Halloween II (2009 Director's Cut Film Review)

2009 Dimension Films
Written and Directed by: Rob Zombie
Starring: Malcolm McDowell, Tyler Mane, Sheri Moon Zombie, Brad Dourif, Danielle Harris, and Scout Taylor-Compton
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 119 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 1/10

Assault and kidnapping victim, Laurie Strode, tries to put her life back together, while her attacker, masked mass murderer, Michael Myers, hides from the authorities in a barn. As Halloween, and the two-year anniversary of the attack draws near, Laurie's mental health begins to disintegrate, as she's screaming at her adopted family, her therapist, and anyone who tries to help. Meanwhile, as Samhain nears, Michael begins to see an angelic vision of his mother, along with a childhood version of himself, next to a white horse. Now Laurie is seeing the same visions because, unbeknownst to her, she's actually Angel Myers...Michael's baby sister.
I absolutely hated Rob Zombie's 2007 remake of John Carpenter's 1978 film, Halloween, and I hate Zombie's 2009 sequel too. The first Zombie film is a grotesque nihilist nothing, cinematic putrescence. This time, Zombie attempts to go high concept and achieves the same results.  He at least tries to make the small-town setting of Haddonfield feel like a real place this time, though of course there's no joy there, only joyless debauchery. Scout Taylor-Compton appears again as Laurie, though she's mostly relegated to shouting expletives and crying. As the town sheriff, Brad Dourif gets to shine as a rare speck of decency, but he's drowned out by the deafening roar of Zombie's nihilistic milieu. Of course, if the film solely set out to showcase a pure vision of a nihilistic viewpoint of the world, which I'm not even sure it is doing given the head-bashing repetition of the white horse motif, it would want to do so with some type of artistic excellence and cohesion. Michael and Laurie's visions of the white horse are shot like a homemade, straight to video class project, some of the sets here look like high school theater work, and as stated, the white horse metaphor is extremely muddy. On the other hand, the gore effects are incredibly good, but unfortunately they're so constant and numbing, even the disgust they initially invoke becomes a boring annoyance. And while I appreciate the extra attention given Laurie here, that extra attention is solely focused upon punishing her, which is in turn, a punishment upon the viewer. 
I only watched this movie because I'd seen every other film in the Halloween franchise, and I'm a completionist. Having seen them all, I'd rather watch any other entry over Zombie's two. At least even the worst of the others are fun--even David Gordon Green's heavily flawed and little loved trilogy, even some of the insanely goofy main timeline entries before that. I hate these ugly, unenjoyable Rob Zombie Halloween films, and I never want to watch them again. John Carpenter's legacy deserves better.