Halloween II

The burn-in that opens “Halloween II” informs us that we’re in Haddonfield, Illinois, and that’s it’s October 31st, 1978.

The first shot is of Tommy’s house, and after a moment it’s apparent that the opening few minutes of this movie are a rewind on the last few minutes of “Halloween I.” You kind of have to love the era before VCRs became commonplace, when every horror sequel used to pull huge chunks out of the previous movie to remind everyone what happened last time.

I’m sure it’s not a cost-saving measure. At all. There’s no way a producer would go to the writer of the movie and say, “Look, can you work in ten minutes of the last movie? And then, can you, like, maybe only come up with like seventy minutes of plot? Because we want to keep costs down. Way down. Perhaps you could work in a lot of flashbacks to the first movie, while you’re at it?”

At any rate, the movie rewind takes us back to the moment when Laurie tells Tommy and Lindsey to run down the street and have the neighbors call the police. They run out screaming, Dr. Loomis sees them, and he heads into the house.

Michael attacks Laurie. She pulls off his mask. He pulls it on. Dr. Loomis comes up the stairs and shoots him a bunch of times. Laurie asks if it was the boogeyman, and Dr. Loomis says it was.

Then Dr. Loomis looks out the window… oh wait, I’m sorry, he walks out the front door and looks at the ground and sees that Michael is gone.

So… I guess we’re into the new stuff now.

(A couple of quick notes: The score from the first movie has been replaced for the redux of the old scenes, and the awesome creepy tinkly piano sound has been replaced with blatting keyboard noises. This is not pleasing. On a similar note, the reused footage has been recut a bit here and there, and newly shot footage has been added. So, for example, in part uno, we watch Michael fall out the window from inside the house, but in part dos, we see him fall from outside the house.)

(And seriously, Loomis really did look out the window in the original movie. How did they forget that? Did they just assume there would never be magical video-watching boxes that would allow people to verify that kind of information?)

Whatever. Loomis walks out the door (feh!) and onto the front lawn, where he takes a closer look at where Michael fell to the ground. He sticks his hand into the patch of matted-down grass, and it comes away very bloody.

A neighbor walks out, and Loomis tells the neighbor to call the police. The neighbor says he’s been trick-or-treated to death tonight, and Loomis informs him, “You don’t know what death is.”

Is it too much to hope that the movie turns into a series of philosophical musings on the true meaning of death, both physically and spiritually?

Probably.

No matter. Here come the credits! Same deal as last time, really. Credits roll along next to a jack o’ lantern. Once again, the thing still seems to be wobbling from side-to-side. As the credits wrap up, the pumpkin slowly fades from view, and then the camera pushes in on it, revealing a skull trapped… behind it? Inside it? It’s an interesting little camera trick, but I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking at.

Eventually, the shot pushes in on the eye socket of the skull inside the pumpkin, and then the blackness there fades up… and we’re in a Michael point-of-view shot. The soundtrack helpfully informs us of this, because we can hear the mask-breathing sound that makes us think that perhaps Michael went bad as a kid because kids teased him about his terrible asthma.

Michael-cam sees some kids out trick-or-treating really, really, really late, and also a barking dog, and then he sees Loomis, who runs out to the sheriff’s car and proclaims, “I shot him six times!” Then he repeats his proclamation twice more, perhaps assuming that the sheriff didn’t hear him.

Finally, Loomis states, “He’s not human!” and they both get in the patrol car and drive away.

Michael wanders over to another house. The lights are still on, and an elderly woman is asking her husband if he wants mustard on his sandwich. When he doesn’t answer, she wanders into the living room, and finds her husband asleep in his chair. “Night of the Living Dead” is playing on the television.

A special news bulletin breaks in, letting the woman know that a killer is on the loose! Yep, three people were found dead in the bedrooms of “this house,” says the reporter, who opts not to give too many more details.

As the news runs, the woman watches, while Michael-cam creeps into the house behind her and grabs a knife from the cutting board.

Michael leaves, the news bulletin ends, and the woman turns around and mind her knife missing and some very ketchup-looking blood smeared on her cutting board. The woman starts screaming.

Michael walks across the lawn, keeping to the shadows, though it’s hard to tell if he’s doing it on purpose, as he isn’t exactly being sneaky about it.

A teenaged girl runs out of her house and calls out to her elderly neighbors, who are named Mister and Mrs. Elrod. When no one answers, she goes back into her house and calls someone, though it isn’t clear who. She does say that Mrs. Elrod is always picking on her husband, and that he probably started beating her. I swear I did not make that up.

Suddenly, we can hear the other side of the conversation, which allows us to learn that this here teenage girl opted to call her friend, instead of the cops, even though she suspects domestic violence one house over.

Her friend informs her that three people were killed, and the girl turns on the radio where, according to the laws of movies, the important information she needs to hear must be on the radio at the exact second she turns it on.

The girl starts to freak out a little bit, because she’s home alone and the murders only happened three blocks away. She would probably be even more nervous if she were to turn around and see Michael walking in her front door. This girl has the worst peripheral vision ever.

Come to think of it, Michael just walked into two fairly quiet houses without making enough noise to alert people to his presence. Haddonfield must be the home of WD-40.

The girl, who is named Alice, hears a noise, turns around, and Michael stabs her. Good thing they finally told us her name…

Back at Tommy’s house, Laurie, who appears to be wearing a bad wig, is put on a stretcher and taken out to an ambulance. Which is nice, I guess, but probably not necessary, since really her only wound was a not-very-deep cut on the arm.

At the hospital, a mom and her kid get out of their car. The kid seems to have a bloody nose. Or bloody teeth. There’s blood in his facial area, at any rate.

The ambulance pulls up, and the two nice ambulance-workers bring Laurie into the hospital and inquire about the doctor. The doctor, the nurse informs them, has been at the club and she thinks he’s drunk.

Assuming that medical policies were this lax everywhere during the 1970s, I’ve gotta say I’m happy to have made it out of them alive.

The doctor notes the cut on Laurie’s arm, and he states that there’s also one on her chest. He takes a blood sample to get her blood type, and says they’re going to have to knock her out to sew her up.

Laurie begs everyone not to put her to sleep. But they do it anyway.

She seemed really worried about it. Perhaps she thought they meant “put to sleep” in the sense that people say, “Well, we’re going to take your dog to a nice farm where he can run around, so he won’t have to bite anyone…”

Elsewhere, Loomis and the sheriff drive around, and the sheriff seems remarkably calm, considering the fact that his daughter is dead. But he’s not happy with Loomis who keeps saying things like, “Drive faster. Shine a light over there.”

Then things take a sudden turn. Loomis spots someone walking towards a bunch of trick-or-treaters. He’s/she’s wearing a mask that looks somewhat similar to the one Michael wears. Loomis runs from the car and pulls out his gun, preparing to shoot the guy.

The sheriff grabs Loomis, rightfully assuming that it would be a bad thing if Loomis shot some random dude, freaky costume or not.

Loomis is about it open fire when a car comes out of nowhere, smashes into the Michael lookalike and crashes into a van, pinning the lookalike between the two vehicles. Which then burst into flames.

The sheriff cries out to Loomis, “Is it him?” only it’s hard to tell, what with the wall of fire surrounding him and all.

At that moment, another car pulls up, and a cop gets out and informs the sheriff that they just found three dead people in the house across the street from Tommy’s house, and that one of them was Annie.

Ah, that explains it. The sheriff didn’t know his daughter was dead because despite the fact that he’s supposed to be in charge, and despite the fact that the deaths are all over the news, the sheriff had no idea what was going on.

The other cop, the sheriff, and Loomis all pile into the other cop’s police cruiser and drive away, leaving a flaming body and two flaming cars behind. I guess they figure they’ll take care of the paperwork later.

Back at the hospital, the little kid with the bloody face and his mom walk out. He’s been taken care of, but he can’t talk right for some reason. Whew. Glad they decided to resolve that plotline.

Inside the hospital, one of the ambulance dudes, Jimmy, goes to visit Laurie in her room. She’s already awake, post whatever-the-doctor-did. A nurse comes in and states that Laurie has a cracked bone in her… I don’t know really. The nurse just sort of vaguely points, so it could be her foot or her leg.

The nurse tries to get Jimmy to leave, but Jimmy is a sassy monkey, and offers to get Laurie a Coke. Unfortunately, he has to go on another ambulance run. Laurie will be forced to just lie there and feel a parched, I guess.

At Lindsey’s house, the sheriff identifies Annie’s dead body, and then heads home to tell his wife. The other cop and Loomis bicker back and forth about whether or not the dude who just went up in flames is Michael.

Loomis gives another, “He was my patient for fifteen years” speech, tossing in the information that he shot Michael six times. Naturally, since this is a crime scene, there are about a half-dozen reporters standing there with cameras and microphones at the ready, so the news is out in the world mere seconds later.

Loomis tells the other cop (man, I’d kill for a name…) to get the Michael lookalike’s body to the coroner’s office and meet him there in half an hour with a dentist.

Out in the middle of nowhere, a kid wanders around with a boombox on his shoulder, blaring the news. I wonder if he does that all the time. Just wanders around, box all rocking the NPR.

The camera zips past him, and two young ladies, maybe teens, maybe older, it’s tough to tell, gab back and forth about being at a terrible party, and how one of them is late, and the other one needs a ride, and blah-blah-blah whatever.

They drive away, and here comes NPR-boy, only he’s not paying attention to where he’s walking, and he just misses walking right into Michael, who isn’t dead. Because, duh. Seriously. We’re only 26 minutes in. This would be a really dull movie if the bad guy was already worm food.

Michael ambles along for a minute, until the movie finally shows us a street sign to alert us to the fact that Michael is headed to the hospital.

At the hospital, the chick who was running late arrives there, and gets out of her car. And there’s Michael.

A minute later, we’re in the security office, where the security guy is reading a magazine, instead of noticing Michael walking across the lawn. There’s a knock at the door, and the security guard lets the late girl in.

Over in the break room, Jimmy, his ambulance cohort, and another nurse sit around, trying to kill some time so the movie makes it to the 90-minute mark. The late girl, who is finally assigned the name Karen, comes in for a minute and flirts with Jimmy’s cohort, then heads off to get changed.

Michael-cam wanders the hospital for a bit, constantly avoiding being seen by a bunch of people who should really get their peripheral vision checked. It turns out that Karen works in the kid ward.

Jimmy heads down to see Laurie, and Laurie finally learns that Michael was the one who attacked her. “Why me?” she says. Um, Laurie, seriously now. Michael killed a man for his pants. He also iced three of your friends and a dog. “Why me?” is not a relevant question. Try, “How was I lucky enough to survive?”

A black nurse, Alves, shows up and kicks Jimmy out. She tells Laurie that they’ve attempted to call Laurie’s parents, with no luck. Alves tries to call from Laurie’s room, but the phones are out.

She sends another nurse to tell the security guard to check it out. Man of many talents, I guess. Security guard, phone repairman. I wonder if he knits.

The security guard heads out, but can’t see anything wrong with the telephone pole. So he starts walking… somewhere else, and sees a dumpster. He opens it up, and spots some blood. He’s about to touch the blood, only a cat comes shooting out of the dumpster and bumps into him, knocking him over.

The guard goes to a storeroom, and finds the lock open and hanging loosely from the door. He starts looking around, then radios a nurse and tells her to get someone to drive to the sheriff’s station.

Only she keeps playing with the radio, because she can’t figure it out, and she doesn’t hear him.

The security guard starts opening up different cabinets, because he’s trying to get himself killed, and sure enough, he moves a door, and there’s Michael, who introduces the guy’s skull to the claw end of a claw hammer.

Over at the coroner’s office, some unidentified dude stands over the charred Michael lookalike and says that there are no fillings, so the body is probably 17 or 18. Loomis notes that Michael is 21. “Some Dude” says that they have to check x-rays and dental records in cases like this.

Loomis says they have to assume that Michael is still alive. He’s well aware there are still 50 minutes worth of movie to go.

The random cop tells his cop buddy to get everyone back out and sweep the neighborhood. Then random cop and Loomis head out to the Myers house, which is under siege by rock-throwing teenagers.

The cop, who it turns out is named Hunt, tells everyone to back off, and the crowd walks about ten steps down the street. Loomis does another, “Michael sure is evil,” speech, and two random boys come over and tell Hunt that a guy named Ben Tramer left “the party” a while ago, and wandered off in a “stupid mask,” and that he was “real drunk.” Ben Tramer was, it should be noted, the unseen hunk of Laurie’s dreams, five hours and one movie ago.

You know, before Jimmy swept her off her feet with the offer of a Coke.

Loomis and Hunt determine that Ben was probably the poor guy who met a flaming death, and vow to check his dental records.

At the hospital, one of the rooms buzzes a nurse named Janet for service, and she heads in. Suddenly, she’s viciously attacked by Budd, Jimmy’s ambulance buddy. No, wait, he’s just fooling around. Or hoping to fool around. And weirdly, despite the fact that she almost wet herself about a minute ago, Janet agrees to meet him for a little something-something.

She heads off to make sure all the kids are okay, first. She’s not, you know, irresponsible, or anything.

Lying in her room, Laurie, who was terrified of being put the sleep, has fallen asleep. She dreams about being a little girl. Talking to her mother, who says, “I’m not your mother.” About walking into a room, and there, in front of a big window, is a little boy.

She dreams about what I guess is dripping blood. Or possibly paint.

Laurie wakes up, looks around, and then goes back to sleep.

And now we’re back with Janet and Budd. They’re in the hot tub in the therapy room. Janet carefully undresses behind a note-quite-see-through window, puts on a towel, then walks over to Budd, and takes off the towel. Not sure what the point of the towel was.

Some fooling around happens, and Janet comments that the water is really hot.

In the other room, a hand twists the knob that sets the water temperature, setting it even higher. Of course, it’s Michael’s hand, as near as we can tell. But perhaps there will be a shocking twist of some sort.

Either way, Budd is sent to turn down the heat. He exits the tub and goes into the next room, while Janet wraps herself in a towel again and makes sure to face away from the glass door behind her.

Budd goes through the door, the door closes, and Budd is immediately attacked by Michael. But, of course, Janet is NOT LOOKING. Again with the peripheral vision issue.

I’ve gotta say, though, no one ever talks about how humiliating some of these deaths are. Can you imagine how this is going to go down? Here’s a guy, have unclothed time with his lady-friend while on duty. And he gets choked to death.

So they’re going to find him dead on the floor, with nothing on. What do you say to that? “Well, he always said he wanted to go out that way. Strangled to death, not a stitch of clothing on, while on the clock.”

One other thought, before I move on. People make a big deal about the whole “pureness” factor in these movies. Laurie lives through the first movie because no man has touched her special place, right?

But go with me on this – I don’t think Michael is necessarily against the act of sweet, sweet, loving. I think he’s against really awful, lower-your-standards action. Consider: He ices his sister after her encounter lasts less than a minute. He doles out death to The Other Best Friend and The Other Best Friend’s Boyfriend after their not-impressive act lasts something like twenty seconds.

And then we have these two bozos, fooling around in a tub made for therapy, while on duty, while the woman complains that the tub is too hot.

This series is not about killing those who are impure in deed. Quite the contrary. This is a movie telling women that they need to raise their standards when it comes to carnal acts.

At any rate, once Budd is dead, Michael quietly walks up behind Janet, who naturally thinks Michael is Budd. So she says she needs to get back to work, but that maybe they can have breakfast, and then she does some flirty stuff with his hand, and then she realizes that the hand has a sleeve on it, and freaks right out.

Michael jams her head under the water, which has moved from hot to scalding, according to the helpful meter on the wall the movie keeps showing us. This causes her to both die and have skin peel off her face. Though, interestingly, it does not affect Michael in any way, despite the fact that he keeps jamming his hand in the water.

Of course, he was shot six times, so it’s clear Michael is not exactly easy to damage.

And now we’re back to “Loomis and Hunt: They Fight Crime. But Not Very Efficiently.” Some other cop without a name takes them to a local elementary school. Michael broke into it earlier that evening. He left some blood splotches lying around, and stuck a knife through a children’s drawing of a family.

And also, he wrote the Celtic word Samhain in blood on the chalkboard. Samhain means The End of Summer – October 31st.

Which I guess is an interesting if you wanted to watch a movie so that you could totally learn some Celtic. But since we’ve already established that Halloween is important in this movie, learning another word for October 31st isn’t really what I’d call a plot twist.

It seems the movie knows this as well, as it sends a woman into the classroom to talk to Loomis. I think it’s the nurse from the first movie, but since no one bothers to explain themselves, the movie instead opts to send its audience into whisper-fits of, “Who is that? Do you know?”

The Random Woman asks to talk to Dr. Loomis alone, and tells him that the Governor has demanded that Loomis leave the search and head back to the mental hospital. Apparently, the fact that one of his patients got away, killed three people, was shot six times, and then got away again is bad publicity for the hospital.

Loomis tells Random Woman to tell the Governor that she couldn’t find him. She tells him there’s a marshal waiting outside for him.

At the hospital, Jimmy goes to visit Laurie, and tells her that he’ll take care of her. Which would be really sweet, if they had known each other at all before he stuck her in the ambulance.

After a moment, he realizes that Laurie is staring at the ceiling, and not acknowledging the heart on his sleeve. So he calls a nurse, who in turn runs to get the doctor. She finds his office dark and his shower running.

She walks into an inner office, and sees the doctor sitting in his chair, facing away from her. After imploring him to come with her, she turns his chair around and discovers that the doctor has a hypodermic needle in his eye. So he’s quite dead.

She gasps and steps back in horror, and Michael, who is standing there in the dark, grabs her, pulls out a hypodermic needle, and injects air into her head.

She drops to the floor, dead.

Meanwhile, Jimmy and yet another nurse continue to stand over Laurie’s non-responsive body. Jimmy decides to go and find Alves. He races off and heads to the Ladies Lounge. But no one is there, so he runs off again.

Totally Random Nurse continues to stand by Laurie, until the front desk phone buzzes. She heads out to see what’s going on with the totally random, non-comatose patient.

And here comes Michael. He walks down the hall to Laurie’s room, lets himself in, and then proceeds to stab Laurie over and over again with a scalpel. Only it turns out Laurie isn’t there – she stuck some pillows under her sheets and ran off.

The movie catches up to her in a hallway, and I guess it figures we don’t care why she was in a coma, but now she’s not. Or we’re just supposed to assume that she faked it. I have no idea.

Either way, Laurie goes wandering down the hall.

The nurse eventually returns to Laurie’s room, finds her missing, and then proceeds to not look very hard for her.

Laurie slips into a room and tries the phone, but the phones still don’t work. So she closes the door to the room and curls into a little ball on the floor.

Back with Loomis, Hunt, and Random Woman, Loomis is escorted into a car by the marshal. Hunt assures Loomis that they’ll find Michael.

At the hospital, the nurse who totally failed to look after Laurie goes to find the security guard, only of course the guard is missing.

Jimmy find the random nurse, and tells her to check the east wing again, and then to drive to the sheriff’s office if she doesn’t find anyone. Meanwhile, Jimmy goes on a hunt for pretty much anyone.

You know, if it were me? I’d whack the old intercom and be all, “Yo, is ANYONE HERE!?”

Jimmy locates Alves, who has been tied to a table, then punctured with a needle so that she can bleed out. He goes to leave the room, slips Alves blood, and falls to the floor, knocking himself out.

Outside, the completely random nurse goes outside, gets in her car, and tries to drive away. But her car won’t start.

She gets out of the car, and discovers that her tires have been slashed. And so have the tires of every other car in the place.

So she runs back into the hospital. Which may be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen happen in a horror movie.

On the bright side, as she comes up the hallway, she spots Laurie, who has just decided to come out of hiding. But, sadly, that’s pretty much it for the good news, as Michael walks up behind random nurse moments later, stabs her with a scalpel, lifts her up into the air on the scalpel, waits for the nurse’s shoes to fall off, then drops her to the floor like so much undercooked beef jerky.

Laurie, the only person in the movie with peripheral vision, witnesses the entire act.

Laurie runs, and Michael does the whole slow, “I’m just barely walking after you” thing.

Laurie goes down some stairs, runs down a hallway, and finally finds and unlocked door. She goes through it, and there’s the dead security guard, hanging from a power cord for some reason.

Laurie sees that Michael is coming, so she climbs up a pipe and breaks through a window, exiting to another room while Michael slashes impotently at the air beneath her.

Laurie finds an elevator and punches the call button, getting in just as Michael slooowly walks up behind her. It’s one of those two-way jobs, and so she goes in the front door and out the back door of the elevator, which takes her to the lobby of the hospital.

Which takes her outside.

Free at last, she runs to find help and the movie ends with the sheriff’s department descending on the hospital.

Okay, no. What really happens is she finds an unlocked car in the parking lock and hides in it.

Back in the car with Dr. Loomis and Random Woman Who Might Be That Nurse, Loomis explains what the Celtic word back in the school meant. Apparently, to appease the gods, Druid priests held fire rituals, burning criminals and animals in order to see the future.

The nurse interrupts Loomis and tells him there was a secret file on Michael that was sealed by the courts after his parents were killed. It seems that Michael had a sister who was born two years before Michael killed his sister.

And then, two years after Michael was committed, his parents were killed, his sister was adopted, and the adoptive parents asked that the records be sealed to protect the family.

And that sister’s name was? You with me? Yeah, it’s totally Laurie.

Loomis pulls out his gun and demands that the marshal take him to the hospital where Laurie is.

And speaking of Laurie, she’s still hidden in the car. Which turns out to be Jimmy’s car. He steps into the car and tries to start it, only naturally it won’t start. And Jimmy is looking kind of stoned. Or perhaps like he has a concussion. Either way, he passes out, and his head lands on the horn, honking it loudly.

Laurie pushes him aside and tries to start the car. Then she attempts to get out of the car, trips, and falls to the ground.

But lucky Laurie, here comes Loomis and company. Only they don’t see her (curse you, periphery vision!) and they head into the hospital while Laurie screams for help.

Laurie drags herself across the parking lot, finally getting up and running to the door when she sees Michael stalking across the parking lot. For whatever reason, he’s totally on the other end of the lot from where Laurie was.

Laurie makes it to the door, pounding and screaming to be let in.

Loomis lets her in at the very last second, and locks the door behind her.

But the door is made of glass, so Michael just walks right on through it. Loomis shoots Michael a whole bunch, and Michael falls over.

The marshal appears in the hallway, and is about to walk over to Michael, only Loomis warns him away, noting that, yep, Michael is still alive.

The marshal steps back, and Loomis tells the woman who still hasn’t been identified to go out to the marshal’s car and radio Hunt for help. Marshal tries to argue that he’s the only one authorized to use the radio, which is dumb, because he just watched Loomis shoot a dude to what everyone hopes is death.

You know who you should never argue with? Crazy guys with guns.

But whatever, the marshal clearly isn’t all that bright, as he opts to get down on his hands and knees and take a closer look at Michael. Naturally, Michael grabs the marshal and cuts his throat.

Loomis and Laurie run for it. The nurse, lucky for her, is already out the door and headed for the car/radio.

Oh, hey, we finally got a name for the nurse: Marion Chambers. She uses it when calling the cops.

Inside the building, Loomis and Laurie secure themselves in a surgical room, which sadly doesn’t project them from the superman Michael. Michael breaks through the door as Loomis sets a gun next to Laurie.

Loomis then runs up to Michael, sticks a gun in Michael’s face, and pulls the trigger. The gun goes CLICK instead of BANG, and Michael stabs Loomis in the belly.

Loomis falls over because he’s a big baby who can’t handle a minor stab wound.

Laurie says, “Michael!,” and Michael pauses for a moment. For all of a second. She then tries, “Michael, stop!” which doesn’t have much of an effect either.

So she shoots him twice, in the face. The eye holes in his mask cry tears of blood.

Michael puts his hands over where his eyes used to be and starts slicing at the air. But he’s not exactly taking careful aim. He isn’t even kneeling, which would pretty much be the only way to stab someone lying on the floor.

Loomis stands up, and runs over to a gas tank labeled Ether. He cranks it on, and Michael lurches towards him, slicing at the air.

Laurie stands up and turns the crank on another tank with no label on it that I can see.

Loomis ups the ante by pulling some tubes out of the wall labeled Ether and Oxygen.

Laurie starts turning the dials on more tanks.

Loomis grunts, “Laurie, get out now!” and Laurie runs.

Loomis says, “It’s time, Michael,” and flicks a lighter. The room behind Laurie explodes.

And here comes Michael. He’s walking. And he is on fire. For a minute. Then he’s collapsed on the floor on fire, and then I guess he’s dead. For whatever degree of dead allows multiple sequels using the same character.

Then it’s the next morning. Some cop goes up to Hunt and tells him the body count is ten, so far.

Close by, the TV news is following Laurie as she’s taken to an ambulance in a wheelchair. They put her in the back, and she stares into space as the ambulance takes her somewhere or other.

The story comes to a close with The Chordettes singing Mr. Sandman. While we watch an extended shot of Michael’s face/mask melting on the floor of the hospital. What the two things have to do with each other, I have no idea. I guess it was either that or Funkytown.