Avis Metacritic

At times Halloween II dances on the line between alarming and disgusting, and it doesn’t all hold together — I couldn’t figure out what the goblin banquet was doing in this movie. But if it was meant to freak me out, it worked.

Despite the limitations inherent in the genre, it actually delivers.

Halloween II provides ample spotlights for Zombie’s visual gifts, but—apart from some striking Oedipal fantasy sequences featuring Sheri Moon Zombie as the spirit of Myers’ mother—we saw most of this last time around, and a lot of promising material leads to dead ends.

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.

The copious violence, as always, is an assault - even aurally, as every thudding knife strike is made to sound like a boulder dropping on the theater.

Freed from the original Halloween template, Zombie is aiming for something hallucinatory, almost abstract: a tone poem of madness and sadism and family ties that bind (and garrote). But the picture runs out of ideas about halfway through, and what’s left is splatter in a void.

Halloween II is full of in jokes and references but nearly devoid of wit.

This time, Zombie doesn’t appear to have many deep thoughts, so Michael doesn’t just stab his victims, he slices and chomps them into gooey pulp — an overkill motif that actually feels false to the character and quickly becomes a depressing bore.

With Halloween II, Zombie shows conclusively that he's not interested in growing, getting better or ever becoming an original. He's just a hack with a made-up name, a cult following and a wife who can't act.

Halloween II is an affront to Halloween and horror fans. It's the kind of cataclysmic misstep from which a franchise cannot recover. It has transformed Michael Myers from an iconic movie monster into a laughingstock.