It's a bore! I didn't anticipate much from 2009's <em>'Halloween II'</em> based on its predecessor and it turns out I was right to have done so. It's nae good! More of Brad Dourif is nice, though to be honest none of the cast members do anything to elevate this film up. Not that I blame those onscreen, as it's all poorly cobbled together. The early hospital scene, starring Octavia Spencer and Richard Riehle (minorly) interestingly, showed some promise, but this flick quickly descends into a waste of 105 or so minutes; I zoned out a few times.

**Paying to see this is a waste of time and money.** I've seen the original franchise, but I confess that "Halloween" will never be a movie that I enjoy. It's simply not the style of horror I enjoy: "slasher" films are simply too "campy" and will probably scare only those whose fear is measured by the amount of fake blood used in the scene. However, Carpenter's films acquired, with some merit, the character of classics. None of the older sequels even deserve to be used as a benchmark. They are simply awful, and it was the Franciscan poverty of subsequent films that motivated Rob Zombie to take the franchise and start over from scratch. And if the first movie was bad, this one is worse. The film wastes no time with introductions. Starting at the point where the predecessor ends, it immediately transports us to the action, with a lot of deaths of characters that we do not know, and with which we do not care. The film thus functions as a virtual meat mincer. The script is downright amateurish, and an excuse for a horror film based solely on gratuitous bloodshed. The actors are pretty bad. Malcom McDowell, who is usually a very good actor if he is well directed, has one of the worst works of his career in this film: in addition to having almost no time to do anything, the little he does is terribly bad, and the character is very bad. and unhappy. Brad Dourif does what he can, but in all fairness, I can't rate his effort beyond merely satisfying. Even so, he is the best actor in the film. The rest of the cast is forgettable, or downright awful, and that includes the entirety of the female cast. Technically, the film bets heavily on CGI and liters of fake blood. The director completely forgot that the audience tends to feel the film more if they really sympathize, or care, with some of the characters, and in particular with the protagonist. Instead, he offers us all the fake blood he could buy with his millionaire budget, and grotesque deaths. It's no more exciting or frightening than an expensive video game, but it must have brought in a nice bag of money for the main players...

Malcolm McDowell so 2 stars just like I did the first one: ** The nudity isn't as much, so maybe I was wrong, maybe he was going for satire in the first one and not snuff porn...or maybe he was told to tone it down with the rape and dead naked women... ...but there are still naked women that get murdered by the big scary male monster after committing a fundamentalist sin of one kind or another... ...so was it intended to be a satire of the genre or does it just get Zombie off? Still not sure. And again, the atmosphere isn't there. The film has a feel to it that is almost grindhouse sleaze without being good enough to really achieve grindhouse sleaze. It makes for an off putting after taste in your mouth. And with all the nudity it still feels like its trying to be Friday the 13th more than it is a Halloween installment. Yet again I ask "Why remake it?" And this time the answer I can come up with is, Zombie is a great musician...unfortunately he shouldn't quit his day job.