YMMV / Halloween II (1981)

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Laurie's adoptive mother is shown for only a short moment, and in a dream sequence, but she seems to act rather cold to Laurie when she tells her "I'm not your mother." It's difficult to determine if her relationship with Laurie has always been that cold and distant or if Laurie's traumatized mind has depicted her through that particular unpleasant memory.
• Ass Pull: John Carpenter himself admits that while writing Halloween II, the idea of Laurie being Michael's sister came to him "at 2:00 in the morning in front of a typewriter with a six pack of beer" while desperately trying to force a way for the story to continue when he felt the story had nowhere else to go after the first film, all due to the producers refusing to let the Myers story die after the success of the original film despite Carpenter wanting it to be an anthology series. He has repeatedly expressed his discontent with this plot thread and pointedly erased it from the Blumhouse trilogy's continuity entirely.
• Awesome Music:
  • The Shape Stalks Again, which somehow manages to make the original more tense and suspenseful with synthesizer instead of piano.
  • The rendition of the original theme on an organ and synthesizer combo gives off a very dark and eerie vibe that effectively puts the viewer in sync with the atmosphere.
  • The use of "Mr. Sandman" makes for an effective bit of Soundtrack Dissonance.
• Base-Breaking Character: Budd. Fans can't agree if he's an annoying Asshole Victim who couldn't die soon enough (especially when he's played by the actor who would seven years later play an equally loathsome and annoying role as the rapists' cheerer in the Academy Award-winning courtroom drama The Accused) or a hilarious Jerkass Casanova Wanna Be who brought a lot of laughs to the film.
• Broken Base:
  • One of the biggest in the franchise, being the twist that Laurie is Michael's sister, a twist that was carried in every following film except for the third one (which follows a separate cast) and the 2018 and onward installments (which ignore every previous film but the first one). Some didn't mind, arguing that most of Michael still remained a mystery and it did not change too much about his character. Others criticize it for being an Ass Pull that did not contribute to the plot and for demystfying Michael by giving a motive, thus reducing his intimidation as a villain. Rather tellingly, the 2018 film dropped this as a means of appealing to all bases.
  • The theatrical cut vs the television one. The TV cut inserts some deleted scenes and eliminates some unnecessary gore, with some of the restored scenes explaining a lot of Fridge Logic from the original. But it also re-orders some scenes around — often clumsily — and fans can't agree on which version is better.
• Complete Monster: Michael Myers. See here.
• Contested Sequel: Though it's certainly one of the best received Myers sequels, the film is polarizing. Fans that like it love the direct continuity with the original film, Carpenter's score, the increased gore, the returning cast/crew and the filmmaking being very synergetic with the first film's. However, others criticize it for the lack of character development and reduced presence of Laurie Strode, weaker characters and scenes of suspense and the gore being downright excessive at times. It's to the point the film is just as often considered a worthy follow-up to the original as it is criticized for being a step down, a point of contention that only increased when the 2018 installment ignored this film.
• Director Displacement: While John Carpenter was heavily involved with the film, it was actually directed by Rick Rosenthal. This is not helped by the fact that most of the crew from the first film returned and Carpenter wrote the film, in addition to directing reshoots of death scenes.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Ben Tramer is one on account of his rather memorable death scene and knock-off Michael Myers mask, making him popular as a Memetic Loser.
  • Nurse Jill Franco has a surprising amount of fans for a tertiary slasher film character, due to a good mixture of caring and professionalism, distinctive Boyish Short Hair and pumpkin broach, and a memorable death scene. Fans tend to be happy that she's Spared by the Cut in the version that airs on TV.
• Franchise Original Sin: Later movies would get flack for stripping away Michael's mystique by explaining his Implacable Man nature and why he targets the Strode family. This movie started that trend by revealing that Michael was actually Laurie's long-lost brother, as well as implying he was connected to the occult, in contrast to the first movie where his motives are deliberately kept mysterious and unknown and whether he's a supernatural threat or just a very tough and evil human is ambiguous. While these changes were rather polarizing even at the time of the movie's release, they didn't go to the extremes of later films, and they didn't change too much about Michael's character or reveal too much about him, so they don't get as much flack even today... even if many realize in retrospect that they started trends which would go on to seriously hurt the franchise.
• He's Just Hiding:
  • Jimmy. It helps that he survives in the AMC cut of the film. His last name in the script is Lloyd...which is the same last name that Jamie has in the sequels. This has led to some minor Fanon that Jimmy is her father.
  • Having a needle injected through your skull like Janet isn't always fatal and can even be done in certain routine operations.
  • While Jill is Spared by the Cut in the TV cut of the film, many fans think she could have survived her stab wound in the theatrical cut too, and that she just passed out from shock.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Dana Carvey makes his big screen debut in this film about a guy named Michael Myers, and he would go on to be a long term collaborator on Saturday Night Live and Wayne's World with a guy named Mike Myers.
• It Was His Sled: The reason behind Michael's killings in this film is rather well-known, to the point every film in the series afterwards (except for the 2018 sequel and its own sequels, which treat this film as non-canonical) references it.
• Love to Hate: For those who don't view him as The Scrappy, Budd is seen as this due to his transparently sleazy behavior and proudly jerkish moments providing quite a bit of comedy due to their cartoonish nature.
• Memetic Mutation: Ben Tramer's infamously contrived death. Expect many fans to bring him up as Haddonfield's favorite guy and claim his death is even more tragic than any of the established characters.
• Memetic Loser: To an extent, as while new continuities have left Ben Tramer's state of being in flux, his infamous accidental death scene here has forever cemented his status as this due to the contrivances of it and the fact he was wearing a knock-off Michael Myers mask at the time of his death.
• Narm:
  • When Jill is being stabbed and Michael lifts her in the air, it cuts to a shot of her shoes falling off her feet. This makes it slightly more comical than it needed to be. She looks less like she just got stabbed and more like Michael is giving her a wedgie.
  • The fact that Karen speaks to Michael thinking he's Budd for so long makes the scene funny rather than suspenseful. The unintentional humor is elevated after she looks back and realizes it's not Budd, only to cut to a shot of Michael awkwardly looking to his left for a moment, for no discernible reason at all, before he attacks her.
  • Ben Tramer's death scene, due to how it escalates from a panicked chase to a car hitting him and exploding, which can take away from the actual horror of his death being an accident.
  • Michael walks into Laurie’s hospital room and proceeds to stab her...only to pull the sheets back after his third stab and see that he stabbed pillows the whole time. Add on the robotic movement when he slowly goes for the sheets and it drains all the suspense out of that scene. ^note  Funny enough, the TV cut averts this by having Michael slowly walk in, then pull the sheets back instead of stabbing pillows first.
  • In the television cut, we hear young Laurie begging Michael not to be angry with her, which comes off unintentionally hilarious when young Laurie sounds bored when she’s talking to him. The fact that it’s actually Jamie Lee Curtis providing the voice only makes it funnier.
  • Budd sings a Squick version of Amazing Grace which in itself has its charm.^note  Amazing grace, come sit on my face. Don’t make me cry, I need your pie. The TV cut naturally censors it, but what they change it to makes it sound even lamer than before.
    Budd: Amazing grace, come show me your face. Don’t make me cry, I tell no lie.
• Narm Charm: For many fans, the ridiculousness of Ben Tramer's death is part of what makes it so memorable.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Michael enters a home through an unlocked door, steals a knife from a cutting board, and leaves, all while one of the residents is asleep and the other doesn't realize anything is amiss until she reaches for the knife and finds Michael's blood.
  • The shot of Michael walking down a crowded street, while the people around him are blissfully unaware of the monster in their midst, even with the news reporting on Michael's escape.
  • The fact that Michael stalks through the hospital, butchering the staff, almost completely unnoticed. Only a few people even realize that anything is amiss, and by the time they do, they're usually just in time to be Michael's next victims.
  • Ben Tramer gets killed because he unknowingly wears a mask that looks too similar to Michael's. This sort of mistake has happened a few times in real life: an innocent person gets killed because they fit the description of a criminal at large.
  • The boy with the razor blade stuck between his teeth that is admitted to the hospital, an event that has seemingly nothing to do with Michael Myers nor the main storyline of any of the films, makes one wonder just how many other sadists and killers besides "The Shape" (or Conal Cochran and Silver Shamrock, or the Man in Black and the Cult of Thorn) are out there, in what is supposed to be a quiet Everytown, America setting where Michael's disruptive killing sprees are ostensibly the exception rather than the rule to the town's normal safety and tranquility, no less. The effect is magnified as at this point in the franchise, an adult Michael Myers Would Not Hurt A Child despite all of his other evil deeds (though this unspoken rule would change in later installments).
  • Michael wandering into the NICU full of infants. He doesn't do anything to any of them, but the first time you see the film, you might become immediately worried.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Marion Chambers proves more useful than she did in the first film, filling in Dr. Loomis on a vital detail about Laurie and Michael, and summoning back up in the climax.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Dana Carvey has a brief non-speaking role as a reporter's assistant.
  • Baywatch actor and future soap star Billy Warlock (the son of Dick Warlock, this film's Michael Myers), briefly appears as Craig, one of the local teens looking for Ben Tramer.
• The Scrappy: Karen not only arrives late for work but almost immediately leaves her post to fool around with her boyfriend. She's the nurse on a maternity ward! It's hard to see her death as anything other than Laser-Guided Karma albeit a bit excessive.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • Jamie Lee Curtis is clearly wearing a wig that only vaguely looks like her hairstyle from the first film.
  • Near the end of the film, Laurie shoots Michael in both of his eyes. However, despite the blood dripping, you can still see that Michael's eyes are in perfectly good condition through the eye holes of his mask.
    • Or maybe Laurie shot him above the eyes considering he’s able to see perfectly fine in later entries.
    • Clearly not the intention of the filmmakers here. The implication is definitely intended to be that she shoots out both his eyes, but the cinematography failed to keep his eyes out of view afterward and later films just forgot or didn't care.
• Squick: The film was made with the intention of being gorier than the original to compete with slasher films of the time, which resulted in some people complaining that it was overkill and verged more into this territory. Director Rosenthal himself was upset that the studio forced more death and gore into the film than he intended it to have, because he wanted it to be more of a suspense thriller like the original rather than an all-out slasher.
  • The kid with the razor blade stuck between his teeth, presumably from when he bit into an apple given to him by a so-called "Halloween Sadist."
  • The hypodermic needle sticking out of Dr. Mixter's eye.
  • Nurse Karen's face after being drowned in scalding water.
  • Ben Tramer's horribly charred corpse.
• Tearjerker:
  • Sheriff Brackett's reaction to seeing his daughter's corpse. Charles Cyphers does a magnificent job selling his shock and devastation, as well as his rage at Loomis. Loomis himself can only quietly reply that he didn't let Michael loose, knowing that he can't do anything to ease Brackett's pain.
  • The death of Nurse Jill considering she was easily the kindest of the medical staff and dies a moment after being relieved over finding Laurie, in addition hearing her final breaths as Michael lifts her up isn't easy to listen to, it's a very severe case of Kill the Cutie.
  • Janet and Virginia also didn't seem at all like bad people and instead dedicated medical staff (in contrast to Mixter drinking on the job and Karen and Budd ditching their jobs to go have fun in a hot tub instead of looking after patients) who were senselessly killed simply for being in Michael's way.
  • When you look past how utterly ridiculous Ben Tramer's death is, it's actually rather heartbreaking to think about the fact that a teenage boy was killed by the police for simply wearing a mask that happened to look like a spree killer on a night which was supposed to be fun for him. in his final moments before being rammed with the car he looks around in fear(admittely we can't see the poor boys face due to the mask that caused his doom) at having a gun pointed at him, Loomis really missed the mark here, to put it bluntly.
• Too Cool to Live: Dr. Loomis. That is, if you follow the filmmakers' original intention, rather than the sequels (as both the 4-6 and H20 timelines established he survived).
• Values Dissonance: The doctor who operates on Laurie shows up to work after drinking at a party and has shaky hands, yet is seen as competent to treat her. Since the film came out, doctors operating while under the influence has become seen as more serious and alarming.
• Villain Decay: The revelation that Laurie was Michael's sister. Some felt that the reveal took away the menacing mystery that made Michael such an effective villain as it gave a reason for him to stalk Laurie instead of leaving it as an unknown motive. Others felt that Michael's obsession with killing his family members may make him out to be one of the more brutal or irredeemable slashers as even some villains care for at least one family member. This is still a rather divided twist to this day, but for the most part, people seemed to accept it as canonical (even though Carpenter himself has disowned this plot contrivance as stupid and ridiculous), as it's used again in the remake - though it did eventually lead to the franchise revival Halloween (2018) dropping II from canonicity in order to eliminate this plot point, which helped convince Carpenter to return to the series as an executive producer and composer.
• Vindicated by History: To a lesser extent than the original film or some of John Carpenter's other works, but the hit-and-miss quality of subsequent sequels led to this film getting a warmer reception from audiences and critics since its initial release. It's still considered lesser than the original film, but it's commonly regarded as one of the better sequels for at the very least attempting to provide a definitive end to the Michael Myers story and relaunch the franchise as an anthology series with Halloween III: Season of the Witch.