ROAMING THE CORRIDORS OF THE ORIGINAL 'HALLOWEEN II'

year: 1981

For the neurotic, paranoid, panic-attacked among us, hospitals are the place to be: The cool white walls, the medicine, the wise doctors and those lovely nurses – it’s a sublime safe haven where hearts can beat comfortably.

So when Jamie Lee Curtis... reprising her role as sole surviving ingénue Laurie Strode on the same night, Halloween... awakes in a hospital room, she has nothing to worry about, right?

Well that’s what really works with HALLOWEEN II…The hospital setting is ominous, creepy and best of all, contained as The Shape, Michael Myers, haunts an assortment of expendable characters, practically begging to violently flatline: Two ambulance drivers: one an obnoxious womanizer, the other a nice young sap…

Ana Alicia H2Rates: ***

The latter, played by future LAST STARFIGHTER Lance Guest, warms up to a recovering Laurie while Leo Rossi has both leering eyes on Pamela Susan Shoop… Their sizzling "jacuzzi" scene is tops in the body count horror canon. And while Curtis lays around till the scorching 11th hour climax, the “heroic” stature goes to Donald Pleasence as Dr. Sam Loomis…

Along with several oblivious police officers, Loomis, in a Noir fashion, is on Myer's trial through the dark Halloween streets: he alone knows the story behind the mysterious suburban killer, and no one else is buying it. 

With the return of camera-gliding cinematographer Dean Cundey, produced, co-written (with Debra Hill) and scored by John Carpenter and directed by Rick Rosenthal, HALLOWEEN II is a clean slate for the viewing audience and a chance for Michael Myers to be even more present and menacing: covering the ground he broke in the original.