If you were wondering what happened immediately after the ending of the first Halloween movie, here ya go. This picks up RIGHT where it left off. It’s still Halloween 1978 and crazed killer Michael Myers is STILL trying to turn Jamie Lee Curtis into tomato paste. Nobody knows about his fixation on her yet though, so the police and creepy Donald Pleasence search for Myers in just about every corner of the little town of Haddonfield except for the hospital where she’s been taken… and where Michael Myers is headed and ready to slash some more throats.
It’s not as good as the first movie. The Halloween atmosphere is mostly gone (there’s not much autumnal ambiance in hospital corridors). The mystique of Michael Myers is lessened by his cartoonish Wile E. Coyote resilience and some shoehorned background information. Even Donald Pleasence loses his Van Helsing-style coolness and starts to come off like a flake. The first film was a terrific suspense yarn. This one’s your basic chase-and-slash with characters who act like idiots. Neophyte director Rick Rosenthal imitates some of John Carpenter’s tricks from 1978—the foreground/background suspense schemes, the flashy POV shots—but none of it helps. 
On the plus side, it’s paced like a jack rabbit with a flaming hellhound trying to bite its ass. This thing zips.
It’s also more gory than the first Halloween (reportedly that was co-producer John Carpenter’s decision, so that it could compete with other slasher films of the time). A smidge of controversy reared its head when Richard Delmer Boyer of El Monte, California stabbed an elderly couple to death in 1982 and claimed that this movie was his inspiration.