Entertainment

HORROR-SHOW SHTICK OR TREAT

IN dreams, Michael Myers’ dead mother comes to him to com mand, “Now go have some fun.” So who can blame him when he lets his id out for a little pony ride again?

“Halloween II,” writer-director Rob Zombie’s completely unsettling but incompletely satisfying continuation of his 2007 reboot, offers up a rush of fiercely imagined nightmare images. Be warned: It’s one of the most gruesome films of the year.

We begin right where the earlier movie left off. I hope I’m not giving away too much when I inform you that Michael isn’t really dead. Baby sister Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) is recovering slowly from the rampage with the help of the friendly sheriff (Brad Dourif) and her friend Annie (Danielle Harris), but the body of Myers (Tyler Mane) hasn’t been found.

The shrink (Malcolm McDowell) — whose treatment of him wasn’t entirely successful — has written a book to profit from Myers, and, most alarming of all, Laurie comes to realize her subconscious is somehow tied up with that of the killer.

The details aren’t explained and her character never really does come into focus, nor is she interesting enough to balance either Michael or his psychiatrist. (McDowell has several funny scenes as Dr. Loomis becomes increasingly insufferable).

Zombie works in ghostly images reminiscent of “The Shining” in which Myers, as a boy, prowls the night beside his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie). They work well as a relief from the blood-streaked brutality with which Zombie films the murders. Some of these aren’t filmed with much panache — there’s an awful lot of footage of Myers straddling some lifeless body and digging in, with sound effects that suggest a watermelon being smashed open with a baseball bat — but there are inventive episodes, too.

A stabbing that is intercut with garishly costumed figures at a Halloween party soaked in sickening red light is particularly effective. Myers, though, is more killing machine than character. He shreds both sleazeballs and total innocents to the same molecular level. There’s too much boogey, not enough man.

Zombie makes some of the few horror flicks worth seeing more than once, with their wicked dialogue and madly harrowing tableaus. At times “Halloween II” dances on the line between alarming and disgusting, and it doesn’t all hold together — I couldn’t figure out what the goblin banquet was doing in this movie. But if it was meant to freak me out, it worked.

kyle.smith@nypost.com

HALLOWEEN II Par for the corpse. Running time: 101 minutes. Rated R (extreme graphic violence, profanity, nudity, sexual content). At the 84th Street, the 34th Street, the E-Walk, others.