journal features

movie review - Halloween II

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 1999.04.17

This one picks up with a re-reeling of the last two thousand frames of the first film, and carries right on. Where the first film covered the evening, this one struggles through the night, as our doctor hunts for the escaped killer, and the killer hunts for the escaped victim-who-killed-him-repeatedly, our girl Jamie Lee. It's a cheap knock-off of the original, much like countless forgettable things that have come out in the past twenty years, and which turn up in those bizarre gore magazines.

Not recommended. See the first one, and leave it at that.

rand()m quote

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.

—John Gardner