Taro the Dragon Boy (Essay)

(Tatsu no ko Tarô)

Released 1979 (Japan); January 31, 2006 (US DVD)

Studio: Toei Animation Company

Directed by: Kiriro Urayama, Peter Fernandez (English cut)

Sticking to the theme of lifelong favorites from my childhood, especially those that feature dragons, I thought Taro would be a most fitting, if not completely unknown, addition. Easily as hard to find as Flight of Dragons, Taro doesn’t even have a Wiki page, so I will have to use my limited knowledge of Japanese folklore if I want to go in depth explaining the stories behind the story.

I should point out I have never watched the original Japanese dub of the movie. Apparently the English cut is vastly different. It doesn’t change the story but apparently lots of the dialogue is changed and in the US version there’s a lot more songs (well, one song sung a few times) that I guess they don’t use in the original. The songs were one of the reasons I liked it so much and why it’s so memorable for me (unlike the previous two films, Taro has never left my memory). Someday I probably will watch the Japanese version, but will quickly go back to the American one shortly after. I’m keeping the magic of my childhood alive.


Taro is the story of a young boy who has been orphaned. He lives in a poor village in the mountains with his grandmother. The people of the village spend their days trying to grow millet in their infertile lands. “Grow a thousand grains from one, grown ten thousand grains from two,” is their mantra. Taro is a lazy boy, who, even though he’s young and strong, spends most of his days asleep rather than helping the community or playing with the other boys. This causes the boys to give Taro the nickname “dragon boy”. Why, I do not know. My guess is it was a rumor that grew out of control. A rumor, Taro learns, is true.

One day Taro asks his grandmother about his mother. She tells him that yes, he is the son of a dragon, and that his mother gave her eyes to feed him when he was a baby (to substitute for milk), and blinded, flew to a lake high in the mountains. Taro promptly vows to find his mother and sets out the next day to do just that.

As per usual in adventure films, Taro meets all kinds of amazing characters on his way. Aya is a girl from the neighboring mountain, who plays the flute beautifully. The Wizard Tengu (who appears sometimes in Japanese fairy tales), wrestles Taro and gives him the strength of ten men, something that comes in handy when he meets the Red and Black Demons. Taro also is briefly employed by a farmer woman, who claims a dragon lives in the pond by her house. When this is proven a lie, Taro takes his pay for his work. The woman laughs and offers him all he can carry, which turns out is the entire crop. Taro begins then to redeem himself by doling out portions of the rice crop to other poor villagers throughout the mountains.


Eventually Taro reaches the lake, and finds his mother in one of the most tearful reunions ever in film. He learns the full story of how she became a dragon in the first place (punishment for selfishness), which cements Taro’s good deeds as self-redeeming. But he wasn’t done thinking of the people of the valley. He notices the lake could be drained which would get water to all the people and make their lands more fertile and they wouldn’t be so poor and hungry. The film climaxes with Taro and his dragon mother draining the lake in epic fashion.

Now when it comes to family dynamics in film, the father-son relationship is probably the most often represented. There’s a fair amount of mother-daughter, and even a few father-daughter. But the one least represented is the mother-son relationship. This is probably a reason the movie is so important to me. My mom was stay-at-home until after my brother was born so I’d spend a lot of time with her, reading books, going to the park, and watching movies. Movies like Taro. And invariably I’d end up walking around singing the song and carried the “dragon boy” nickname around for a while. So that’s a reason I hold it so dearly.

Something else I noticed when watching it shortly after I bought the DVD. Taro, along with other animated films I grew up with, allowed me to accept pretty much anything fantastical without questioning it (in stories at least, because I recognize them as stories *cough* creation stories *cough*). For example, when Taro defeats the Black Demon, he frees a horse the demon had captive. Later in the movie, the horse can fly. I never thought twice about this until my dad was like, “oh, yeah, that makes sense, flying horse.” Well, Aya explains the horse has gotten its strength back and now is its normal self and can fly again. This is a perfect explanation in the realm of this story, and it never occurred to me at age 3, 13, or 23 to question it.


Taro was also the first anime I ever saw, so the seeds of that love were planted quite early. You may also have noticed how absolutely beautiful the artwork is in the movie. That I think is something amazing: it’s not an "A" movie quality-wise by pretty much any standards, yet the art is still gorgeous.

I don’t expect anyone will be clamoring to tell me this is one they watched years ago and forgot, so I will say that you should do yourself a favor and seek Taro out.

9 (Review)

Back in 2005, Shane Acker created an 11 minute short called “9.” Now four years later, Acker is back and he brought some Hollywood friends along this time. Produced by Tim Burton, 9 takes an otherwise blasé and mundane story about a fore-coming apocalypse produced by Machine v. Man warfare and dresses it up in CGI clothing.

Instead of following a band of last remaining humans, the film puts a rag-tag group of...rag dolls at the center of the narrative, following a repetitive formula the whole way through. 1) A machine threat is produced. 2) Our heroes defeat the threat. 3) They talk. Rinse and repeat.

The charm of the silent original has faded away leaving behind a husk of its former self, stuffed to its ears in production values unable to stand on their own.

Many of the film's artistic choices are entirely too reminiscent of other films. The machines look as if they were cut directly from The Matrix and spliced in with a CGI retool. Some shots are shockingly resemblant of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, especially one particular crane shot that features two main characters in the forefront and a set of ominous towers in deep focus.

The anti-technology sentiments may well have been ripped right out of The Terminator and I, Robot. Technology is bad, especially in the hands of bad people; audiences have been spoon-fed this message since the term “sci-fi” was first coined.

Those complaints aside, aesthetically, 9 is attractive and pleasing. Acker's designs are superb; the different self-made monsters that the machines build leave the viewer curious as to what will come next. These ingenious designs—taking after various intimidating animals—save the film from drowning in its formulaic narrative.

Overall, 9 felt confused with what kind of movie it wanted to be: intense, sci-fi horror, or family-friendly cartoon. While most scenes are suspenseful and compositionally disheartening, the ending is much more Disney than the original short (and less satisfying).

9 is a huge disappointment. What could have been an interesting and dark stand-out picture was torn in two between the box office and artistic integrity. The only remaining qualities of its former rendition—a haunting soundtrack and unique character design—luckily saves it from the Dreamworks graveyard of CGI film.

Chaplin and Keaton: Polarized Cinematic Technique (Essay)

NOTE: Very formal, read at your own risk.

The silent era of film history produced two comedic giants, similar in their use of slapstick and intricate physical gags throughout their films, but different in their cinematic techniques which they employed to convey both comedic and thematic messages. Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times is riddled with social criticisms and deep political messages that are successfully communicated in a way that does not disrupt the cinematic space, thus seamlessly entwining the expression of his viewpoints with the means by which they are expressed: comedic irony.

Conversely, Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. calls attention to the ways in which the medium of film effects his comedic goal and, therefore, Keaton's overall message, resulting in audiences laughing at the movie (how trickery is being used) rather than with it (how the characters are behaving). The feeding machine scene (00:09-00:13) in Modern Times and the movie-within-a-movie landscape scene (00:19-00:22) in Sherlock Jr. exhibit the two comedians' separate styles of film making, both woven with commentary on the content of their films.

The comedy of the feeding machine scene in Chaplin's Modern Times is brought about by the contrast in both the camera's and the machine operator's reaction to the machine's malfunction and the factory worker's opposite reaction. When the feeding machine goes haywire, it begins to pummel the factory worker (Chaplin) with corn (00:10), pour hot soup all over him (00:12), and feed him lug nuts (00:12), all to the shock and distress of the worker. Obviously in pain and desperate to get out of the contraption, the factory worker flails about, noticeable even when the camera cuts down to the machine operator who is trying to solve the problem (00:10) (a hint at what the operator should actually be paying attention to). Conversely, the men working to fix the machine are calm and unconcerned about the welfare of the worker. After one round of abuse, one operator says to another through a title card, “We'll start with the soup again,” almost as if he didn't even recognize the suffering of the worker. Chaplin's technique of minimalism is what drives the situational irony home. The straight-on, perfectly still shots trading off between the feeding machine operators and the factory worker add to the calmness of the scene.

The comedy is enhanced by this ironically objective disposition to the torture of our main character. Chaplin's purpose in this is to criticize the carelessness of those in charge, those who are willing to use and abuse others in the pursuit of money. The way in which he makes “our consciousness of the cinematic medium disappear” (Mast and Kawin 116) through a light-hearted soundtrack and a relaxed, uncomplicated composition also lends to the unconsciousness of what we are actually witnessing—one social class completely disregarding the wellbeing of another. By choosing not to incorporate any compositional or spacial criticism of the content of the scene (i.e. odd or disruptive angles, shot lengths, etc.) Chaplin's criticism is even further supported through the ironic comedy produced.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Keaton's purposefully meta film style comments on the nature of film and film viewing in the beginning of the movie-within-a-movie sequence in which the main character (Keaton) performs a series of stunts as the landscape changes with the scenes. In this gag, Keaton manipulates space and time to confuse and physically effect the boy who has stepped into a film, calling attention to the devices of film creation such as editing and set design. This then has its own effect on us, making us laugh because of both the physical stunts being performed and the way in which the scene pokes fun at our own belief in the tangibility, the realism, of film.

By making us face the “facade” of film, Keaton points out that watching film is watching a fabrication, a construction, and as we watch we behave like the boy in the movie-within-a-movie, falling about, completely at the mercy of the filmmaker who strings us along. This technique by which Keaton forces us to more fully realize the content of the comedy (of believing film) calls “attention to the expectations and desires with which we enter into a pact with narrative” (Gladfelder 146). Oddly, the scene's comedic effect is less so produced by Keaton's prat-falls and tumbles, but more so by his manipulative technique and the content-based commentary that coincides.

Chaplin and Keaton, seen almost as arch rivals of the silent era of film, utilized very different means by which they provided social, political, and artistic criticism through comedy, but shared in the same end: a comedic goal not met by the content of the gags alone, but also by the film making techniques that were a crucial supplementary factor in getting the artists' point across.

Works Cited

Mast, Gerald, and Bruce Kawin. A Short History of the Movies. New York: Pearson Education, Inc., 2008.

Gladfelder, Hal. “Sherlock Jr. (1924).” Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. Ed. Jeffrey Geiger and R.L. Rutsky. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005.

Modern Times. Dir. Charlie Chaplin. Perf. Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard. 1936. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2006.

Sherlock Jr.. Dir. Buster Keaton. Perf. Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, and Ward Crane. 1924. Online. Google videos, 2007.

All About Steve (review)

It's hard to imagine what goes through the minds of those who make movies like All About Steve. Drowning in cliché social criticisms, the film plays like we've seen it a hundred times before, failing to generate any inkling of sympathy for the characters involved while desperately attempting to reel in all possible fans with its version of Apatow-esque comedy.

All About Steve tells the story of Mary Horowitz (Sandra Bullock), a quirky and talkative crossword puzzle creator, who follows a news cameraman, Steve (Bradley Cooper), around the country after he inadvertently invites her along during a less-than-successful blind date. After experiencing multiple newsworthy events, viewers are taken to a final location where Mary becomes the center of the news frenzy.

All About Steve is more like a fairytale than a realistic portrayal of life and relationships. The film tries to delegate a childlike message of “be true to yourself,” but takes it to an extreme with stereotypes and a black-and-white outlook that ends up with a downright disturbing lesson: weirdos and “normal” society do not belong as one.

This theme is supported throughout the entire film as Mary tries to inject herself into normality, but fails to do so in every attempt. Although the ending is a very predictable amalgamation of good feelings, it still very much fosters the attitude of segregation that the rest of the film exhibits throughout.

Mary as a character is a socially inept know-it-all who is obsessed with words and the use thereof. An out of place voice-over narration sprinkled throughout the film (a common technique utilized by scriptwriters who don't know how to get their message across by ways of more skillful means such as character interaction and dialogue) features Mary babbling about words and their meanings and how it relates to her life.

This technique trades subtlety for blatancy, literally telling the audience exactly what they should be thinking about and the connection between vocabulary and Mary's life philosophy. This aggravation is both belittling and boring, as it assumes the audience isn't capable of figuring out the intricacies of Mary's character on their own.

The humor of All About Steve is typical and blasé for the most part, but I did find myself smiling on occasion. Steve and his two companions, Hartman (Thomas Haden Church) and Angus (Ken Jeong), make up a fairly entertaining trio as they bicker around the nation in a news van.

After giving it some thought, I am completely stumped as to why films like All About Steve exist. It was never going to be a giant blockbuster, nor an Academy Award winner, nor an art-house cult classic. It seems All About Steve was destined to be a forgettable, stereotypical venture into relationships and self-discovery unable to win over audiences already accustomed to more intelligent and poignant 2009 romantic comedies such as (500) Days of Summer and Away We Go.

The Flight of Dragons (Essay)

Released 1982 (Direct to video); August 3, 1986 (TV)

Studio(s): Warner Bros, ABC

Directed by: Jules Bass, Arthur Rankin Jr.

Long-time producing and directing partners Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass created some of the most memorable films from my childhood. Although they are most well-known for their Christmas fare (namely Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman), they also produced and directed The Hobbit and The Last Unicorn, both of which were childhood favorites. Another staple of my younger years were mythical creatures, especially dragons. I loved anything and everything with dragons and still do today. In fact, pretty much everything in my life up to this point has been because of my love for and interest in them (loved Hobbit because of them, which lead to Lord of the Rings, which lead eventually to where I am today).

Flight of Dragons is the most dragon-filled movie I can think of. It is absolutely steeped in dragon lore. Loosely based on a fictional natural history book of the same name and Gordon Dickson’s novel “Dragon and the George”, Flight of Dragons follows Peter Dickinson as he tries to protect magic itself from extinction.


The story goes: about a thousand years ago, magic is real but it is dying out in favor of science. People believe less in magical things and more in mathematics, biology, astronomy, and the like, and that is weakening all the fantastical things that very much do exist. This is felt mostly by the wizards, and there are four, each corresponding with an element or part of the world. Carolinus, the Green Wizard of Nature’s Realm calls his three brothers to meet at the Temple of All Antiquity to discuss the matter. His brothers being:
Solarius, Lord of Deapths and Heights, he controlls the waters; Lo Tae Shao, Master of Light and Air; and Ommadon, the Red Wizard, Lord of Black Magic (wonder if he’s the bad guy).

At the gathering, Carolinus asks his brothers to help him create the “Last Realm of Magic” where magic can stay safe from a changing world. Ommadon, shockingly, refuses, because his plan is to dominate man through greed and conquor both worlds. For some reason or another, he says the only way to stop him is to take his red crown, the source off all his power. Genius move if you ask me, “I’m gonna rule the wooooorld. Oh by the way, here’s how to kill me.”


After Ommadon’s threat it’s obvious he needs to be stopped. Lo Tae Shao says than he cannot, for he is a wizard of peace and has no weapons, but he lends a flute of healing. His brother Solarius offers all the help he can give, which at the time is a golden shield, but he also aids later on. Here the brothers’ elements come into play: earth, fire, air, water; good, evil, peace, war. It doesn’t quite match up correctly given earth’s counter-element is air, not fire, but the movie’s about dragons, not elemental balance. Antiquity, however, will not allow the four brothers to war on one another, so Carolinus asks who can help them. The answer is Peter Dickinson, a scientist/inventor from 20th century Boston. Carolinus uses a great deal of his remaining magic to transport Peter back to his time to lead the quest to capture the crown.

Peter is voiced by John Ritter, and isn’t the most dashing or charming hero-type. He spends his time fantasizing about mythical things and making board games from them. He’s also trying to write a definitive book on dragons entitled “Flight of Dragons”, which, oddly enough, a man named Peter Dickinson did. It’s his book the film is loosley based on. A “flight” of dragons, by the way, is a term for a large number of dragons, like herd of elephants or pod of whales.


Shortly before the quest is about to begin, a magical accident occurs and Peter is left in the body of Carolinus’ house dragon Gorbash. It’s hard to get used to being a dragon, and one certainly can’t lead a quest knowing nothing, so Peter-Gorbash gets a crash course in being a dragon from Carloinus’ old dragon friend Smrgol. Here is where Peter learns much of the details for his book and the dragon lore really gets going. We learn all kinds of things about dragons: how they fly, how the breathe fire, why the have gold hordes (they sleep on it because it’s comfortable and it can’t ignite like hay, I’m also fairly certain - and this detail isn’t in the film - that it has something to do with their armoured undersides, makes them stronger, Smaug brags about it in Hobbit).

The quest then continues wherein various frightening creatures are battled and heroic characters are introduced. There is a fair amount of deaths in the movie for a kids flick, and only one of the eventual five journeyers is really developed (other than Peter-Gorbash). In the final battle with Ommadon (did I mention James Earl Jones is the voice of the villain?), Peter uses science and logic to defeat the wizard’s magic, proving whcih is more powerful. The three remaining wizards are left to create their realm that will stay magical and safe, and Peter is returned to Boston to write his book and make his games.

Filght of Dragons was probably one of the worst movies I could have chosen to write about if I wanted discussion to happen. Very few people have even heard of it let alone seen it. My own brother, who I watched it with many years ago, took some time to get his memory going and remember it. It is a more memorable film than Once Upon a Forest because there are so few films like it, but it’s so ridiculously rare no one has been able to get their hands on it (a DVD is out but is incredibly hard ot find, I watched a poor-quality version on Google Video). However, continuing the theme of movies I forgot from my childhood and rediscovered, I felt this fitting.

Expectation (Discussion)

How do expectations affect one's opinion of a film? Everyone goes into a new movie with some sort of prejudgment of the coming experience, but how big a role does this judgment play in our final opinion? If you really think about it, personal expectation, or prejudgment, shapes our perception of movies to a very large extent, and truly is a root cause of how we have come to view films in general.

I thought Public Enemies was going to be the movie of the summer, if not the year. It had everything going for it: a gangster movie with Michael Mann behind the camera and Johnny Depp in front of it. Nothing could stop this movie from blowing me and everyone else out of the water. Well I was wrong, but not in the way you'd think. While it did not disappoint in its own right, when hyped and compared and contorted into something it just wasn't going to be, it left me hanging. It left me wanting—and what I wanted was a movie I'd seen before.

Preceding Public Enemies was a slew of comparable films that I had enjoyed, if not loved. American Gangster, The Departed, Donnie Brasco, there are too many to name, all of which blur the line between right and wrong, just and unjust, agent of the law and disturber of the peace. These films left viewers wondering who was the cop and who was the criminal, forcing us to face the similarities between the two and the possible contradictions that live on both sides of the line. They all have compelling characters and suspenseful, often poignant story arcs riddled with brilliant speeches that define the gangster genre (I'm speaking more so to The Departed and less so to American Gangster which was good, but not great). Public Enemies does have those qualities as well: it's attention-grabbing and smart and funny and, notably, well-made, but it's different. “Different” is not bad, but I left the theatre without the feeling I had after seeing the films mentioned above; I was unsatisfied. But why? The cinematography was spectacular, Depp was amazing as usual, the script was solid and the action was exhilarating, so why? It's expectation.

I went into Public Enemies thinking American Gangster and what I got was, who would have guessed it, Public Enemies. It is a “different” film. The action sequences, especially the one located at the cabin and in the woods, felt real—as if the characters were on set. The gunshots echoed in what felt like a staged scene, and the lights and shadows looked artificial. That aesthetic feeling of realism made a lot of statements: it put the violence of the scene front and center, forcing the audience to see, and most of all, hear the real effect of the bloodshed; it made the camera less like an invisible screen and more like character of its own, watching the action from a crouched, low angle, and then perching behind a gunman's shoulder, almost like it was peering out to get a better glimpse of the shootout. Other differences included the dialogue: there was none. Well, virtually none. Gangster films are usually filled with witty conversations and intimidating speeches, but Public Enemies remained silent (save a few smart and humorous anecdotes from Dillinger (Depp). This places more focus onto the inner characters of the two featured men, Dillinger and Purvis, and, once again, the violence that exists between them. Not bad, just different. Overall, I think it's a forgettable film—but is that because it's just forgettable, or is it because I expected one thing and got another?

On the opposite side, I thought Kung Fu Panda was going to be the worst movie of all time. The premise was boring, the animation was classic Dreamworks sludge, and the comedy seemed old and stale. Then I saw the movie, and my mind was inexorably changed. I genuinely cared about the Panda, Po, and his quest to become the dragon warrior. I also laughed harder at a movie than I had in a long time. It was a miracle: the worst looking film of all time turned out to be one of the best of the year. But is it that good? I doubt it; once again, expectation got the best of me.

Once Kung Fu Panda exceeded the minimal expectations I had for it, it became something great. I still think the movie is good, but I don't think I would feel so strongly about it if I would have had different, more promising expectations for it in the first place.

Try going through this exercise: think of a movie you feel strongly or semi-strongly about and try to recall what you thought about it going before seeing it. In one way or another, your expectations had a part to play. Going into Howl's Moving Castle, I knew it was going to be amazing, but when it exceeded those high expectations, I was even more enthralled with the film (and still am today). This isn't to say Howl is any less great than it really is, but it does mean that my opinion was in some way strongly influenced by expectation.

The consequent question, then, becomes, How do we know if a movie is good? How can we tell? Even if we rate the movie using certain sophisticated standards and scales, it is virtually impossible to eliminate our bias, our prejudgments. This may not be a bad thing, of course, as we can simply factor these biases into our overall opinions, and accept them as how we view movies in general. This, I believe, is valid. We take into account our prejudgments and form our opinions including them as a part of the cinematic experience. But what of cases such as Public Enemies? It seems as if this film may fade from our memories for the (almost) sole fact that it came out after the precedent had already been set in the gangster genre. And if this is true, then, boiling down the subject, our opinions of film are effected the most by when a particular film is released.

If Public Enemies had come out before The Departed and Donnie Brasco and the like, would it have been better received? Is innovation the most important factor for judging film? OR, coming from the opposite angle, is it safe to say, “For the time, Star Wars was great, but now that it's 2009, we realize it isn't that good.” Or does the fact that it came out so long ago, reinventing the sci-fi genre for a generation to come, make us overlook the actual content of the film? I would be inclined to argue the latter, but for now, I'm going to watch Kung Fu Panda again.

Halloween II (Review)

One of the first of a wave of remakes meant to re-energize and re-establish otherwise played and creatively starved series, Rob Zombie's 2007 Halloween was a good effort, but made a lot of the same mistakes that continue to plague the slasher genre. Now two years later, Zombie returns with Halloween II, proving that Michael Myers should have died a long, long time ago.

The refreshing distinctions that saved the 2007 film from failing completely, such as a thorough look into the childhood of Myers, which remained untouched since the pop-culture icon first started slicing up teenagers back in 1978, are completely absent from its sequel. The film starts off directly where the last one ended—and this is Zombie's first mistake. Halloween II adopts the poorly constructed plot and laughable dialogue that made the second half of the 2007 remake so disappointing. With little briefing, we are placed in the hospital with protagonist Laurie Strode, who shot Myers in the head at the end of the last film. Unbeknownst to Strode, Michael Myers has survived (who would have guessed?) and has infiltrated the hospital looking to finish Strode off, thus beginning another 2 hours of running and hiding.

With a weak central plot, Halloween II relies on the random victims of Myers to provide the meat of the story (no pun intended). Zombie adds scenes of unimportant and unrelated killings in an obvious effort to supplement a tattered main narrative. As if it hasn't been established enough already, Zombie emphasizes Myers' ability to easily take down those who oppose him on numerous occasions. Myers kills six people in two separate scenes who are completely unrelated to the story, providing unsatisfying “fluff” that does the opposite of what it's designed to do and incites boredom instead of suspense.

A “disturbing” series of dream sequences are littered throughout the film, bringing back Myers' mother from the last movie (played by Zombie's wife, Sheri) in an effort to add a sort of spiritualism to the film. Aesthetically reminiscent of The Unborn (2009), the sequences suggest (in a highly underdone way) that all the Myers share some sort of spiritual wholeness, thus inevitably connecting Strode, Michael's long-lost sister, to the killer. If done correctly, this emphasis may have been slightly interesting, but instead it comes off more like a plug for Sheri Zombie's acting career.

Halloween II also brings back Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), Myers' lifetime psychiatrist who spends the movie traveling to different venues promoting his new book based on the life and times of Michael Myers. This final side story is the most unfocused of them all. In it, Zombie criticizes those who prey on the misfortune of others—the media sharks and publicity-seekers that use tragic events for their own profit. Although clear, the message comes as a footnote to the picture as a whole, merely providing another distraction from the lacking plot.

Following the lead of many modern-day directors who try to cram too many storylines, ideas and themes into their films, Zombie becomes bogged down with his own ambitions and ends up with multiple unsatisfying, unfinished and underdeveloped narratives in one movie. Instead of achieving a cohesive and effective message, Halloween II leaves the viewer with confusion and bewilderment. Why did he kill that guy? Was he in the first one? Where is the killer? Why are we watching this?

Despite the film's inability to deliver a meaningful and enjoyable experience on the whole, I don't want to completely discourage Zombie. He obviously has cinematic vision, adding some interesting stylistic compositions and artistically creative sequences to the film. In one scene, a blurring effect is added as Myers takes a victim in slow motion. The actual murder is presumed and not shoved in our faces like usual, which was both refreshing and eerily effective. Later in the film, Zombie pulls the camera back to watch Strode flee in the moonlight which overexposes the lens in a visually pleasing composition. These examples of creativity save the film from becoming an utter loss.

The slasher genre is a slowly fading trend. What was once a new and exciting statement about violence and fear is now a played shadow of its former self. Where others such as Batman Begins and The Dark Knight succeeded, the Halloween remakes fail to revitalize a fading legacy and are a clear example of how none of us, no matter how hard we try, can breath life into something that was never alive to begin with. Let's hope Michael Myers goes the way of the slasher and dies off, once and for all.