There was never meant to be a second Michael Myers film. John Carpenter had always meant for the 1978 Halloween movie to be a standalone one, and other than that last scene which technically left things open, he had tied everything together quite nicely. But by the time 1981 rolled around, the slasher subgenre of horror was disgorging money like a broken Vegas slot machine and, seeing the success of films like Friday the 13th and The Burning, the Universal studio executives decided they wanted a share of that cash too and so poked at Carpenter to make a sequel.
Halloween II starts off pretty much where Halloween ended - Dr. Loomis turns up just in time to save Laurie Strode; he shoots Michael Myers several times and knocks him backwards off the balcony; we get the Boogyman quote; then finally Loomis goes to check on Michael only to find him gone! (Not a spoiler considering it was in the last film, so if you're watching the sequel first then you've got to be expecting to be spoiled; plus Michael Myers is known for being second only to Jason Voorhees in his ability to get the living crap kicked out of him and yet keep going). Thus starts the movie proper, as Laurie is taken to hospital, Dr. Loomis keeps running around Haddonfield trying to find Michael, and Michael continues to just stroll around the town, stopping occasionally to kill someone and vandalise the local elementary school before heading to the hospital to finally finish Laurie off - not to mention everyone else at the hospital as well.
As I said earlier, John Carpenter had never intended for there to be a sequel to the first Halloween, and in fact only came back to write the script for this sequel because Universal offered him more money and Carpenter felt he hadn't been paid enough for the first film. Even then, Carpenter wasn't happy with his work on Halloween II at all, blaming a daily six-pack of Budweiser, among other things, for the way the script came out. And if I'm being completely honest, that does explain a lot, such as Michael's sudden need to grafitti Celtic words on blackboards and the sudden, shoehorned-in plot revelation that Laurie was in fact Michael's sister, adopted as a child after their parents died (that might technically be a spoiler, but believe me this is going to come up a lot in future episodes of the series and so I'm afraid you'd be finding out sooner or later anyway). To make matters worse, this particular plot revelation, which is a pretty important one all things considered, is delivered via one of the worst sins of storytelling - a character is pretty much parachuted into the film to just tell the other characters (and us), completely out of nowhere. The ultimate case of telling rather than showing. And as a final insult, the worst thing about this revelation is that it actually makes Michael Myers less frightening. Suddenly he goes from a silent stalking killer who picked his victims completely at random just because he saw them walking down a street, to a silent killer who just wants to kill his remaining family (even if we don't know why he wants to do that either).
Being a sequel, Halloween II of course has a higher body count and gorier deaths. Chief among them include a nurse being scalded to death in a jacuzzi, and another nurse suffering death via the ultimate blood donation (and again, where exactly did Michael learn to properly set that up?). The irony of those scenes is that they were added to the film by John Carpenter himself because he felt the film wasn't gory enough - even though the actual director Rick Rosenthal had been trying to emulate the first Halloween by focussing more on suspense and tension rather than the attention-grabbers of gore and nudity.
The ending of Halloween II was meant to end the story of Michael Myers, which is why they went all-out to come up with a climax that even the seemingly indestructible Michael would be hard-pressed to come back from. Of course, we all know that even that didn't stick, but in the meantime they did go with John Carpenter's original idea for the Halloween series, which was to try having a new story for the next movie...
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