I like Psycho II - it is perhaps unfair to try and expect it to reach the heights of the original but it gets closer than most sequels and is certainly far better than any sequel made 23 years later could expect to be. The director
Richard Franklin died last year.
I do agree about Halloween. It is a beautifully shot and composed film (another good double bill idea - P.J. Soles movies with this and her unlikeable character in Carrie both coming to sticky ends!)
I like the temporal and spatial consistency - i.e. that it mostly takes place in one night, the time divided up according to the movies showing on TV, and that feeling that you can be speaking to someone across the street on the phone and as soon as you hang up it is like they are in another world and anything could be happening over there, whether it is casual sex or casual death! So close and yet so far.
And also that the 'responsible' Doctor has the disturbing speeches explaining Myers while the killer himself is silent and purposeful - as if in psychoanalysing him Loomis has extracted the killer's reasoning and abusive past leaving himself tormented by the killer's past while leaving Myers empty of feelings of pleasure in his murders or reasoning behind why he is doing them, just with the compulsion to commit them remaining.
I didn't really like the move in the later films to Laurie being Michael's sister therefore giving Michael 'motivation' to have targeted her in the first film. It is much more frightening to just be targeted and attacked for no particular personal reason. I'd like to think that instead of Myers wanting to get his sister in particular he is more involved in targeting the town of Haddonfield itself and what could be perceived as the hypocrisy of small town wholesomeness compared to all these young women abandoning the kids they are meant to be babysitting without a second thought to go off and bonk each other (the thing that set Michael off as child - due to annoyance at being ignored or that his sister was having fun with another boy?)
And the way Myers pushes his luck by going after Laurie (and is about to sully the above M.O. because she is actually looking after the kids in her care), when he could have killed all the 'bad' kids and disappeared into the night even earlier! I would suggest that if he had succeeded in killing Laurie then he would have
had to have been captured and killed. By Loomis forcing Myers into keeping his 'philosophy' of who he kills clean, it allows him to disappear without punishment - and to become the urban legend used to keep babysitters on the straight and narrow!