a free concert. It would be awesome. It would be even more awesome if Michael Myers then showed up and killed all of them with home-building tools. That's where Rob Zombie missed the boat. This movie should have been EXTREME MAKEOVER: HALLOWEEN EDITION. Envision the pinnacle moment when Ty Pennington yells "Move that bus!", the bus pulls away, and there's Michael Myers, butcher knife in hand, just standing right in front of them in the shadow of the new home. Michael goes into action and within moments, Ty Pennington's face and that blasted bullhorn of his will have finally become one. Now that would have been BRUTAL~!

The true highlight of HALLOWEEN 2 is a bizarro dream sequence that finally answers the long contemplated question as to what THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS would looked like if it had been a 1970's Sid & Marty Krofft Saturday morning kiddy program. I rather wish Zombie had chosen to make this one mind trip the central focus of the entire film instead of more of the same old hack and slash because the spectacle of Laurie Strode being offered up on a dinner table before an ALICE IN WONDERLAND-esque assortment of pumpkin-headed characters provided more WTF?!?! than anything else in the entire bloated 104-minutes of running time.

The biggest surprise of H2 was the cameo appearance by H. Ross Perot

Here’s what Rob Zombie should have done for this sequel. Have Laurie Strode in a coma or suffering some mental breakdown following the ending of the previous film. Have her wake up to find herself trapped in a nightmarish otherworldly dreamscape of Muppet-like Halloween-themed creatures. Looking for a way out, have Malcolm McDowell voice a cantankerous talking skull that advises her to seek out the Earl of Pumpkins to show her the way home. Have Laurie on her journey be haunted by visions of a wicked white queen riding atop a very angry pale horse. Most importantly, have Laurie be in constant danger being terrorized by a man-sized foam Michael Myers mask with arms and legs known only as M.M. Kilnstuf.

Everybody, it's time for a sing-a-long!

M.M. KILNSTUF,
Who's the shape that might get rough?
M.M. KILNSTUF,
Can't kill a little 'cause he can't kill enough.

Once upon a Halloween
Just a nightmare told yesterday 
A teen girl with a fragile psyche
Saw a white horse coming her way
"Make us whole again, Laurie 
Make us whole again. 
And I will take you on a hellride 
To reunite our family." 

But the white horse belonged to her kooky dead mom 
Who only got the part ‘cause she’s married to Rob
With her baby boy by her side
She watched her plans materialize 
Loomis rolled his eyes
Any chance for the movie was gone 
The film grew brutal
The cast said "Fuck!"
And the sequel droned on and on and on and on and on and on. 

But Kilnstuf was watching too 
And knew exactly what to do
He got ready to attack
By putting on his Shatner mask
He called upon his trusty knife
As we was oft inclined
And off to kill the girl he hike
But was all in her mind?

But now everyone was up shit creek
Halloween 2 bombed on opening week 
Which made Rob Zombie so mad he swore 
I’ll skull fuck every last horror geek! 

M.M. KILNSTUF,
Who's the shape that might get rough?
M.M. KILNSTUF,
Can't kill a little 'cause he can't kill enough.

M.M. KILNSTUF,
Who's the shape that might get rough?
M.M. KILNSTUF,
Can't kill a little 'cause he can't kill enough.

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE HALLOWEEN: H20