Halloween is a very long-running horror franchise – 13 films and counting – and is often the way with America’s extended slasher series, not all instalments are good. Opinions are going to differ on which ones are the least popular, but that conversation will almost certainly include Halloween II, Rob Zombie’s 2009 sequel to his own franchise reboot. I think that is a mistake. This review isn’t so much of a defence of Halloween II – it’s a film with a lot of problems – but it is certainly a clarification of it. I don’t know about you, but when I see a failed film I would prefer it at least be an interesting one.

Zombie’s first Halloween spent an awful lot of its time humanising its masked villain Michael Myers. We are introduced to him as a child, and see his home life and struggles in school. We see him commit his first violent murders, his long incarceration in a psychiatric hospital, and his relationship with Dr Samuel Loomis. By the time Michael dons his iconic mask and goes rampaging through the town of Haddonfield, the film is already halfway through.

It was a stark contrast to John Carpenter’s Halloween, and of course that is what made it an interesting remake. With Halloween II Zombie stretches the concept even further, producing something uniquely strange, surreal, and – as it turns out – difficult to digest. If his first remake was a Halloween movie with some Rob Zombie inflections, his second is a full-blown Rob Zombie effort that happens to feature Halloween‘s characters. If you are seeing the film for traditional slasher movie kills and mayhem, your patience is going to be sorely tested.

From a maskless Michael (Tyler Mane) roaming the American wilderness like a homeless person to survivor Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) slipping into a hallucinatory mania, Halloween II eschews almost everything you might expect to see in favour of dream sequences, grindhouse-styled violence, and Zombie’s trademark grotesquery. Sheri Moon Zombie, whose appearance in the previous film amounted to an extended cameo, is pivotal here as Michael’s adoring mother. Whether she is a figment of the imagination or an actual ghost is never clarified. Malcolm McDowell also returns as Loomis, now transformed to a cynical, deeply money-hungry profiteer. Overall Halloween II does not feel like a typical slasher film, but rather a study of the consequences of one.

Rob Zombie has a tendency to cast under-appreciated veteran talent in his films. In addition to McDowell, Halloween II features Margot Kidder, Dee Wallace, and Brad Dourif. Dourif in particular makes a strong dramatic contribution to the film. Taylor-Compton also excels in a far more complicated role than she performed previously. There is even a brief appearance by future Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer.

For all the good in the film, however, there is also a surfeit of material that frustrates. A standard ‘horror scene turns out to be a dream’ sequence drags to interminable lengths – so long that by the time Laurie wakes up the audience will feel cheated. The central hallucinatory connection between Michael, Laurie, and Michael’s mother feels terribly muddled and poorly communicated. Some of the most violent scenes get genuinely confronting, but feel badly incorporated into the main narrative. In short, the film is one hell of a mess: there’s an extent to which the biggest problem is that everything is chained to a pre-existing franchise.

This is far from Halloween at its best, and it also far from Rob Zombie at his best. It entertains in fits and start, and it is at least an inventive, provocative take on the material. Interesting? Yes. Enjoyable? That is more open to debate.