I’m sort of torn when it comes to musician-turned-director Rob Zombie; in a landscape littered with genre fakers, filmmakers who seemingly embrace affect for no other reason than to simply further their careers, he’s a not-untalented guy who comes across as the genuine article, and someone who obviously has a well-honed knowledge and appreciation of the exploitation and horror genres in which he likes to trade, as the unrelentingly brutal The Devil’s Rejects amply demonstrates. Visually and tonally, he’s made savvy use of his devil’s minion image, finding a way to marry that tattooed, “hellbilly,” devil-may-care outsider sensibility to the film projects — derided limited release castoffs at first, but increasingly commercial fare — he’s managed to mount.

All of which brings us to Halloween II, a sequel to Zombie’s 2007 remake/re-branding of the seminal 1978 horror flick, which has grown in stature and spawned its own cottage industry of sequels, books, fan festivals and the like in the years since its release. I was not really a fan of what Zombie did with his first, umm, stab at Halloween, but colleague Luke Y. Thompson’s impassioned defense of what he pegged as the movie’s skewed point-of-view and admirable ambition definitely intrigued me, so I settled down with the unrated director’s cut DVD (clocking in at just under two hours, or about 16 minutes longer than the theatrical version) with a mixture of plodding, dutiful franchise loyalty and legitimate anticipation coursing through my bloodstream.

The plot doesn’t take us too far afield; it’s that time of year again, and adolescent killer turned hulking slasher Michael Myers (Tyler Mane), powered on by visions of his mom Deborah (Sheri Moon Zombie), has returned home to sleepy Haddonfield, Illinois, to take care of some unfinished family business. Picking up at the end of Zombie’s first film, with a dead Myers in hand, Halloween II concocts a resurrection/car crash escape, and then flashes forward a bit, following the aftermath of Myers’ latest murderous rampage through the eyes of heroine Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor Compton), who herself is suffering from trauma, nightmares and possibly delusions. While Sheriff Lee Brackett (Brad Dourif) tries to protect both his daughter, Annie (Danielle Harris), and Laurie, who is living with them, things go terribly wrong, naturally. Myers’ antagonist/surrogate father figure, Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), is also back (and nuttier than ever), having penned a new cash-in book on his famous patient.

Zombie is hellbent on trying to make the body counts in his movies mean something, but all the merry depravity and over-the-top gore in this film (unsurprisingly, it was not screened for critics) doesn’t particularly aid one in a more sophisticated reading of its narrative. What Zombie is good for is a certain collagist sensibility that is refreshingly out of lockstep with modern horror conventions; he’s also not afraid to let our putative heroes, or more redemptive characters, show a nasty side, or dark streak. That makes his narrative miscalculations in both armchair psychology and churned-up viscera (the more violent the killing of an innocent or passerby, the more deeply an audience will feel it, he seems to posit) all the more disappointing. His touch with actors also seems uneven; Compton is allowed to rant and rave to the point of drama class embarrassment, and various over-articulated, spat-out iterations of the word “fuck” are liberally sprinkled throughout the dialogue, which has the weird effect of giving greater dramatic heft to small arguments over larger scenes of physical imperilment. Taken together, Zombie’s Halloween films achieve a certain air-quote modernity, in that they are gritty, vulgar, and showcase an analytical preoccupation with cause not present in slasher films of years gone by. They do not, however, haunt or unnerve like John Carpenter’s original films.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Halloween II comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track that captures the sounds of plunging knives and bloodcurdling screams with sickening volume and clarity. The ample slate of supplemental material makes for slow navigation on most DVD players, with several seconds elapsing between many menu screen selections. A hearty collection of deleted and extended scenes, 25 minutes worth, seems to run counter to the assertions of slashed scheduling and fine-tooth comb budget consciousness that Zombie mentions in his audio commentary track (more on that in a moment), but you have that material if you want it; a lot of it is of the slightly tweaked variety, with a couple clipped, inessential (often vulgar) dialogue exchanges within a given scene. There is also audition footage, make-up test footage, a couple music videos and a bit of stand-up routine footage (seriously — it’s part of an outdoor festival that figures into the movie’s final act), in addition to the requisite collection of preview trailers. Oh, and there’s also a scored, four-and-a-half-minute blooper reel, which includes footage of McDowell eating it outdoors, tripping on a branch, as well as Dourif giving the slow burn to a day-player who fails to hear her cue for entrance.

As mentioned, there’s also an engaging (and, naturally, spoiler-heavy) feature-length audio commentary track with Zombie, who talks about the movie’s Georgia shoot, and explains how the loss of several scheduled filming days informed some of his choices, most notably in two third act chase/kill sequences, in which he uses a cross dissolve and slow motion to skip ahead from Myers’ final two kills. He also shares a couple amusing anecdotes, including one about how balsa wood was apparently trimmed from the budget, leaving a very pissed-off Mane to get in touch with his inner method actor, and break through a real door. Most explicitly, though, I’m sorry to say, for my friend Luke, Zombie dismisses the notion that his movie is a paranoid fantasy of any sort. Yes, he says, the film is about Laurie’s increasingly tenuous grasp on reality (hence the kiddie version of Michael that she hallucinates at film’s end), but in Zombie’s mind, it was always his intention to show that Laurie dies, and that that is the closure of the homicidal Myers narrative. The final shots in the movie do not represent an institutionalized flash-forward, but a dying Laurie’s attempt to sort through her family scrapbook, and make peace with it. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B- (Disc)

Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid headline Pandorum, an effectively moody but also fairly frustrating sci-fi mash-up of Supernova, Event Horizon and Cube, among other films. A more action-oriented cousin of spare, fellow paranoid space opera Moon, Pandorum could slot decently as part of a double-dip couch festival with that movie, depending on one’s level of interest in either slipping into something spooky and meditative after a well intentioned but essentially romper-style genre flick that feels shruggingly compelled to include snarling beasties, or vice versa.

The latest collaborative effort by Robert Kulzer, Jeremy Bolt and Paul
W. S. Anderson, the producers behind the hugely successful Resident Evil movie franchise, Pandorum — like Unknown, Cube and the basic plot hook for the original Saw — revolves around people who wake up in strange places, and in various stages of pain, abuse and amnesia. In the year 2174, two astronauts, Bower (Foster) and Payton (Quaid), awaken in a hyper-sleep chamber aboard a massive, seemingly
abandoned spacecraft known as the Elysium. They’re massively disoriented, and the only sound
is a low rumble and creak from the belly of the ship. Trying to piece together bits of their own respective identities along with mission specifics, Bower ventures deep into the ship, with Payton staying behind to guide him via radio transmitter.

Before too long, however, Bower comes across some nasty, pale, toothy creatures who, unsurprisingly, do not have much of a penchant for cultural dialogue, or even exchanging pleasantries. These mysterious creatures — where did they come from, Bower wonders — are lightning-quick, and they like to kill, even if they don’t seem entirely carnivorous. In scrambling for his life, Bower comes across Nadia (Antje Traue) and Manh (Cung Le), and the three of them form an uneasy alliance, continuing their trek deeper into the Elysium.

Directed with a nice attention to background detail by German-born Christian Alvart, who traded in similarly grim subject matter in his underappreciated 2005 film Antibodies, Pandorum is an interesting study in contrasts. Much of the tech-jargon dialogue (“The reactor timing is offset in the core!”) and all the get-to-the-center-of-the-ship plot mechanics are yawningly familiar, to the point of almost paralyzing disinterest. And yet the movie is constructed with such style, and makes use of a couple nice slick directorial tricks, that it keeps you leaning forward a bit, always wanting to like it a bit more than you in the moment are, but never entirely giving up on it. The engaging authenticity of the film’s settings and production design — which nip piecemeal inspiration from some of the aforementioned genre efforts, but also movies like Dark City — go a long way toward holding an audience’s interest.

It’s just a shame, really, that Pandorum seems almost bound by convention to include such a clamorous external threat. This is by far the least successful and intriguing portion of the movie, in large part because Alvart and company have neither the budget to replicate the creature effects of an Aliens film, nor the imagination of someone like Guillermo del Toro, who can stage memorably unsettling and fantastical scenes for a fraction of the normal Hollywood cost. Part of the film’s initial appeal relies in its use of unreliable narrators, and in this way, it feels a bit like a jumbled-up, madcap, recast take on The Shining, which put eroding sanity and the effects of extreme isolation under the microscope. Pandorum starts to be this type of film, and fitfully returns to this theme, but it’s an ill-designed and ultimately unsuccessful match, on a cathartic narrative level, with a lot of what else is included in the story.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Pandorum comes to DVD presented in a 2:35:1 widescreen aspect ratio, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. DVD special features are ample, anchored by a feature-length audio commentary track with director Alvart and producer Jeremy Bolt, in which the pair discuss Alvart’s late-in-the-game, pre-production idea of depicting the effects of years of hyper-sleep via sloughing skin, as well as the special challenges involved for Foster in crafting a performance out of reacting to Quaid’s disembodied voice, since more than half of his material was prerecorded, before the younger actor’s scenes.

The DVD also includes 16 deleted and alternate scenes, which run a total of 28 minutes, though there’s additionally a separate four-and-a-half-minute featurette, “What Happened to Nadia’s Team?,” that in actuality is an excised, direct-address in-character bit. Running 14 minutes, a behind-the-scenes featurette includes some solid interviews with both on-camera talent and director Alvart, who talks about blending together Travis Milloy’s original screenplay with an entirely separate yet thematically similar script that he was working on when producers first approached him about the project. After a brief, pointless “flight team training video,” a robust slate of picture galleries, including everything from pre-production storyboards, model work and conceptual monster sketches to on-set photographs, rounds out the material, along with the theatrical trailer and sneak peeks at five other forthcoming Anchor Bay DVD releases. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)