Overall Rating
  Awesome: 24.02%
Worth A Look: 20.11%
Average: 6.7%
Pretty Bad: 12.85%
Total Crap: 36.31%
5 reviews, 149 user ratings
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| Halloween (2007) |
by Peter Sobczynski
"If Only Zombie Were A Carpenter"
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When it was announced that Rob Zombie, the musician-turned-auteur responsible for “House of 1000 Corpses” and “The Devil’s Rejects” announced that his next project would be a remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic “Halloween,” many people were aghast at the thought of anyone tampering with the memory of one of the most popular and influential titles in the history of the genre. In response, his defenders–such creatures do exist–pointed out that such films as “The Thing From Another World,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “The Fly” not only managed to survive being remade but that the new versions in many ways were even better than the originals. True, but those films all had great directors (Carpenter, Phil Kaufman and David Cronenberg) who were working at the peak of their creative powers and who managed to find fresh new takes on the material to justify their existence. By comparison, what Zombie has done to “Halloween” is roughly akin to what its central character does to virtually every other member of the cast–he hacks away until all we are left with is a bloody and virtually unrecognizable mess that lingers around painfully for a while before mercifully expiring.The basic storyline is pretty much the same boogeyman tale that Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill cooked up thirty years ago. After spending fifteen years in silent confinement at a mental institution for a shocking murder that he committed when he was only a child, Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) busts out of the Smiths Grove sanitarium and makes his way back to his former hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois just in time for Halloween, the anniversary of his original crime. Not realizing this, a trio of high-school cuties–smart Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton), slutty Linda (Kristina Klebe) and sassy Annie (Danielle Harris)–prepare for an eventful evening involving boys, beer and, in Laurie’s case, babysitting and fail to notice the signs that Michael is among them. Once night falls, he emerges from the shadows and begins to pick them, and anyone else who happens along, off one by one in the most brutal fashion possible. The only person who understands exactly what Michael is capable of is his former psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), who knows where Michael is heading and frantically pursues him while trying to convince the police of what exactly they are dealing with.
One of the great things about the first “Halloween” is that the motivations behind Michael’s rampage were never explained–he was, for lack of a better name, Evil Incarnate, and that was all the backstory that was required. (One of the reasons that the subsequent sequels backfired was their insistence on trying to explain him via an ever-expanding array of increasingly perplexing subplots.) This time around, Zombie has chosen to give us a long and detailed look at the unhappy childhood that helped drive Michael over the edge. Of course, he isn’t doing this as a way of exploring the psychology of a mass murderer in any real or thoughtful way–he is merely using it as an excuse to work in the grotesque white-trash caricatures with which he has populated his earlier films. Instead of the seemingly normal middle-class family that we saw in the original, the Myers clan this time around consists of a mom who is a stripper (Sherri Moon Zombie), a drunken and abusive stepfather (William Forsythe) and a decidedly slutty older sister (Hannah Hall). It is bad enough that none of this stuff adds anything to the film or our understanding of the character of Michael Myers but what makes it especially excruciating is that Zombie spends nearly half of the film’s running time on it–so much, in fact, that when the film finally jumps to the present day, he virtually has to tell the rest of the story in fast-forward in order to get everything in before the end credits roll.
If you saw the original “Halloween”–and if you haven’t, I cannot understand why you are still reading this–you know that unlike the countless slasher epics that sprung up in the wake of its success, it was a horror film that didn’t rely solely on blood and guts in order to make an impact on viewers. (In fact, a typical episode of “CSI” contains more gore and a higher body count than the entire film.) Instead, it relied on John Carpenter’s consummate filmmaking skill to create and sustain tension and a trio of smart, funny and utterly realistic teenage heroines that were so likable that we rooted for them to survive and genuinely felt something when they were cruelly dispatched. Based on the evidence seen here, it would appear that Zombie fell into the same trap as the directors of most of the various sequels, knock-offs and rip-offs that emerged in the years since “Halloween” premiered–he discovered that he lacked the ability to create tension or likable characters and figured that no one would notice as long as he threw enough blood, guts and breasts across the screen.
This time around, Michael kills loads of people and while they feature plenty of gruesome and sadistic imagery (Zombie really seems to get off on the image of a mortally wounded and half-naked female crawling along the ground in agony while being hacked away at from behind), there is never a single moment in which we care about the passing of any of them. One of the reasons that we don’t care is because they are barely introduced before getting rubbed out and another is because the few that we do get to know even slightly–such as the three heroines–are so thoroughly annoying and unlikable that we actually want to see them get croaked just so that we don’t have to put up with them for another minute. (The lone exception is Malcolm McDowell turn in the role made famous by the late Donald Pleasance–it isn’t one of his great performances but he has the kind of voice that was born to deliver the kind of fruity lines that he has been given here.)I’ll be honest–based on my feelings towards John Carpenter’s original film (which I still regard as one of the most sensationally effective horror films ever made) and the oeuvre of Rob Zombie (of which I have absolutely no use for, though I will admit to a certain admiration for the energy displayed in “The Devil’s Rejects”), I went into “Halloween” expecting it to be pretty bad but I never in my wildest nightmares imagined that it would be as awful as this. This is a vile, sick, stupid and deeply unpleasant exercise in pointless sadism that may well be the worst remake of a generally acknowledged classic to come along in a long time. Granted, it was probably asking too much to hope that Zombie would come up with a film that would live up to the high standards of the original “Halloween” but what he has given us is so completely worthless that it pales in comparison to “Halloween: Resurrection.”
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=15531&reviewer=389
originally posted: 08/31/07 14:56:20
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USA
31-Aug-2007 (R)
DVD: 18-Dec-2007
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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