I hope you enjoyed that little five-day break. We're a mere twelve days from the O-Unholy Night itself. Best get on with the top-five of the countdown!
#5 - Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007)
This movie gave more "fucks" than I did.
After the oh-so-glorious entry
Halloween: Resurrection in 2002, the studio had other sequels in the works. For a while, there was
Halloween: Retribution, which would star the same actor as Michael Myers and take place a year later. That was canned in favor of
Hall9ween, which was immediately dumped after negative screenplay results. Then, some egghead at Dimension Films said "Hey! Let's just remake the first movie! It'll be a shoe-in to be glorious!" Each of the other Dimension studio executives agreed, puffed on Cuban cigars and lit hundred dollar bills just for the hell of it in agreement.
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| Michael looks like the personification of botched plastic surgery |
That's just my interpretation of the events, but they probably went something like that. Tasked with breathing new life into the
Halloween franchise was renowned shock rocker Rob Zombie, known for his kick-ass '98 solo album
Hellbilly Deluxe and his film
The Devil's Rejects in 2005; but he's also the numbnuts responsible for
House of 1000 Corpses, so kind of a mixed blessing. Zombie received blessing from series originator John Carpenter, who told him to "do whatever he can to make it his own." Make it his own, he most certainly did.
Because we'll go over
Halloween 1978 in due time, I won't necessarily go through the movie's plot. The movie is split into two parts, the backstory/prequel, and the present day/remake. It does make many, many additions to Michael Myers's backstory and gives us a glimpse into his life as a child growing up. Which is an interesting route to take. However, the movie insists on presenting piles and piles of evidence that Michael Myers grew up in a broken home. Like, it takes the fact that he did so and buries you underneath it. The house is rundown, his family's poor, his sister's a slut, his step-dad or mom's boyfriend is just the
worst person ever imaginable, he's bullied at school, he tells his principal "fuck you", he kills cats and dogs; saying there are clues is an understatement. Clues have to be found, not blatantly thrown in your face. What Zombie did to make the remake his own thing was to make the audience sympathies with Michael over the growing up in a broken home. It made him a broken character that Zombie wanted the audience to relate to, minus the whole "killing people" part. You root for Michael when he beats the bully to death with a tree branch, slits the throat of Ronnie, whacks Judith's boyfriend's head with an aluminum baseball bat, and they even made Judith a shitty character enough to where you root for Michael to kill her too. Michael Myers is the main focus of the backstory, and the remake's story. I'm not necessarily saying that's a problem, but John Carpenter once said the main point behind Michael Myers was that the audience was never supposed to relate to him or sympathize with him. I can see how this was the biggest attempt by Zombie to make the premakequel his own work, but any fan of
Halloween is going to have a hard time swallowing the pill that Michael is the "hero" of the film, or at the very least the first half of the film. The nurse is mean to him, let's have him brutally shank her with a fork in the cafeteria. Judith was rude to him, let's stab her to death! Ronnie was a fucking ass, let's slit Ronnie's throat and watch him bleed out. Michael is not necessarily the bad guy in this movie. He's an anti-hero; somebody who does heroic deeds violently or whatever the cost.
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| "Is that what I think it is, Dr.?" "Yes, my dear. Old Spice." |
Now, moving past that, the movie as a
whole is not
that bad .In fact, it's still entertaining and I actually
do make a point to watch it during October season. Malcolm McDowell takes over the role of Dr. Sam Loomis and does a great job. His original dialogue is eerie and spine-tingling, and the recycled dialogue from Donald Pleasence in '78 is delivered in an entirely different manner. Some of the recycled dialogue seems a bit hokey when uttered by McDowell, but I think he's a huge highlight of this film. Sure, just like in Zombie's
Halloween II he's a book writer, but he's not quite a prick yet. That will come later. Across the board, Brad Douriff is fun as Leigh Brackett. He too makes the performance his own, as Zombie integrated Brackett moreso into the backstory of Michael Myers and made him a bigger piece of the folklore rather than being "just the town sheriff that happens to help". My only gripe is that he he disappears from the climax after they find Annie bleeding in the house, leaving it up to Loomis to save Laurie. Speaking of Laurie, there's the three main girls of the story. Laurie's now played by Scout-Taylor Compton. She takes Laurie from being a shy bookworm to an eccentric bookworm and makes her no longer enjoy babysitting as she did in '78. She's a different character, but the same character. It's weird, I don't know, I just know she's my favorite of the three girls. Danielle Harris returns to the franchise as Annie Brackett, Leigh's daughter and Laurie's friend. Having played Jamie Lloyd in
Halloween 4 and
5, it's weird to see her in a different role. Especially when her character is 17 and she's 29, but I digress. She takes Annie's character from being a bitch who can't act to a bitch who can. It's a great trade off and I think she's an improvement. My only gripe with her is we never got Danielle Harris's take on "Hey jerk. SPEED KILLS." Then there's Lynda, played by Kristina Klebe. She's...there. Pretty forgetful. In fact, she's only memorable because she shows full-frontal and full-rear nudity. Other than that, she's just...there. One of my favorite characters is actually Deborah Myers, played by Sheri-Moon Zombie, Rob's wife. Her character arc is pleasing and she's very well done. I take my proverbial hat off to her. She's someone who's down on her luck raising a slut, a psycho and a newborn on a stripper's salary dating a complete dickhead in a broken-down, impoverished home. We sympathize with her when Michael goes apeshit and kills Judith and Ronnie, basically leaving her alone with the baby Laurie. Her death is very iconic, simply because it's sad and I felt pretty down after watching her take her own life. She was perfectly cast and portrayed. She was
also perfectly ruined in
Halloween II two years later, but that's a horse of a different color. Ba-dum tss...
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| Spy Kids Game Over indeed... |
The movie is almost too adult to contain. I know horror movies usually are, but the amount of nudity in this movie is just tipping the scales of unsettling, even for someone as immature as myself. There's three sex scenes in the movie, four if you count the rape scene. There's Judith and her boyfriend, Lynda and Bob, and then Annie and Paul. Breasts in all three. Don't watch with your parents or you'll/they'll be scarred for life. Guarantee the living room freezes in a state of awkward confusion. On top of that, as you'd expect, the blood and gore is far over-the-top. It's about as bad as
Halloween II (2009), but here the deaths are simple and down-to-Earth. Oh, except the fact where the kid from
Spy Kids gets fucking massacred by a tree branch barrage, but I digress. Nobody's getting stabbed repeatedly or getting their heads smashed into a mirror over and over again. There is no shortage of blood, however. Ronnie getting his throat slit is unsettling. Judith's ugly boy toy gets his head smashed in with an aluminum bat. Many characters who get stabbed but don't die bleed profusely from the wounds and their mouths. The fake blood budget is a little bit higher than "a few bottles of it'. There's blood and gore everywhere. Just like Lynda's breasts. Everywhere.
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| Guys, quick! Look like the photographer just ruined our conversation |
So as I stated earlier, the movie's split into two acts. The first act is all Zombie and it's where he got ot shine. The entirety of the first half is basically the first five minutes of the original film. The only thing from Zombie's film that carries over to Carpenter's is Judith's murder. Everything else was conceived by Zombie and feels very original. It adds to the folklore and makes the characters we were introduced to in '78 more vibrant on screen. We know more about them and develop greater connections with them. Once Deborah kills herself, the movie rapidly switches gears to John Carpenter's
Halloween. You start seeing scenes replicated straight up, like when Michael is watching Laurie from across the street, when Michael appears from behind a hedge to watch the girls, when Loomis shows up Smith's Grove to investigate Michael's escape. All of it feels weirdly familiar. However, in touch with Zombie's conceived universe, some of the remade Carpenter scenes feel out of place or don't serve the overall scope of the story well at all. The key example is the graveyard scene. In Carpenter's movie, the graveyard scene was essential in that it let Loomis know that Michael had indeed "come home" to "visit his sister". In the Zombie scene, it serves no purpose other than to 1) pay homage to Carpenter and 2) give Zombie regular Sid Haig something to do. Other than that, serves almost no purpose to Zombie's story piece. Why would Loomis go to the cemetery?
The music is marvelously tributed by Tyler Bates. Bates took all of the original motifs from Carpenter's original score and gave them a modern-day sprucing up. His recomposed
Halloween theme is chilling, pays homage to original tune, and updates itself for modern audiences all at once. Great fun to listen to! Some of the other musical queues are hit-and-miss, but mostly hit. The inclusion of Kiss's "God of Thunder" needs no introduction. It's hugely known that Rob Zombie is a huge fan of that song, even covering it with his band White Zombie. I also like the inclusion of "Love Hurts", by Nazareth. Touching in the scene its played in.
All in all, Rob Zombie's
Halloween is a mixed concoction of weird. It's not
as weird as
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers; it's weird on a completely different level. Half of it feels like a Rob Zombie exploitation movie, and the other half feels like a
Halloween movie. Still, it's at least worth a watch to see a different take on the story that started it all. Zombie takes the Loomis, Laurie, and Brackett characters and gives them very interesting spins. Michael may be hit-or-miss with people in this one, but at least the atmosphere brings to life that charm of the autumn October Halloween feel. Zombie did just what John Carpenter had suggested; he made it his own. For better, or for worse.
"That was actually surprisingly good. I can't wait to see the sequel!" - What we all stupidly thought.
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