Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007)
Review by Dr. Royce Clemens
“As great as you are, man, you’ll never be greater than yourself.”
-Bob Dylan
On this day, August 31, 2007, a vicious madman is finally coming home, to unleash his own brand of havoc upon an unsuspecting private populace.
I am speaking, of course, about Karl Rove…Oh, and the Rob Zombie remake of Halloween came out today. I don’t know if you guys heard about that.
And the results are very good indeed. Rob Zombie’s Halloween did three things that I thought were at best improbable and at worst, impossible…
-It reminded me, after Hostel Part II and Captivity that, yes Virginia, horror films are indeed a way to have fun.
-It is a remake that held my attention so raptly that I forgot about how great the original was for great stretches of the running time.
-It’s a Rob Zombie movie that managed to get his wife (Sheri Moon-Zombie) to finally show some Goddamned range. I KNOW! I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT EITHER!
Living up to John Carpenter’s original is not a priority for Zombie. His film and John Carpenter’s 1978 original attempt to do completely different things. Carpenter’s film is easily better it its goal of playing God in the universe, looking down at Michael Myers’ bloody conquests in the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois. Zombie, on the other hand, wants to lock us in a small room with a bloodthirsty animal. Some people don’t like to think about their slashers being actual human beings, but there’s a difference between faceless and unstoppable evil and just giving your plot device arms and legs. Both Carpenter and Zombie know better. As it stands, Carpenter’s film was all head and no heart. Zombie’s film is vice-versa. Don’t think of it as a remake, but rather you should think of it as finally going into the attic after owning the house for twenty-nine years.
The film opens with young Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch) and his shitty childhood in Haddonfield. His stepdad (William Forsythe) doesn’t like him very much, his mom (Moon-Zombie) is a stripper, but Lord knows she’s trying. His sister (Hanna Hall) is completely indifferent and all the kids at school pick on him. He starts by torturing small animals, but one day (Halloween to be exact) he snaps and starts killing people. He is sent to an institution to be examined by Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell). He does a shit job, because within a year, young Michael’s body count continues to climb.
After seventeen years he escapes to terrorize his old neighborhood on Halloween, focusing his rage on two teenagers and their mom, who follows them around everywhere…WHOOPS! That’s actually Danielle Harris, and she’s playing a teenager. My bad.
The pleasures with Rob Zombie’s Halloween start at the bottom and work their way up. I’m usually not one for cameos out the ass, but when a movie has Sid Haig, Brad Dourif, Danny Trejo, Leslie Easterbrook, Bill Moseley, Dee Wallace-Stone and Ken Foree I am more than willing to change my mind. It’s just nice to see them on the big screen, as opposed to the much tinier ones we all have in our homes. Zombie must be a nice guy, because his actors keep coming back…Well, all except Karen Black, who apparently was all “I WORKED FOR ROBERT ALTMAN! GIMME MONEY!”
But I digress.
Zombie wants to show us a vicious and barely containable human being, as opposed to the off-duty Sam Fischer that Michael Myers was in the original. Both work, but this new one is not without its charm, as he savagely goes off on everyone. While the old one bided his time, Tyler Mane as Myers rushes right in with a lack of planning or grace. The scene where Myers kills the trucker in the bathroom and takes his coveralls is ASTONISHINGLY well put together, as DP Phil Parmet shakes the camera every time Myers bashes the poor guy’s head into the side of the stall. In fact there is a lot of shaky-cam in this film, which will result in a lot of ass-letting from whiny moviegoers. They’re entitled to their opinion, but the romantic in me prefers to believe that Myers is so nasty that even the cameraman is trying to beat feet in an attempt to escape.
And I liked the three girls, God help me. They are Scout Taylor-Compton in the Jamie Lee Curtis role, Danielle Harris (who is in her thirties) and Kristina Klebe and they come off as the kind of teenagers I went to high school with, which is to say they are extraordinarily foul-mouthed and inappropriate. I hate how in all these horror movies there’s always the patron saint, the skank and the one who’s just there as cannon-fodder. Here, these three actresses milk Zombie’s dialogue in an attempt to be all three.
If there is any disappointment to be had by yours truly, it is that while Zombie sidestepped living up to John Carpenter, he doesn’t really do a very good job living up to The Devil’s Rejects. I bought a ticket wanting to see “Rob Zombie’s” Halloween. I wanted king-hell craziness. What Zombie does here is make a movie that succeeds by conventional terms. I know it sounds weird to say about a slasher picture, but Zombie shows restraint, decorum and grace. He piles on the tension and ignores his baser impulses.
Rob Zombie is growing up on us. He’s becoming “a real filmmaker.” If The Devil’s Rejects was the Pulp Fiction of latter-day horror films, this is Jackie Brown. Maybe I’ll come around in ten years or so the same way everyone else did with THAT film.
This isn’t to say he’s losing his edge, no, far from it. But he’s focusing it instead of going nuts and spreading out. He’s paying more attention to his script and his plotting. I’m not entirely convinced it’s a good thing, but I am relieved to see that he can do it.
So congratulations, Rob. You’ve done the impossible. You’ve remade Halloween and didn’t embarrass yourself. You’ve answered all those reasonable people (all five of them) who said you were a hack by giving Michael Myers his best and scariest day in twenty-nine years. Good job. Well done.
Now, go back to having no redeeming qualities. For me?
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