When The Devil’s Rejects came out, I hailed Rob Zombie as the person to finally save the American horror genre. His brand of horror is fearless and unrelenting with an old school approach, emulating the crazy exploitation flicks perfectly while still maintaining his own modern style. For him to make a generic slasher film is akin to taking away horny teenagers from a masked killer. It’s artificial impotence. Exploitation seems to be Zombie’s real forte, so Halloween proves to be a real mismatch. This remake is more disturbing than the original, but sacrificing the shock factor as a result. And yet, it feels toned down from The Devil’s Rejects, so it’s kind of a lose-lose situation.
For those who have not seen John Carpenter’s slasher classic (shame on you), the story concerns the disturbed Michael Myers, a child killer who grew up in a mental institution and years later escapes on Halloween day as the mute psychopath with a William Shatner mask, stalking his childhood suburban neighborhood. Like any slasher film, that’s all there is to it to the plot.
Typically, these films are enjoyed to see the killer’s gimmick, the boobies and the creative kills. But Carpenter’s original only had five deaths in the entire movie—it was scary because of Myers’ presence, creeping around like a boogeyman from the shadows. Zombie’s “re-imagining” ramps up the body count (and the gore), but it’s by no means enjoyable. In a manner more befitting of exploitation movies than slashers, Zombie lingers on Michael’s victims as they gasp their last breath, writhing in pain, and naked if they’re young women. Talk about torture porn. You don’t get the over-the-top kills here. No one can clap and cheer at these kills. What you do for the whole movie is watch young people get stabbed by a kitchen knife and slowly die; extra nauseating because of the way Zombie shoots the scenes in tight shaky-close-ups. Which, I suppose, is the whole point… you’re supposed to be disturbed by Michael\'s actions because it’s so horrible and not cool. Yet the teenagers and even the new Dr. Loomis (despite Malcolm McDowell’s natural awesomeness) aren’t characters likeable enough to root for, so the entire movie is just depraved and pointless.
It\'s boring to see remakes attempt to "improve" the same story and pale in comparison, thus why Zombie’s film started off in the right direction. This Halloween can be a prequel as well as a remake. Rather than starting with a heroine and then going through the usual motions of picking people off one by one, this film gives Michael Myers the Batman Begins treatment. The first 50 minutes of the movie follows Michael as a 10-year-old boy, before jumping 15 years later to when he wears the infamous mask and goes stabby-happy in Haddonfield, IL. Though it ends up being unnecessary, at least Zombie attempted to redo the original in a different light, and that’s commendable. When the film then moves to the second half and retreads the original, it becomes far less interesting.
There’s a lot to be said about the mystery of a character, and this movie obviously doesn’t want any part of that. It tries to give reason behind Michael’s evil, by putting him in a hick white trash upbringing and show him getting bullied at school. Besides taking away that “pure evil” personification of him, it also doesn’t make much sense at all. Michael starts off as a whiny kid killing only the people who harass him, and even shows compassion for his baby sister (the only innocent in his family), but then all of a sudden he stops talking and kills people senselessly. Why present logic behind madness, just to take it away? It’s also really, really hard to take the silent creepy masked killer shtick seriously when you still remember him as the little white trash brat in a KISS t-shirt from earlier in the movie.
The worst part about this movie is its length. It’s bad enough that it has two beginnings because of the two halves, having to introduce a new set of characters in the middle of the damn movie... Clocking in at almost two hours long, it couldn’t sustain itself with anything other than regurgitating the same scene over and over. It just goes on and on and on without much of a purpose. I’m surprised and disappointed to see that a filmmaker as energetic and stylistically wild as Rob Zombie could make such a boooring movie.
"Halloween" opens August 31, 2007 and is rated R. Horror. Written and directed by Rob Zombie. Starring Malcolm McDowell, Brad Dourif, Scout Taylor Compton, Tyler Mane, William Forsythe.
