Ah yes, possibly the most polarizing horror movie to see the silver screen since… I don’t know, Hostel? Bah. Anyway, yes, this is the Rob Zombie remake that people seem to either get along with or have the overwhelming urge to go back in time and kick Zombie’s favorite childhood pet after viewing. How do I feel about the writer/director of The Devil’s Rejects exhuming a franchise that should’ve stayed dead years ago, adding a few new limbs to it and trying to resurrect it as his own creature? Well, that’s what the review is for, so read it…
Whether you’ve seen it yourself, read the seventy-two thousand different reviews for it swimming around the internet and other media, or you’ve just opted to wait till the DVD comes out, you probably already know what happens. Just like the original movie, Michael Myers has spent 15-18 years in a padded cell until one year he opts to break from his incarceration, steal a car, and return to his old hometown of Haddonfield Illinois to kill canoodling teens. Sorry, every since Rangarok’s Death Curse of Tartu review, “canoodling” has burrowed its way into my personal vocabulary and laid eggs. Anyway, Mike is back and cutting a bloody swath through his sister Laurie’s friends until he can finally get to her… but is he there to finish what he started when he killed his other sister over a decade and a half earlier, or does he have something else in mind? Like impregnating her and spawning an incest baby to be sacrificed by a cult of druids… or something mind-fuckingly retarded as such?
Okay, as with that much of the movie, if you’ve read any of the seventy-two thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine, you probably know what Zombie did differently with this “re-imaging” as well. In case you didn’t, here’s the gist: if you ever wondered why Michael Myers turned out to be a psychotic killer who randomly killed his sister one night and then, just as randomly, broke out of bondage 15 years later to head home and kill random teens for no apparent reason, Zombie tries to give Mikey an actual origin this time. Turns out the Lil’ M had a rough childhood and, like all the other little abuse cases we hear about later on in life when they turn into Henry Lee Lucas or Ted Bundy, that led to a number of psychological disorders and dismembered pets. Eventually the school bullies and drunken step-dad antics and a-hole older sister bullshit and absentee stripper mother stuff pushed the preteen to snap and one Halloween, donning his favorite clown mask, he… well… you get the idea. When he came out of it, young Michael found himself in a mental institution and getting his head shrunk by local child psychologist Sammy Loomis. When he’d found out just what it is he was accused of doing, he begins regressing further and further into his other, more kill happy personality where he wears masks to cover his ugliness, goes mute, and tends to stick something pointy into any available jugular veins within arms’ reach. This all takes its toll pretty heavily on his mom Debby though, eventually pushing her to fellate a handgun and redecorate the family room with whatever creamy gray nougat was left sticking to the insides of Sheri Moon-Zombie’s skull.
Years later, Loomis decides that it’s over and there’s nothing left for him to do with Michael. After a decade and a half of bouncing one-way conversations off of the big meaty equivalent of that brick wall everybody talks about, Dr. Sammy gives up and says goodbye to the twenty-something Myers… who is now also a huge brute of a human being. It’s decided that Michael is a lost cause and needs to be transferred to a higher security facility where he’ll spend the rest of his life sentence behind bars and without his beloved access to arts & crafts supplies to keep feeding his mask fetish. He’s big and doesn’t talk but that doesn’t make Michael Myers a retard, and when he realizes what’s going on, Michael breaks his chains like Steve Reeves, slaughters the guards escorting him, and escapes off into the night. This is where we meet Laurie Strode who, of course, is Mikey’s baby sister, now all grown up and being a typically irritating teen and giving the audience plenty of reasons to want to see her face smashed into a mirror at some point. The majority of her equally irritating friends will be bludgeoned or sliced up by the end credits, so there’s some solace to be had there. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zombie intentionally made these girls and their half-wit beaus so hideously nerve-raping just so we could all have a nice smile when we finally get to see their stupid mouths closed permanently. Of course Sam Loomis returns (having recently wrote a best-selling book exploiting all the time he wasted on trying to fix the busted wheels on Mikey’s little gray wagon), but will he be able to stop Michael’s rampage before he gets to Laurie, for whatever reason?
Let me get this little statement out of the way first: I’m not Hindu, so no cow is sacred to me. I don’t care what topic it is or how many people love it, you put anything in front of me and I’ll be perfectly happy to dissect it, roll it through breading, fry it up and eat that sucker for dinner. Some people aren’t so quick to agree with this lifestyle though, and a number of those people see John Carpenter’s original Halloween and immediately start tossing flowers in front of it’s path and getting on their knees to pray for it’s safe journey. Fuck that. Don’t get confused though. Don’t think that I’m anti-Halloween ’78 because I think it’s “cool” to piss on popular movies, because that would mean that you’re jumping to conclusions and if there’s one thing I hate (and in actuality there are probably a few thousand things that would fall in this category) it’s dickheads and she-dickheads that jump to conclusions. No, I’m anti-Halloween ’78 because I don’t like movies that call me an asshole behind my back, then try to act like they never said anything when I call them on it. The following statements are being made in comparison between Halloween ’78 and Halloween ’07 and ignore all of the half-assed, hair-brained, anus tasering sequels that came during the near-30 years between them.
Just because his initials are J.C. doesn’t mean John Carpenter should be getting his ego stroked like he’s the bastard spawn of Jehovah. If Carpenter himself had came up to me with his movie about a random masked killer stabbing teens and lugging around headstones for no apparent reason while tacking 200+lb men up to rickety little doors with nothing more than a butcher knife, I’d just look at him and ask why I should bother. “But it’s just oozing with suspense, sir! It’s an amazing assault on the senses and my very minimalist piano-synthesizer score is icing on the cake!” Uhm, no Mr. Carpenter, it’s really not. Who keeps telling you this is a good thing? It seems more to me like lazy storytelling and a simplistic slasher flick that people are just trying to sell as this astonishing allegory of cinematic greatness packed with more edge-of-your-seat suspense than the entire Alfred Hitchcock catalogue. I’d like to say it’s just because slasher movies were a new thing back then and people were easier to impress, but I’ve been dumbstruck by people younger than I am that think, for whatever reason, Halloween is something special. That it’s better than every gimmick slasher movie franchise that’s come since its release and in the 12 or so years since I first watched it, I still don’t understand. If I were of a more egocentric nature I’d say the people on Carpenter’s dick are all stupid and useless, but everyone’s entitled to an opinion. Keep that in mind while you’re thinking of how to word the hate mail some of you send me every time I say something like this.
Anyway, here’s what it comes down to: I like my killers with a background. I like understanding my monsters instead of just being satisfied watching them gut people for no apparent reason. Granted, I think Michael’s background could’ve been streamlined a bit and not included so much background, but I appreciated it none-the-less. I think the balance of the first and second halves of the movie was a bit awkward though. Again, I appreciate giving Michael the spotlight, fleshing him out and making him more than just “the Shape” (another piece-of-shit point that always nagged my “craw” about the original). I know the movie is about Myers and not so much Laurie this time, but inherently this comes with another slippery slope to climb: centering your movie on a character that forfeits all vocal abilities and hides his face for the majority of the last half of the flick. This shift from making Michael the main character over to putting all the attention on Laurie (who spent her first half of the flick in a high chair and drooling all over her sippy cup) hurts the cohesiveness of the movie for me. How could this have been fixed? Maybe some of the time spent on chronicling Mikey’s stint in the loony bin could’ve been spent showing us exactly what’s been happening to Laurie all this time so we could start to give a shit about her too instead of just dropping her in our lap later and making most of us hate her from Scout Taylor-Compton’s first few lines. But no, Laurie’s history is all just covered in some dialogue later between Loomis and Sheriff Brackett and thus the mild sense of audience vertigo remains. When they remake this again in another 20 or 30 years, hopefully the guys/gals handling the creative reins will keep something like this in mind.
In regards to the cameos, I don’t care if it was just Zombie giving his friends and horror movie idols a paycheck or if he was trying to appeal to the horror movie geeks who like to point at the screen and name as many of the actors as possible, but either way I still get that little kick out of being able to do the latter while everyone else around me is generally clueless. Granted, their lives are probably filled with more endearing and humanity benefiting pastimes than what I do on my days off, but being able to say, “Hey! That’s Richard Lynch playing the principal!” puts a smile on these lips in the morning. As far the actual acting goes, meh. Half the cast seemed like they just wanted to get it over with so they could pay the rent and the other half of the cast was generally irritating. I think Daeg Faerch was the surprising stand-out of the group, as his portrayal of young Michael gave me the legitimate creeps and not just those clichéd “genuine chills” that so many horror movie reviewers like to fall back on. He manages to play a disturbed-but-still-sympathetic lunatic child without tripping over the “obnoxious little shithead you just wanna smack upside the head” pitfall that other child actors in horror flicks seem inclined to do. As for Rob’s wife Sheri, just because her last name is Zombie doesn’t mean she should let herself decay to the point of looking like a reanimated corpse. Her emaciated body nauseates me as her ribs try to poke out my eyes during her “lazy stripper” routine. Somebody order that woman a corned-beef on rye before she slips into a coma! Is she under the impression that trying to look like Keira Knightley will get her those fat Disney paychecks like Miss Pirates of the Caribbean? Not so my dear, so try putting something into your body other than cocaine and Scotch, okay?
Of course there’s still all the “tribute scenes” that mimic or mock parts of the original. The whole b.s. with the tombstone still comes into play (somehow making a little more sense this time than it did 30 years ago), the “guy stuck to a wall with a butcher knife” crap is there (hopefully as a joke), the “Myers dressed like a ghost wearing glasses” part is present and accounted for. It’s a lot like the original with enough new material tacked on to set it apart from its source. I liked it. It’s far from perfect, but I wasn’t demanding my money back at the end and neither were my fiancée or her mother. If it matters at all, I’ve seen over 1,000 horror movies and the monster-in-law-to-be saw the original in theaters, so take that our opinions as you will. I think the movie improves on the life and times of one of horror’s flagship mask-wearers, unlike that hemorrhoid Michael Bay disguised as a TCM remake a few years back.
Oh yeah, though I always welcome frank discussion and debate with our readers, if you’re a biased member of the “loyal Carpenterees” crowd (and therefore have no need to fear the Attorney General and his pals tying to a chair and smashing your toes with a tack hammer) and you’re just going to write unintelligible rhetoric to me about how much of an ignorant “traitor” I am to the horror genre because I’ll take Zombie’s movie over Old Man Carpenter’s movie any day, keep two things in mind: (1) Carpenter gave Zombie the okay to do whatever he wanted with the movie (so it’s his inbox you should be packing) and (2) please at least do me the favor of spellchecking your shit first. If your email looks like the stenographer’s records from an episode of “Divorce Court” or a "Maury" transcript, you won’t get a response. I let somebody borrow my copy of “How to Write Letters to Stupid Grammarless Idiots” and would have no idea how to respond…
