Halloween II (2009) Critic Reviews

If only he (Zombie) had more on his mind than his love of 1970s Italian horror films, his meticulous color schemes and his body count. Halloween II is full of in jokes and references but nearly devoid of wit.Read the full review

Zombie does a lot extremely well. Maybe someday he’ll find a movie into which it all fits.Read the full review

What Halloween II does have, though, is Zombie's claustrophobic visual style; he half-drowns his actors in shadow, then tracks them through windows and around corners like a focused predator. If only we cared about the prey.Read the full review

With his new sequel, Zombie spends less time paying tribute and more time getting inventive, with mixed results.Read the full review

Perhaps reflecting the filmmaker's other career as a recording artist, many of the film's scares come as much from the ultra-vivid horrifying sound effects as the gore itself.Read the full review

What you won't feel is genuine horror, because unlike John Carpenter -- whose original 1978 film is a sly game of nerve-racking peekaboo -- Zombie isn't out to engage fans of the genre with a slaughterhouse bonbon like "Halloween II."Read the full review

The movie lacks the strong vision and memorable carnage of Zombie's masterpiece, "The Devil's Rejects."Read the full review

Repellent not only in content but in visual style, writer-director Rob Zombie's hatchet job on the series he revived so artfully two years ago plays like a violent act of euthanasia upon the huge, brain-dead body of work inspired by the 30-year-old "Halloween."Read the full review