This 2007 remake of the 1978 classic confirms a few things:
1) Rob Zombie can direct effective and wince-inducing hardcore horror without the camp trimmings of House of 1000 Corpses or the misguided antihero road movie rape-and-kill romp that was The Devil’s Rejects.
2) However Zombie should not write his movies, especially a remake of one of the most iconic horror films of all time, and
3) The answer to a previous question posed by Clawsome; “Do we really need another Halloween?” is no. No we don’t.
There are some effective, and hardcore, scenes in this flick for the gore hounds – unfortunately the plot is an inconsistent, shambling mess.
The original Halloween (1978) started an entire sub-genre (the Slasher film) and launched young, fearless filmmaker John Carpenter into fame and infamy. The plot was stripped-down perfection: Michael Myers – institutionalised for killing his older sister when he was six – escapes and goes on a knife-happy rampage in the suburbs.
Simple. Effective. Slightly dated by today’s standards but still a great genre film.
Why? Because Myers is the “boogeyman“. That was the whole bloody point of the film!
Mr. Zombie seems to think we need to know why (borrowing the clunky ‘Micheal’s sister’ motivation from Halloween II) because he spends a good fifty plus minutes with Michael Myers as a long-haired youngster who kills pets, a bully and finally his entire family sans his stripper mum and baby sister. Fine – an original take on Carpenter’s flick. It’s almost a prequel – and interesting, albeit filled with Zombie’s ubiquitous need to make every character an unsympathetic, foul-mouthed and/or slutty trailer trash cliché.
Then, abruptly – as if Zombie realised he was actually writing a remake, it’s fifteen years later. Myers escapes the nuthouse and in the final twenty minutes of the flick the entire plot of the original Halloween is shunted in – almost scene for scene – including the original’s bit of dialogue: “Was that the boogeyman?” to which Michael’s shrink Dr. Loomis (played by Donald Pleasence in the original, Malcolm McDowell in this one) replies: “As a matter of fact, I do believe it was.”
Rob Zombie tries to have his cake and eat it. But you can’t demystify the monster and show us the man and then expect us to see him as a monster again. And when Zombie tries to wring out some sympathy for Myers… what the hell?!
Contradictory in its plotting, poorly acted and creatively bankrupt – Rob Zombie’s Halloween is just not very good. If Zombie wanted to make a film about a serial killer, fine – go to it but using the moniker of Halloween makes this feel like a cheap cash-in on a revolutionary original.
Update: So, obviously I wrote this review quite a while ago, before the Friday the 13th remake had a chance to be barely adequate! That said, Michael Bay’s [shudder] Friday redux was Citizen-fucking-Kane compared to Rob Zombie’s Halloween II.
HO-LY SHIT!
I’m not going to review it in depth because even thinking about the fucking thing makes my anus bleed, but if you find yourself in one of those ‘Well, I didn’t much like the first one but I’d like to see what he did with the sequel…’ STOP! Put the DVD/Blu-ray down, shut the bit-torrent off and save yourself 119 minutes of heavy-handed horsey symbolism and Michael as a Hobo from hell. Damn, even dissing it makes it sound more interesting than it is. Just stay away. You can thank me later. Perhaps with a foot massage or some scented candles.
