Halloween the redux

So I went and saw Rob Zombie's Halloween today and unsurprisingly he met my expectations. I expected it to suck and it pretty much did. I tried to imagine if I would have liked it if I could have somehow not compared it to the original. The answer is: NO!!! I still would have hated it. Rob Zombie is about as good at making horror movies as all the rest of the hacks who are making these gore-porn festivals now. I'm not impressed. And since a huge chunk of the movie is a Cliff Notes for Dummies version of the original with hints of Friday the 13th Pt. 2, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and several of the Halloween sequels, it's kinda tough to separate this steaming pile of shite from its alleged source.

One problem with the movie (besides its very existence) is Rob's insistence on feeding into the Hollywood stereotype of who becomes a serial killer. In the original, Michael came from what we assumed was a fairly normal middle class suburban family. (Sure, his parents probably had secrets. Maybe dad liked martini lunches and breakfasts and dinners and having special meetings with his secretary. Maybe mom was a pill-popping floozy whom cops brought home every weekend from the local bar.) So his sister invited her boyfriend over for some random nooky. I didn't get the impression from the original that she was being judged for that. She had some sex, and that's what teenagers do.

Here, the family is the epitome of white trash. Mom's a stripper (giving Rob a chance yet again to show off his wife's ass on film), StepDad (no mention of Real Dad) is a good-for-nothing jackwad, and Big Sister is kind of a skeez. I don't think we were supposed to sympathize with Dad when he gets his (and just for shits and giggles this time Big Sis's boyfriend bites it too), but I can't say I was thrilled with the demise of his sister. Part of it is the way she is killed as opposed to Dad. Dad is a relentless asshole to both Michael and his sister (which I'm sure is why Mom loooooooves him). He insults and threatens everyone in the house including a wee baby, yet his death takes about 10 seconds. Sis, on the other hand, is stalked and terrorized a bit before she gets hers. In fact, hers is the first of 3 terrified-woman-trying-to-crawl-to-safety scenes. We aren't supposed to believe she deserved to die because she chose sex over taking her chubby kid brother trick-or-treating, are we?

I'm not one of those people who flings out the misogyny accusation to horror movies very often, but I gotta say I think our boy Rob might have some Terrence Howard-level issues with the ladies. Sure he makes Michael's mom sorta sympathetic (could that be because she's played by Rob's wife?), but I'd for sure hold her responsible. What type of crankhead allows a guy who talks about the sexiness of her teen daughter's ass and threatens to rip her son's face off stay in her home? Bitch, no wonder your kid is fucked up, and that seems to be Rob's thinking too.

The Dr. Loomis character here is an insult to the memory of Donald Pleasance and psychiatrists in movies in general. Here, you don't get the sense of urgency from Loomis like you did in the original. This Loomis seems more curious about what Michael's up to after his (extra-bloody) escape than he is about taking him out. He acts like he's bored and that makes him boring.

Loomis isn't the only character that Rob screwed up. Since the 'character building' in this takes about 10 seconds and it consists of them screeching like fingernails on a chalkboard, I can't say I was too traumatized by the attacks on Linda, Annie, and Laurie. Was I supposed to be saying 'just fucking kill her already' when Michael was carting Laurie from one location to the next? To make matters a little gorier, Rob tosses in a school bully (Rob Zombie likes kids about as much as he likes women judging by this death scene), some random trucker (Mikey's gotta get his jumpsuit somewhere), Annie's never-seen-in-the-original boyfriend Paul, and Laurie's parents as additions to the meat wagon.

And another problem is the pacing of this movie. Things go kind of slow in the beginning (really slow actually), but then you blink and there are dead bodies coming out of your eyeballs. A high kill-count does not a good horror movie make. I mean, it can. Jason racks up the corpses like it's going out of style, but usually there is a bit of fun to those flicks since he always has such innovative ways to kill, like wacking someone zipped in a sleeping bag against a tree or punching someone's head off. Michael does do a couple of beatings and a strangulation, but mostly it's suspenseless stalk-and-stab. Yaaaaaaaawn.

Oh, what's with the random use of the Halloween theme? I mean, Rob just drops it in here and there at the most arbitrary moments as though he's trying to remind the viewer she's watching a shitty remake of Halloween. Dude, she knows!

And then there is Michael himself. The kid Michael is okay. (Hey, look! I just said something good about this movie.) The actor does a good job of playing a little weirdo, but then most kids are little weirdos at the age of 10 so it's not a terribly far stretch. Adult Michael is a whole nother story. You know one of the scariest moments in the original for me is when Michael is trying to strangle Laurie and she manages to rip his mask off. We get a brief glimpse of his face and it's mostly in shadow, but you can make out that it is COMPLETELY NORMAL (well, except for the eye she had earlier poked out with a hanger)! In fact he's actually kinda cute (although not as cute as the blue-eyed, shaven-headed, tattooed hotty I saw at the bus stop on my way home from the theatre. grrrrrrrrrr! Mama like!).

Apparently, that was too boring for Rob, so he cast some guy the size of Kane, put mud in his hair, and combed it forward. Michael has his own little F/X shop at the hospital where he apparently sits all day in his bathrobe and slippers making masks and chewing on steroids.

Some might argue that I didn't give this movie a chance and had no plans to. They would be kinda right. Most of you know I've been pissed about this little project from jumpstreet. Considering this little quote, I haven't the foggiest idea what this prick thought he was doing here. Like I said, I didn't expect much and in that, Rob Zombie didn't disappoint.