Halloween (2007)

Directed by: Rob Zombie
Written by: Rob Zombie
Based on 1978 screenplay by: John Carpenter/Debra Hill

We don’t always need remakes. But sometimes they’re ok.

First, let’s hit some previews.

FEAST OF LOVE–Not the horror film it sounds like. It’s actually a romantic comedy kind of like Love, Actually. Which means that I’ll probably like it. Morgan Freeman, Jane Alexander, Selma Blair, Greg Kinnear, Radha Mitchell, Alexa Davalos (the hottie from Chronicles Of Riddick) and a whole bunch of other people. I’m a sap. I’m there.

THE MIST–I read this Stephen King story years ago and I don’t remember all the God stuff in it. I need to read it again. Frank Darabont gets to do another story that King said he would never sell. I guess technology finally caught up with it. Hopefully, it’s good. Loved Shawshank, liked Green Mile.

By the way, this also stars Miss Davalos. Its a feast of Alexa, I guess. Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden and Tobey Jones also star.

30 DAYS OF NIGHT–I’m all for this one. Based on a graphic novel about vampires in the Arctic where day never comes. I have no problem with Josh Hartnett or Ben Foster, so I’m ok with them being in it. (Even if the only character I’ve really seen Ben in recently was a complete waste of space, I hear he’s a good actor. He was great as Eli in “Freaks And Geeks,” though!) Looks like an awesome movie…and there will be blood. Oh, yes. There will be blood.

And apparently there’s another Horror Fest going on with “8 Movies 2 Die 4.” I hear the movies last year were, for the most part, pretty good. Maybe I’ll actually check them out this year. The ad for this year’s, though, is lamer than lame. The huge chick in heels and a nightie stalking through the city to a billboard for the festival. Yeah, she’s hot. Nice to look at. But, MAN, is it dumb.

Ok, on with Michael Myers.

Back in 1978, no one had really seen a slasher movie before. Sure, Psycho is kind of considered the first American slasher movie…but that was totally different. That was the puritanical 60s. (Although, Hitch tried his best to make them NOT so puritanical. There was a nipple in one shot. THE HORROR!!)

John Carpenter brought in a whole new era to horror, for better or worse. Halloween is STILL the best of the genre, even after all of the imitators have tried to capitalize on it. (The original Nightmare On Elm Street was a little bit better than Halloween…but Nightmare is barely a slasher movie. It’s more supernatural than that.)

At this point, the slasher genre is pretty much over. There are still some holdouts: A few Friday The 13ths come out occasionally. Hatchet tries its best to bring it back. (And it really does its best. I really liked that movie a lot.) But there’s not a lot that you can really do with the genre anymore to surprise people. Especially after movies like Scream and Scary Movie have skewered them so much already.

So, of course, Hollywood thinks that it’s time to jump start slashers. And Rob Zombie is more than up for the task.

Now, here’s a little bit of trivia that you might not realize about the original Halloween: IT’S NOT THAT FUCKING GORY!!! There’s a bit of blood. There are quite a few boobs (mostly PJ Soles, bless her good genes). There’s a lot of suspense and violence. And there is LOTS of screaming. But there’s no real gore. A lot of it happens off screen or without blood.

Today’s audiences just aren’t up for that sort of thing. That’s why remakes of basically bloodless movies (like The Haunting or Texas Chainsaw Massacre–seriously! Watch it again!) are full of blood and special effects.

Now, I have no problem with gore. I’m a gore-hound, actually. I like the Hostel movies. I think they’re quite good, actually. And I can totally stomach them. (Although, Weiner Dogs upside-down boobs were a bit much to handle.) But it almost pains me to watch a perfectly good movie that used suspense to create horror be remade into a blood bath with no suspense.

Rob Zombie seems to know that this drives the old fans away. House Of 1000 Corpses had some genuinely tense scenes. It wasn’t a particularly good movie (although I liked it more than most people did), but it did hold my attention for its whole run. I still haven’t seen The Devil’s Rejects, but that actually got some really good reviews. (Why haven’t I watched it? Not a clue. I’m an idiot.)

So, how does he do with remaking Halloween?

Not bad, actually. He, for the most part, sticks to the story of the original. Michael Myers (pro-wrestler, Tayler Mane–but first played by 10 year-old Daeg Faerch) kills his entire family except for his mom and baby sister, whom he loves unconditionally. (His step-dad is played to the hilt by William Forsythe. I’ve never seen him be so fucking creepy.) Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is brought in to try to figure out why he would do such a horrible thing. Soon enough, he realizes that Michael is just evil. There’s no other explanation for it.

Flash forward 15 years. Michael breaks out of the asylum to go after his little sister, who is now Laurie Strode (Scout Tayler-Compton who, by the way, is set to star in ANOTHER re-make, April Fool’s Day). Does he want to kill her? Or is there something else going on in his evil little mind? (This fact wasn’t brought to light until Halloween 2, but it’s become such a part of the lore of the series that some people forget that. It’s kind of like the fact that Jason Voorhees didn’t really kill anyone until the second Friday The 13th.)

Eventually, Dr. Loomis finds out about Michael’s escape and goes after him in a very slow cat and mouse game. He has to have a few random scenes of buying guns and such before he can actually chase after Michael.

Of course, Laurie has two friends who are more sexually exploratory than she is. Lynda (Kristina Klebe) and Annie (Danielle Harris, who was Halloweens 4 & 5) are her best friends and are trying to get her to babysit for them so they can run off and have sex with their boyfriends…or whatever dick is closest.

That’s when all hell breaks loose…of course.

Now, one thing that can really derail a movie like this is too much information. We don’t really need to know where Michael came from. The beginning of the original was perfect. We see flashes of the murder of his older sister. Then we see the little boy with the knife and the clown costume. And that’s it. Cut to 15 years later. And that’s one reason why Michael Myers is so scary. We don’t know anything about his family life. He seems to have come from a typical suburban family. Everything was fine. Yeah, his sister was supposedly a slut, but really she was just having sex with her boyfriend instead of taking Michael out trick-or-treating. That was her crime. Everything was normal.

Zombie gives us the whole story. Michael’s family was terrible. His mom (Sheri Moon Zombie) was a stripper. His step-dad was pure evil and apparently wanted to fuck his step-daughter. His older sister was a little bitch and actually quite the slut. The only relief Michael had was the fact that his mom was nice to him and his baby sister hadn’t grown up enough to treat him like shit.

Oh, yeah. And he was a KISS fan. Not so sure I like that particular inference. I’m not a KISS fan, myself. I don’t like them much at all. But I don’t like the fact that an evil serial killer in a movie is a fan. That just feeds the fire on that particular issue. Why not make him a Michael Bolton fan? That would be MUCH better. I would want him to die then.

(By the way, you can tell that the kid never did any of the “kill” scenes. The bodies were never shown in the same shot with the kid and he never brought down a weapon on anyone within the frame. They did a pretty good job of keeping this kid out of psychological harm’s way. The kid is good, too. He goes from a nice, sympathetic kid to crazy scary in a heartbeat.)

When Michael grows up, things don’t get much better for him. He’s in the asylum basically alone. When he escapes, we know that he’s pure evil because he kills the only “friend” he has in the joint (Danny Trejo, making his regular cameo).

Maybe it was a bit too much information. Maybe Michael Myers SHOULD be a mystery. What’s weird is that it really didn’t bother me. I mean, Rob Zombie really spelled everything out for us. But it didn’t hurt the fact that Michael is a killing machine. We sympathize with him as a kid…not so much as an adult. There’s a tinge of pain for his pain…but not enough to make us want him to win. Laurie is definitely the hero here. Michael is an asshole, no matter how much we know about his childhood.

Zombie knows from suspense, too. I’m pretty immune to horror type suspense these days, but there were scenes that almost surprised me. It was a good change from the typical “horror” fare lately. He’s definitely a big fan of the original and uses a lot of the same tricks as Carpenter did (hanging a body by stabbing it against a wall, the gravestone at the head of one of the bodies…) and, like Carpenter, he uses suspense as a tool for the horror instead of the other way around.

But there is plenty of blood this time. No one is left alone here. There’s blood all over the fuckin’ place. It’s no Hostel II, but it’s gore-filled. No doubt about it. And there are boobs aplenty, too. Everyone who should show them, shows them. (And you know that some girls just SHOULD show them.) So no one walks away disappointed on those fronts. (Pun intended.)

Overall, it wasn’t a bad movie. Not great, but certainly worth checking out if you’re a fan of the original or horror films in general. He didn’t ruin the memory of the original any more than any of the sequels did.

Watch for a few horror stalwarts in small roles: Brad Dourif, Udo Kier, Clint Howard, Dee Wallace, Sid Haig…and Mickey Dolenz? That’s right. There’s a fuckin’ Monkee in here! He plays a guard…I think. I forgot to look for him, but I saw his name in the credits. Guess I have to see it again at some point.