Films: 1980s
(1981) Halloween II
Friday, November 02, 2007
Halloween II
Director: Rick Rosenthal
Release: 1981
Jamie Lee Curtis is Laurie Strode, slashed and beaten by a murderous man in a mask while babysitting on Halloween in Haddonfield, Illinois. The killer, an escaped sanitarium legend named Michael Myers, is not dead. Despite taking six slugs from pursuing hospital therapist Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), Myers is bent on finishing the slaughter.
Loomis is even more unhinged here than in the previous installment, and equally ineffective in deducing what Myers will do next. He loses his temperamental ally -- Sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers) -- when the head cop learns his daughter Annie (Nancy Kyes) has been slain by Myers.
Deputy Gary Hunt (Hunter von Leer) takes over for Brackett, attempting to quell a riot a the old Myers house and following a macabre trail with Loomis to the Haddonfield elementary school where Myers has scrawled a cryptic word in blood on the blackboard.
Meanwhile, at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, Laurie slips in and out of consciousness.
Myers has followed her, and eliminates the skeleton nighttime staff one-by-one, until it is a race against time, against the sedatives with which she's been pumped, and the Shape that pursues her through the darkened hallways. While Loomis finally intervenes, his solution to the nightmare comes at a high price.
"Halloween II," like its predecessor is a mysteriously parentless film. Nurse Alves (Gloria Gifford) attempts to contact the Strodes, but to no avail. They have simply vanished from the party to which they went earlier in the evening. Even Brackett - who only acts like a father once he discovers Annie's corpse - is whisked away from the narrative.
This leaves Loomis. A kind of paternal surrogate, he is hopelessly outclassed by the frozen adolescent sexual rage Myers represents.
As motivated the murder of his sister Judith in the first film, Myer's imperative is to eliminate female girls from his bloodline. Loomis learns that Laurie was born of Myers' parents two years after his incarceration as a boy, but that they then died and she was orphaned.
Adopted by the Strodes, blood is thicker than ink and Laurie represents the same target as Judith Myers. She is at the threshold of womanhood and her proto-sexual identity seems untenable to Michael's mind. He acts out, over and over again in "Halloween II," his rage against the fertile young women around him.
When Myers kills a security guard it is via simple methods - a swift hammer to the skull. But, when he destroys Nurse Karen Bailey (Pamela Susan Shoop), he boils her face from its skull in the hot tub in which she made love. Likewise, another nubile nurse is dispatched with a slow needle into the eye.
There is no overt incestuous quality in the killer's quest. Myers does not touch or seek even comfort from the Myers girls in the two films (although he gazes upon his sister's alien womanhood in "Halloween," and is momentarily stymied by Laurie speaking his name in "Halloween II"). He seeks only to stop their eventual emergence as fertile women.
Laurie dreams once of young Michael Myers, and his look is not that of the lascivious and disturbed older brother. Writ on his face as he turns to her is the simple promise of interruption. He will stop the development that robs him of his older sisters in the parentless universe of Halloween.
It is significant that Myers leaves one clue to his intentions at the Haddonfield elementary school. He draws a family picture and plants a knife in the remaining sister character. He writes "Samhain," the Celtic origin-word for Halloween, on the chalkboard. This is the description of a ritual elimination, a sacrifice ceremony he must enact.
Similarly, Loomis must perform his own sacrifice ritual. "Halloween II" steps beyond its parentless-sexual-daughters parameter and indicts professional caregivers as culprits in the compromised safety of American children.
Loomis' hunt for Myers results in the death of an innocent 17-year-old. Ben Tramer. The would-be dance date of Laurie Strode is struck by a police cruiser and burned alive in the subsequent wreck. He wears an exact copy of Michael Myers' costume. Not only has Loomis let the real Myers out, he is now linked to the death of innocent children at the hands of psychotherapy gone awry. The Myers-in-effigy burns before him. All Loomis can muster is the recommendation a forensic dentist check the teeth to see if it is his quarry. Science treats the decimated child with nothing like compassion.
This is not the last time Myers image will be engulfed in flames in "Halloween II," but it is the last time it will happen without Loomis paying a direct toll to the universe for the act. As a Loomis-struck gas explosion finally terminates the real Myers, the image of his mask melting away is apparently burned into Laurie's mind. She is taken away in an ambulance, alone. She plays the scene over in her mind while The Chordettes sing "Mr. Sandman," a song of adolescent sexual longing.
There may be, for Laurie, no Mr. Sandman. Only the image of her immolated brother remains, who sought to freeze her in an elementary school boy's version of family, forever.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Halloween II, 1981
There may be, for Laurie, no Mr. Sandman. Only the image of her immolated brother remains, who sought to freeze her in an elementary school boy's version of family, forever.
