Halloween II (2009)

I thought director Rob Zombie got away with his first Halloween remake, taking viewers inside the head of masked crazy Michael Myers and giving the killer a sympathetic backstory and rationale for his killing in his adult life, but this 2009 sequel confirms the director is trying too hard with his vision for the slasher series - in every scene, Zombie distracts with his communications direct to viewer that what he is doing is arthouse: messages are graffitied on every wall and unlikely posters appear in every room pronouncing cultural subversiveness (a victim of a serial killer has a poster celebrating Charles Manson on her bedroom wall, really?), and even Weird Al Yankovich turns up as Zombie attempts to culturally contextualise what is better suited as a cartoony slasher for teens...and the results are a ridiculous mess: viewers share in the killer's delusory thoughts and are privy to manifestations of his madness in the form of mother, dressed like Legolas, leading a white horse on their journey back to Haddonfield, all the while as a separate movie, a misguided comedy, is spliced in here and there featuring Malcolm McDowell's Doctor Loomis as a whiny fame-whore, suddenly not the Doctor Loomis of previous iterations, in a storyline unrelated to the whole nor relevant to the greater series.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Curse of Chucky (2013)

Satisfying elements of mystery keep you watching this umpteenth episode of the serial killer doll franchise which, taking place in a gothic mansion where a wheelchair-bound woman mourns her mother's death, recalls the classic "lunatic on the loose outside a disabled woman's stronghold" movies of the The Cat And The Canary and The Spiral Staircase variety, at least until the is-this-really-happening, laughable Tommy Wisseau "The Room" reveal-all in flashback.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS