Mega.Co.Nz

• This sequel was originally intended to be the final film to feature the Michael Myers, Dr Sam Loomis, Laurie Strode and Haddonfield storyline.

• Believing Rick Rosenthal‘s version of the film to be too tame, John Carpenter shot a few gory scenes that were added into the film despite Rosenthal’s objections. This annoyed Rosenthal because he had wanted the sequel to emulate the way the original avoided explicit violence and gore in favor of well-crafted suspense and terror. In fact, Carpenter had intended for “Halloween II” to do just that, but the success of the new wave of slasher films in 1979 and 1980 made him afraid that a film which was scary and R-rated but lacked bloodshed and nudity would do poorly at the box office, leading to the extra graphic material inclusions.

• John Carpenter and Debra Hill had no interest in making a sequel as they believed the original Halloween (1978) was a standalone movie. When the studio offered him to write the script and pay them more money (Carpenter states that to this day he saw very little earnings from the success of the original movie) he took the job so he could earn back what he believes was his owed pay. However, the script was not forming out as well as he thought, and he has personally stated that the only thing helping him through the screenplay process was a six pack of Budweiser every day which led to what he believes an inferior script and bad choices in the movie’s story.

• John Carpenter produced, supervised and co-scripted and even directed uncredited a few additional scenes for this film. Carpenter’s music from the first film was also used, and he was involved in the film’s post-production as well.

• The film is set immediately after the first Halloween (1978). Since Jamie Lee Curtis had begun to wear a much shorter hairstyle in the 1980s, she had to wear a wig that matched her original hairstyle for the film.

• Jamie Lee Curtis has played Laurie Strode in films released in five different decades from the 1970s to the 2010s: Halloween (1978), Halloween II (1981), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), Halloween: Resurrection (2002) and Halloween (2018).

• This is the first film in the series where Laurie speaks to Michael.

• The sequel, though not as successful at the box-office as the original Halloween (1978), still grossed more money than other 1981 horror movies such as The Howling (1981), Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), and The Final Conflict (1981).

• An interview with John Carpenter revealed that the whole Michael and Laurie being brother and sister came about from the whole Star Wars “Luke I am your father” thing. Just a plot device to get the script going.

• Interestingly, several of the scenes and lines in this film were taken by John Carpenterfrom the novelization of the first Halloween (1978), which was written by Curtis Richards and published in 1979. The most obvious references are the neighbor appearing from a house near the Doyle residence and speaking to Loomis (their exchange is almost identical, and includes the “You don’t know what death is!” line from Loomis), and Loomis going outside after shooting Michael to view his body (although Laurie accompanies him). Loomis also says that his gun “heightens my sense of security”, a line said to Deputy Hunt in this movie.

• This is one of the only slasher films in 1981 to remain uncut, like others that have been heavily cut by the MPAA, such as Friday the 13th part 2 (1981) and My Bloody Valentine (1981)

• (at around 22 mins) Dana Carvey made his movie debut in this movie playing an assistant. He can be seen receiving instructions from a blonde reporter in front of the Wallace house. Carvey can be seen again at the end of the movie (at around 1h 27 mins) when the film crew follows Laurie to the waiting ambulance.

• (at around 24 mins) Although uncredited, actress Anne-Marie Martin played Karen’s friend Darcy Essmont who needed a ride home after the Halloween party they attended. She was billed under her real name, Eddie Benton, as a rival opposite Jamie Lee Curtis in the Canadian horror film Prom Night (1980) the year before.

• According to the documentary on the blu ray releases of Halloween II(1981) Leo Rossi and Pamela Susan-Shoop were not too keen on doing the hottub scene, with a distressed Shoop refusing to do the scene. Even though he was reluctant at first, with Rick Rosenthal talking to Rossi, Rossi comforted Shoop into doing the scene, due to the fact Rossi felt bad because Rosenthal really went to bat and tried hard to get Leo Rossi the role as Bud.

Assault of the Killer B’s: Interviews with 20 Cult Film Actresses

Emmy Award-Winning Priest Weds Actress Who Was His Parishioner

An Emmy Award-winning priest who was a technical adviser on “The Thorn Birds,” a television miniseries based on a novel about a Roman Catholic priest who fell in love with one of his parishioners, was married Sunday to an actress who belonged to his parish.

Terrance A. Sweeney, 42, and Pamela Susan Shoop, 38, a television and film actress, were married at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Pacific Palisades by three Episcopal priests.

Sweeney said he had asked 33 Catholic priests to perform the ceremony, and all had turned him down because the marriage is against church law.

“I know in my heart that there is no contradiction between being a priest and being married,” Sweeney said outside the church before the ceremony. “Priests are men. They are human beings. They fall in love. The only thing that is unnatural about this is the laws of the church that say we can’t.”

He stood with his arm around his bride for photographs before the ceremony.

‘He’ll Always Be a Priest’
“He loves the priesthood as much or more than he loves me,” said Shoop, who was being married for the first time. “He’s a priest and he’ll always be a priest.”

The wedding means Sweeney is automatically suspended as a priest.

Asked how he would deal with the fact that he was, for practical purposes, no longer a priest, Sweeney tried to answer and then briefly broke into tears.

“With . . . great pain,” he said.

Sweeney had been a Jesuit for 24 years, until he quit the Society of Jesus in August, 1986, rather than obey a Vatican order to cease his work on a survey he was conducting of U.S. Catholic bishops’ feelings about celibacy and women’s ordination.

The survey, based on 145 responses from 312 bishops, found that nearly one-fourth of those responding would allow Catholic priests to marry.

Father Joseph Battaglia, director of communications for the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese, called the marriage “a moment of sadness because he is a priest, but we hope it is also a moment of mature decision as well for Terry.”

Battaglia said there are probably 20 or 30 priests in the Los Angeles area who are in the same status because they married. There are also others who have sought what the church calls “laicization,” a kind of annulment of priestly vows that returns a priest to lay status and allows him to marry in the church, he said.

Sweeney met Shoop in 1985 when she was a prospective parishioner at the Good Shepherd Roman Catholic Church in Beverly Hills, where Sweeney said Mass. At the time, his brother and her father were both dying of cancer, they said. And discussions about those deaths drew them closer.

The former Jesuit walked into the Episcopal church on Sunday still wearing his Roman collar. But when he appeared a few minutes later to talk to reporters, he had changed into a tuxedo. He said he does not expect to put the collar back on and has not said Mass since he resigned from the Jesuits last year.

‘Future of the Church’
“I didn’t decide until half an hour ago what to wear,” he said. “In my heart I think this (the marriage of priests) is the future of the church. But I know people who would be scandalized by seeing me now in a collar here. I am not trying to defy Rome. I’m just trying to express a truth.”

Shoop said that since announcing her engagement a few months ago, she has heard that there may be hundreds of women in the United States who are unable to marry the men they love because they are priests.

“I won’t be walking down the aisle just for myself, but for all the women who have ever fallen in love with a priest,” she said.

The Mission : Former Jesuit Priest Has a Dream: He Wants the Catholic Church to Embrace Married Clerics–Both Male and Female

A framed photo of the happy couple on their wedding day stands on a living room table, the bride in a traditional white gown, the groom in a tux. They live in a cozy house with a white picket fence, flowers and a big dog.

The wife serves coffee and cheerfully disappears. The husband starts to recall the events that led him to leave the Jesuits in 1986, marry and become suspended from the priesthood in 1987 and write a book questioning the Roman Catholic Church and its laws regarding the priesthood.

He still calls himself Father Terry Sweeney, a believing Catholic and a priest actively engaged in ministry. On occasion, he wears clerical garb.

About his relationship with the church, Sweeney says, “As far as I’m concerned, officially the doors are closed to me. But my heart is not closed to it.”

In fact, as he tells it, his ministry is to the church: He wants to help change it in order to save it. Unlike many who have left the priesthood, often to marry, and turned their backs on the past, Sweeney will not let go of it. This has not been a clean break. His relationship to the church and the priesthood are, in fact, what his life is about.

“I have a sense of love and responsibility to the church,” he says, “as a priest, as a married priest, as a Christian. I have an ongoing responsibility to inform the church.”

Sweeney makes an important distinction here: There is the institutional church, administered out of the Vatican–which he calls a sacerdotal, or priestly, monarchy–and there is the church as the people of God. He counts himself among the latter and does not recognize the authority of the former as it is structured. His mission is to change that structure.

As a Jesuit, much of Sweeney’s job involved television writing and production; he has continued with this and describes several television and film projects in various stages of completion. Plus, he has a book in the works on date rape. For some, this would be a full career, but it plays a secondary role in his life. Sweeney simply calls it his work–as opposed to his mission.

Out of that mission, he says, came “A Church Divided: The Vatican vs. American Catholics,” published this month by Prometheus Books, as did another book he and his wife, actress Pamela Shoop, have just completed. In the former, Sweeney explores church authority and the priesthood, especially regarding celibacy and the ordination of women. In the latter, “What God Hath Joined,” he and Shoop write alternating chapters telling their story.

Besides leading him to writing, Sweeney’s mission involves him, with his wife, in two groups: Good Tidings, a national organization “for priests and women in love” that counsels such couples and helps them reach decisions, and CORPUS, an acronym for Corps of Reserve Priests United for Service, an organization of 11,000 members, many of them married priests. CORPUS’s goal, he says, is to return to a ministry that has both celibate and married male and female priests.

“I would like to be a diocesan priest (as opposed to being a member of a religious order like the Jesuits) if the authoritarian structure of the church changes,” he says. “I would love to minister, but I would in no way act as if the executive authority of the church depends on one bishop, or Pope, making the decisions. Authority flows from the community.”

Father Terrance Sweeney, S.J., caused a national uproar in 1986 when he refused a Jesuit order to destroy all data and “cease and desist” work on his survey of American bishops regarding their attitudes toward celibacy and women’s ordination.

The survey, he says, was intended to complement seven years of personal research on authority, obedience, celibacy and women priests. And that research had been prompted by Sweeney’s hesitation to take his final solemn vows as a Jesuit in 1978.

A native Angeleno, Terry Sweeney graduated from Loyola High School and entered the Jesuit order in 1962, on the eve of Vatican Council II, the gathering that sparked so much change and ferment within the church. As part of the 15-year course of Jesuit formation, he took vows of poverty, celibacy and obedience in 1964, taught high school, was ordained in 1973 and earned a doctorate in theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. As a last step, he was to take the final vows.

He never did.

He hesitated, increasingly troubled, he says, by the vow of obedience. He wanted to explore more fully what it entailed. In the process, he says, he became disquieted not only by the “dark side of the church” on authority, birth control, the Vietnam War and women priests, but also by his own silent acquiescence. He had kept his mouth shut and remained seated on the fence.

Not any more. He developed the four-question survey and mailed it out in 1985, the same year that he met Pamela Shoop. (They met, he says, when she was taking instructions, considering conversion to Catholicism. She did not convert.) Although he acknowledges the profound influence that meeting her, and that his brother’s death the same year, had on him, he attributes the survey to his more intellectual and abstract moral dilemma.

In the book and in conversation, he does not give much place to mundane reactions and motivations:

“Suffice to say here,” he writes, “that all the previous years of inquiry, coupled with an awareness of my own past failures and my love for the priesthood and the church, at last led me to the conviction that obedience meant following the truth, regardless of the cost.”

The cost keeps mounting incrementally, as reams of letters and documentation that Sweeney has compiled attest.

Sweeney had mailed his questionnaire to 312 bishops. Despite the survey’s unorthodox nature, quick notoriety and eventual suppression, 145, or 46%, responded. The overwhelming majority, 74%, approved current celibacy policies; less than 10% supported the ordination of women. That there was any disagreement with Vatican policy, however, stirred controversy in the national media.

Still, the institutional church publicly ignored the survey or dismissed it as unscientific.

Father Andrew Greeley, a nationally recognized sociologist and director of the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, calls such an assessment “absolutely correct.”

Greeley, himself a Catholic priest, has not read Sweeney’s recent book but is familiar with the survey: “There is this computer word, gigo . It means garbage in; garbage out– I hate to say it of someone else’s research, but . . . . There’s an inclination of priests and former priests who want to criticize something to turn to sociology to do it.”

After he left the Jesuits, Sweeney could have found work as a diocesan priest, but it would have involved renouncing his survey. His marriage in an Episcopal Church to Shoop ended that possibility. He was suspended as a priest.

Then, early in 1988, he received a letter from Los Angeles Archbishop (now Cardinal) Roger Mahony asking him not to present himself for communion anywhere in the diocese as long as he retained his present marital status. The letter, reprinted in “A Church Divided,” informed Sweeney that should he do so, Mahony had ordered all ministers of communion to refuse him the sacrament and extend him a blessing instead.

Nevertheless, Sweeney says he receives communion here regularly. Father Gregory Coiro, a spokesman for the archdiocese, speculated that some priests, unfamiliar with Sweeney, could have unwittingly given him communion.

Sweeney realizes that part of the rationale for the ban has to do with scandal. He has been very public about his marriage, and for a priest to give him communion might be perceived as the church condoning his action.

“But for me,” he says, “the real scandal is not that a priest falls in love and marries, but that there is a set of laws within the church that forbid it. For 1,700 years, thousands and thousands of people have been hurt by that. That’s the scandal.”

Terry Sweeney is 47 and married to a woman he loves. He has a comfortable home in Sherman Oaks and a successful career in television and screenwriting. He could easily work as a priest or minister in several Christian denominations.

So why bother? Why is it he cannot or will not let go of his relationship to an institution whose authority he says he does not recognize?

“Because so many have bothered with the church,” he says. “A lot of times I feel overwhelmed and crushed. But the church is primarily the people of God. The institutional church is simply an outcropping of the real church.”

He says he has felt abandoned by the institutional church, disillusioned with it and in despair at times. Overcoming such feelings has been a struggle, he says, but he has come through.

And there is this sense of mission: “My research has led me to the conclusion, looking at historical and biblical evidence, that it is un-Christian and unethical to mandate celibacy or continence of priests.”

About the mandate, and the church’s actions over the centuries, he declares that “on three different levels, it contravenes divine law”: It violates the Ninth Commandment not to covet one’s neighbor’s wife, violates the explicit will of Christ regarding marriage and violates the marriage bond.” (Hearing some of Sweeney’s arguments described, Coiro responds, “I suppose it’s how you look at it. I look upon (celibacy) as freely chosen. No one has to become a priest.”)

At times when Sweeney talks of the impact his book will have, it seems he expects it to hit Christendom like a thunderclap: “A lot of priests and bishops are going to read it and go through an enormous sense of confusion and betrayal: ‘Have I made this sacrifice based on the wrong foundation?’ “

To be sure, Sweeney makes no claim that his mission will be the single force that turns the church around, saying, “I hope the book becomes one of many instruments of change that awaken people to their responsibility and dignity as Christians.” If the changes come in his lifetime, he predicts, it will be because the people of God demand them, not because the hierarchy sees the light.

He sits in his easy chair in a room that is the essence of Americana, in a house on a shady lane that might as well be called Pleasant Street. He is about as far from the temporal and spiritual corridors of the Vatican as one can get, and yet he leans forward, an anomaly, elbows on his knees, oblivious to his surroundings as he talks in detail about canonical law.

Earlier, he had been talking mini-series: of development deals, of producers, agents, publishers, talk shows. Yet words like career, success, ambition, profit, fame, vindication, celebrity do not crop up.

Sweeney discounts any attachment to such earthly matters, describing them simply as a means to a more divinely appointed end.

“From the time I was very small, even in grade school, I felt what I would like most was to help other people find happiness in God,” he says. “And the same thing is true today. That’s what I like doing. If being a successful writer and producer and having recognition advances this, then I welcome it. If helping people find happiness in God means suffering humiliation, being suspended, suffering sanctions, I welcome that too. I will get the truth out there.”

He recalls a peculiar phrase from religious life that sums up his :

“Tantum quantum,” the former Jesuit intones in Latin. “So much, as much. Or, whatever it takes. . . .”

Former Priest Seeks to Change Celibacy Rule : Catholicism: Outspoken ex-cleric says prohibition on marriage is unnatural and is driving men from the ministry.

Outspoken as ever that celibacy is “an unnatural law wreaking havoc” within the Roman Catholic priesthood, Sweeney and his wife, actress Pamela Shoop Sweeney, have become increasingly active in counseling priests and women who love them.

Pamela Sweeney heads the California section of “Good Tidings,” a nonprofit support group for priests and women who are in love. It serves more than 700 women, 300 priests and three bishops. It is one of several such groups in the United States. (See accompanying story.)

Now, the couple have written “What God Hath Joined” (Ballantine Books), a personal and often moving account of their love and Terrance Sweeney’s inner turmoil in having to choose between the ordained ministry and the woman he loves.

Sweeney, 48, was suspended from the Jesuits in 1986 for refusing to destroy research that among other things found that 32% of U.S. Catholic bishops believe the church would benefit from married clergy.

After he was released from his priestly vows, he and Shoop, a television and film actress, were married in November, 1987, in an Episcopal church in Pacific Palisades.

“When I went through it, I thought I was the only one,” Pamela Sweeney said. “I never knew anyone else who would fall in love with a priest. And now I realize there are just so many.”

Her husband said Pamela was, at times, compared by critics and others who did not understand the historical origins of celibacy to a temptress who lures a priest from his calling.

“It’s like this: (Pamela) is Eve and a priest falling in love is falling in love with Eve the seductress, the temptress, the agent of the Devil,” Sweeney said.

Father Gregory Coiro, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said celibacy dates to the 11th Century in the Roman Catholic Church and is based on Jesus’ celibate example and, in part, on Matthew 19:12, which says: “There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.”

Although priests in the Orthodox churches can be married, Coiro said, the Roman Catholic Church sees celibacy as a gift to the priest and a priest’s gift to God and the church that allows him to be single-minded in his devotion and in carrying out his priestly role to the people. As recently as last April in a message to the world’s priests, Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the practice.

But Sweeney said: “It was clear from Jesus’ own selections that most of the 12 Apostles were married and he, in his wisdom, saw no incompatibility between being married and preaching the Gospel.”

“This issue is much bigger than just our love,” Pamela Sweeney said.

Sweeney estimates that of the 400,000 priests in the world, 110,000 have either left the church to marry or are secretly living in relationships while continuing to function as priests. More than 20,000 former priests in the United States have married, he said.

Sweeney rejects arguments that he is bringing scandal to the church by marrying and persisting in his call for optional celibacy.

In 1989, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the archbishop of Los Angeles, directed all priests to withhold Communion from Sweeney because of his “canonically irregular marital union.” Mahony said through a spokesman at the time, “When one creates a of public scandal, I don’t have the freedom to permit him to receive Communion.” The prohibition remains in effect.

Speaking in his Sherman Oaks home and wearing his clerical collar, Sweeney said he feels he must speak out against a rule he calls “unchristian and unethical.” He use the title “Father” in his book but the church does not recognize the title and says he is not authorized to wear his clerical collar or exercise priestly functions.

“What this means is that we have a serious structural disorder that has lasted in the Catholic Church for 1,600 years,” Sweeney said. Sweeney said that throughout the church’s history, celibacy has been, at times, cruelly enforced.

“Punishments included fines, dismissal from the clerical state, imprisonment, public humiliation, and beatings. There were several times when papal troops were sent out to arrest the wives and children of priests. There were at least two Popes that made the wives and children of priests slaves of the church,” Sweeney said.

He added that the human tension between the celibacy rule and falling in love has resulted in suicides, not just in the distant past, but in the 20th Century.

“Suicides are taking place now,” Pamela Sweeney said. “People can fall in love, and when you have a discipline that causes people to commit suicide, there’s something very wrong,” said Pamela Sweeney, an Episcopalian.

Concerns over priestly celibacy are worldwide. Terrance Sweeney said that author David Rice in his book “Shattered Vows: Priests Who Leave,” estimated that 50% of Filipino priests, 80% of rural priests in Peru, and 65% of rural priests in Brazil are married or have common law wives.

“This is not a unique local, materialistic American phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination,” Terrance Sweeney said.

Many of those who campaign for a reform note a long-term decline in seminarians and suggest that if priests were allowed to marry, the present shortage of priests in the United States would be far less severe or even nonexistent.

But few hold out any hope that Pope John Paul II will change the centuries-old rule. Still, the Sweeneys and others insist that the church will change some day.

“The Vatican is not listening and their response is that the church is not a democracy,” he said. “Sure the church is not a democracy. The church is a community that is supposed to be inspired by faith and love and the teachings of Christ. The teachings of Christ made it very clear that what God hath joined let no man divide.”