Surprisingly Decent Horror Sequels

John Boorman's (Point Blank, Zardoz) sequel to William Friedkin's classic horror story has a grossly exaggerated bad reputation. While Boorman's film does tend to aimlessly transition from scene to scene, there are flashes of his typical psychedelic style throughout. Richard Burton plays Father Lamont, a priest hired by heads of the Catholic Church to investigate and renounce The Exorcist's Father Merrin (Max von Sydow, who pops up again in this sequel for a flashback or three). With the help of a new strobe-light-induced kind of joint hypnosis, which connects the memories and the emotions of a patient with his/her psychiatrist, Lamont starts communicating with the demon that possessed Regan (Linda Blair) in The Exorcist and tries to hunt it down to find out why it attacked Regan in the first place. The Heretics dabbles with a myriad of exciting ideas that it never fully develops, from the concept that good/evil are essentially two sides of the same coin to the idea that this radical new form of hypnosis can create a communal sense of universal empathy. The scenes in Africa, which look like rejected set pieces from a forgotten Indiana Jones sequel, are especially perplexing but full of such deeply-felt questionable ideas that it's almost impossible to look away. Burton is as always excellent and the scenes of hallucinatory paranoia are classic Boorman insanity.

While Rob Zombie is most well-known and respected in the critical and horror geek community alike for his tripped-out hillbilly grindhouse opus The Devil's Rejects, few of his admirers recognize just how much more polished his sequel to his reboot of Halloween, John Carpenter's seminal slasher is. Zombie's Halloween II picks up the pieces of his first film, which played out like a drawn-out, stiflingly reverent biography of serial killer Michael Meyers. Laurie Straub is coping with survivor's guilt, her father (the inimitable Brad Dourif) doesn't know how to protect her, Dr. Loomis (Malcom McDowell) grubs his way to success with a tell-all book while constantly looking over his shoulder for fear that Michael will return and Michael wanders around aimlessly, sifting through fragmented memories of his mother. In its own stunted way, Halloween II is about the psychology of its characters and how they deal with knowing that an almost supernatural evil walks among them. You can see how far Zombie has come as a filmmaker just from the one scene where Michael is attacked by a group of drunk locals only to put on his mask and instantly become a nigh-invincible force of nature. Halloween II is Zombie's least self-conscious and most admirably constructed film yet.

Like The Exorcist II, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer was criticized upon its release as being a pointless update of its predecessor, which in this case is punk horror filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto's original Tetsuo: The Iron Man. But Tsukamoto, who wrote the script and directed Body Hammer, didn't just slap a plot onto The Iron Man and throw in some bigger budget effects. Instead, he clarified his earlier film's themes, turning the original film's nebbish salaryman's dark daydreams of transforming into a full-fledged cyberpunk nightmare. Body Hammer follows a white-collar businessman who effectively hulks out after his son is kidnapped by cyborg skinheads and turns into the next "Iron Man," a lumbering mass of jagged metal and H.R. Giger-type phallic symbols. A convoluted plot involving a mad scientist and an abusive, gun-crazed father emerges that evocatively gives Tsukamoto's hellish world of technology and sex run amuck a cogent reason to be.