I'm sorry, that was a little harsh. It's at least far, far better than it's sequel, which we'll be getting to next week. But this is pretty bad. I know people were super excited about the return of Michael Myers from sequel degradation - last having been seen in a Haddonfield morgue awakening after being burned alive. Hell, I was one of them. The original Halloween is one my favorite movies as I explained last year. So, naturally, you'd expect that a return to form for the man in the white William Shatner mask would be something to be excited about.
And it was...until this film premiered.
Though a lot of people really liked it, because they think Rob Zombie is some kind of visionary director who totally revitalized the genre because he's clearly the Master of Horror. If this film is any indication, he's a fan of John Carpenter who has a modern, darker edge on things at best. This film is everything that is wrong with modern horror films thrown into one and with the crusty shell of the original Halloween draped over it.
The film begins with young Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch) living in the worst possible environment for a child - a Rob Zombie film! That isn't a joke, the place is the white trailer trash situation you see in a lot of in the - what I like to call - "Blue Collar Horror" genre. He lives with his mother (Sherri Moon Zombie), her mother's abusive boyfriend (William Forsythe), his sister Judith (Hanna R. Hall), and the little baby Angel Myers or "Boo", as Michael likes to call her.
To play Devil's Advocate, Zombie does a really, really good job of painting for us a picture of a reason for Michael's descent into his psychotic murder frenzy. His mother's boyfriend is abusive, crass, and constantly drunk, his sister is an ass, and his mother is largely absentee due to having to work at the strip club to support her family. Really, besides his mother, the only person that Michael shows any affection for is Boo. The situation, particularly with the mother's boyfriend, is just terrible. Really, if someone doesn't go crazy from this situation, they're already crazy.
And crazy Michael is determined to be when his school principal discovers a dead cat and pictures of several animal corpses, forcing him to call in Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell). However, before any psychotherapy can happen, Michael has to kick up the body count. And that he does with taking out not only his sister as in the original, but also a bully from school, his sister's boyfriend, and the mother's boyfriend in a clean sweep.
From there, Michael goes to Smith's Grove after being convicted of first-degree murder. Loomis attempts to reach him, but the years keeping him locked up are many more than seven, so much so that it grates on Michael and he begins to become more and more withdrawn from the world, taking to making papier-mâché masks and being nearly comatose. After a particularly grizzly incident with a nurse and a metal fork (seriously, a metal fork? In an asylum?!), it becomes clear that Michael's condition will never improve and his mother commits suicide.
Got all that? Good, because it was completely unnecessary as the original demonstrated in roughly it's first ten minutes.
No, this is not me nitpicking. This is a genuine complaint given that John Carpenter saw absolutely no reason to explain why Michael went crazy and hacked his sister apart with a kitchen knife, he just did it. It was very sudden and a massive shock when the mask was pulled off of the first person view (something very lacking in this movie) to reveal that a six-year-old child had committed a grizzly murder. That made the shock of the fact that there really was no motive hit all the harder. Here...there's really no question as to why Michael snapped.
But with that settled, the last half hour of the film is basically a retread of the original Halloween. We get introduced to Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton), little Angel Myers all grown up and with no knowledge of her past. And Laurie pretty much shows herself to be nothing like Jamie Lee Curtis in the original, most obviously when one of the first things she does onscreen is use her finger to fornicate a bagel in front of her parents.
No, I'm not joking.
Whereas in the original Laurie was a sweet, kind, demure girl, this Laurie is just...over the top. She's uncouth, she's raunchy, and really just what you would expect from a slasher film victim rather than the survivor. Of course, her friends Annie (Danielle Harris) and Lynda (Kristina Klebe) are even more exaggerated from their original versions, which would make her look tame by comparison...except with a franchise as long-running and memorable as Halloween, we are given to remember the original characters as well.
Sure, in the original Annie and Lynda were nothing to write home about, but even their moral degradation had its limits. Then again, maybe I'm just not with the in-crowd on how teenagers in our modern society work.
And while we're on the subject of being so severely out-of-character, we have Samuel Loomis being taken over by Malcolm McDowell. Instead of spending eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, Loomis goes from being a white knight against Michael's evil in the originals to being a bloodsucking, fame-hungry sociopath who is hilariously egotistical and hocks his book on Michael at every opportunity.
A far cry from Donald Pleasance's portrayal, who saw stopping Michael as more important than anything for all the innocent lives he would take.
Of course, this film doesn't show this character trait nearly as much as the sequel does, but it's still something to note and still something that clearly shows that Rob Zombie was happy to dismiss retaining anything John Carpenter-esque long before he ever made Halloween II.
Basically, these are not characters you want to see live. I've spoken before on how a little developing of characters in these movies - à la Aliens or the original Predator - goes a long way to actually making us care. It doesn't take up all that much time, and it actually gives the audience some investment in the characters. Most horror films don't bother doing that, however. After all, people are just there to fill a body count quota and we're not expected to find any of them memorable or relate to them. They're the main course.
This film, however, does the opposite. You want to see almost everyone that Michael kills off killed long before the point where he does. This is not good for this film at all. Then again, maybe I'm just being completely off-base and this is some sort of artsy statement on the nature of horror films giving us characters we just want to see bumped off because that's what they're there for. Though I really doubt that's remotely what Zombie had in mind for this.
And that's not to say there isn't some good talent in here. You have Danny Trejo playing an orderly at Smith's Grove who bonds with Michael (and is really the only death you actually feel something for), Brad Dourif playing waaaay below his level of talent as Sheriff Brackett, Clint Howard has a short scene giving this film some credit in Smith's Grove, and even Malcolm McDowell makes me forget he was in Star Trek: Generations in a few scenes. But the fact is that good acting could not have saved this film.
This film is akin to those Power Rangers kids' Halloween costumes you can find with the muscles "built" into the suit. It's bloated, only vaguely looking like the thing it's supposed to be while having none of the real substance. It's clear that Rob Zombie did have some love for the original - having done some of the score himself for this one and it shows many cues and homages to the original, as well as in some of the shots - but that gets bogged down under all the things that make modern horror films very stupid and nearly unwatchable for me.
But you want to know the saddest thing about this movie? The thing that drives a hot poker right through my gut and burns my heart to ash over this franchise? The movie was a hit...it was a box office success instead of being relegated to Bad Movie Hell where it belongs. Because people were all "Oh, Rob Zombie, he's so great! Best director ever! Absolutely perfect for this!" The critics hated it, sure...but who the hell even listens to critics? So, naturally, because they saw nothing but dollar signs, Dimension greenlit a second film.
Unlike this film, that one has no defenders. That one is quite possibly the worst of all the Halloween movies, and yes I am actually counting Resurrection in that. And guess what we're looking over next week?
Buckle up, kids.
Halloween is now available from Dimension Films and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer wherever movies are sold.
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
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