Who Slew Halloween 2?

The biggest kill of Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 is the franchise.

I walked out of this thinking: I don't want to see another fuckin Halloween film as long as I fucking live. Or die.

I thought Zombie's first Halloween was pitiful. Well, it's endearing compared to this shit.

And I do use shit advisedly. This film deserves condemnation. And so does Dimension. They greenlit this turd. No wonder they're going to the wall. They've lost control of their material. Their first horror film, The Burning ('81), was fifty times better than this. Is that progress?

As this hulking bore was unspooling like a thick streamer of diarrhea, I had another thought: If a novice screenwriter had sent this script to an agent or studio, he would have been told to get the fuck out of town and come back in ten years when he'd learned how to fuckin write.

The writing here is virtually non-existent. There are no "characters", there is zero suspense, and the kills are so matter-of-fact and hard to see (thanks to the hysterical cutting), you could rate them PG-13.

I don't care who I offend, but Rob Zombie fuckin sucks as a horror director.

To be fair, The Devil's Rejects, which got by on pure adrenalin and viscera, is a very decent flick, but it's an aberration in Zombie's sad screen career.

House of 1000 Corpses is dumb, boring, hick shit, and both Halloween remakes are proof that he has no story sense and no passion left for the genre.

Good horror directors like Romero, Raimi and Carpenter were excited by ideas. Dawn of the Dead, Evil Dead, and the original Halloween, for example, told simple but engaging stories, and were alive with invention, suspense, and fresh technique.

Zombie gets decent budgets, gets carte blanche to do whatever the hell he wants, and he still turns out cinematic excrement that is impossible to flush from video shelves. It sits there like toilet seat smears that won't rub off.

As is obvious, this film made me really fuckin angry, especially in light of the fact that good horror like Grace, The Collector, Eden Lake, Dead Girl , and Sick Girl get next-to-no or zero cinematic exposure.

A big part of the problem are the studio suits who greenlight a stinker like this because they can't tell a prince from a bucket of toe pus. These people are running the industry. These people are fucking it to death until it becomes a moldy, stiff corpse.

What's he got to be so arrogant about?

Halloween 2, made by the goddamn sell-out Rob Zombie (Mr. Fuckin Horror, my ass!), who used to howl and pontificate about the pointlessness of remakes, is the personification of what's wrong with American studio horror.

In future, I now know what to expect from him. Crap. And what to do when another of his stinkers hits the mulitplex. Run in the opposite direction. Fast.

***

Believe it or not, there was an announcement today that the next Halloween will be in 3-D.

Whoopity-fuckin-do!

Will people pay ten bucks to watch someone take a dump right into their face?

The answer may be a depressing yes.

And finally, is there an antibiotic available that will purge a Zombie film from your system?

Yes.

Take one of these once a day for a week: Eden Lake, Combat Shock, I Stand Alone, Sheitan, The Shuttered Room, The Collector & Dead Girl.

Repeat if necessary.

At least the directors of these still give a shit.

Zombies On Mushrooms

Hugh B. Cave, a master of pulp, was born in 1910 and cremated in 2004.

He wrote over 1000 short stories and more than 35 novels.

After WWII, he lived in Haiti for a time and wrote Haiti - High Road To Adventure, an acclaimed non-fiction work on the subject of voodoo.

In '79, Avon Books published Legion of the Dead, a rip-roaring paperback original. Its focus was voodoo-created zombies long before zombie fiction became a virtual genre of its own in the early 21st century.
Although a horror novel, Cave incorporates a lot of meaty, well researched business about the country's militia and the genocide of its people. Zombies, fueled by exotic mushrooms, are being enlisted to help in the overthrow of the corrupt President. Against the grain of Romero-inspired zombie lore, these undead critters are not dependent on human brains or other body parts.

The novel's hero, Cary Connoway, is not dissimilar to most men. He throws good judgment out the window when the vagina calls (and who can blame him). After traveling to San Marlo for some much-needed rest and recreation, he becomes embroiled in the undead coup d'etat. Although most guys would get themselves onto the first plane at the first sight of a shambling corpse, Carey's intensifying affections for the beautiful native girl Juna are stronger than the undead threat.

In a gloriously lurid sequence, our hero opts to pursue the kidnapped princess of his loins into a godforsaken cave:

"I'm going back there," he said to Sebastian and Decano when night came again.

"Cary, be reasonable," the poet begged. "What can you hope to accomplish?"

"I can find her!"

"If she is still alive, they have her. And if you try to take her away from them, they will have you, too. We are just no match for them yet."

Getting laid is at stake, so Cary isn't swayed.

"I've got to know what happened."

They did their best to dissuade him, but he would not listen, and in the end they went with him to the cave entrance. There the poet said: "You are a brave and loving man, Cary. God go with you. And Sebastian said: "I will ask the loa to keep you safe, amigo."

If God had been aware of Cary's true intentions, he may have decided to bail out of accompanying the adventurer on his subterranean pussy hunt. Buckets of luck, which one could attribute to divine intervention, come Cary's way, nevertheless, and he achieves his goal.

Legion of the Dead bubbles with invention and the writer's love of the absurd. After the zombie terror has been contained, the following exchange, in true Scooby Doo style, occurs:

"Without any food, my zombies will die. Really die. It will happen soon, too, because they are in need of food now, and would have been given their ration long ago but for the trouble you have caused us." He paused. "Their odor is less strong, you may have noticed. I was on my way to feed them when I discovered you just now."

Another character elaborates:

"They (the zombies) need very little, you see...This small bagful of the dried mushroom powder would have sustained them all. But, as you can see, it is gone. Gone forever, along with all the powder stored here for the future use and all the growing mushrooms from which the powder is prepared. All gone. Forever."

Unfortunately, Hugh B. Cave, who died at 94, is also gone forever.

But his brilliant pulp legacy lives on without the help of mushrooms.

Hugh B. Cave with writer/editor Stephen Jones