Writer/director Rob Zombie's one-note blood bath is a juvenile experiment in gore for gore's sake.
It remains a mystery how such an incompetent writer could ever sell the kind of monotonous drivel that "Halloween II" represents, much less get a budget to direct it.
Audiences looking for any kind of story will be sorely disappointed with Zombie's barely mapped out narrative wherein plenty of characters with little to no personality are savagely murdered by a giant — we're talking 6'5" — serial killer with a grave mommy complex.
Malcolm McDowell slums it as Dr. Samuel Loomis, an exploitation author whose Halloween-timed launch of his latest book, about the notorious Mike Myers, attracts all kind of threats and humiliations for his troubles.
Even the film's visual style is a hackneyed affair, full of dumb set designs and gaudy lighting compositions that flatten out all would-be suspense.
Zombie doesn't know subtext from a submarine, or suspense from surprise. It's as if the studio (Dimension) let some testosterone-boiling 15-year-old boy with a case of Red Bull in his belly make a slapdash gore fest where a woman in white with a white horse is meant to represent the psychological underpinning of a mute killer in a William Shatner mask.
Shame, Rob Zombie, shame.
Rated R. 105 mins.
