Review of Halloween (2007) by Daniel G — 25 Nov 2012

Ok boys and girls, the season is almost upon us so get your bags ready, your make up on and tie down those masks, because we are going treating or treating as we see a remake of a classic, Halloween.

Rob Zombie invites us to a "reimagining" of John Carpenter's iconic horror flick and decides to give us a deeper look into the man behind the William Shatner mask, Michael Myers. In the original, Michael is first seen as part of a normal family, donning a clown costume and for basically no reason, kills of members of his family. In this version, we get a slightly different perspective. Zombie decides to try to explain why Michael does what he does and this is where the downfall of the movie begins. Instead of being a tower of evil and a mystery, we are led down the normal, clichéd road of a boy with a bad family life who then uses this as a reason to do evil acts. While this may give him a more "human" feel, it takes away any fear of the character that once was there. It also gives the weird view that we are supposed to feel sorry for Michael. Ummm...no. If that is the case, let's all send a Christmas card to Jason, Freddy, Chucky, Norman Bates, Leatherface, Pinhead, and Samara (the girl from the Ring movies) because they are really just misunderstood people, not soulless killing machines. Michael goes on to kill his step-dad, sister and his sister's boyfriend, while sparing his 2 year old baby sister.

Now, after the original killings, John Carpenter tells Michael's story through the eyes and words of Dr. Loomis (then played by Donald Pleasance). You can understand and relate completely to what Dr. Loomis says about the boy just from a few lines of dialogue as he continually refers to Michael as "it" and "the evil". No scenes were necessary to explain the 15 year gap. Here is where Zombie's "original", yet unoriginal at the same time, story kicks in even more. We see how the boy grows up in the institution where he was taken after the murders. He acts as if he doesn't know he did the horrible acts and constantly is wearing different masks throughout the scenes. He eventually just shuts off completely from the world and never speaks again. In this story, Dr. Loomis (played by Malcolm McDowell) is, for all intents and purposes, a pompous jerk who uses his experiences with Michael to make a book and become famous. A far cry from the original, where he cared about Michael, and then when he realized what he was, he cared enough about the world to try to keep him locked up forever.

Michael eventually escapes from the asylum and goes back to his hometown of Haddonfield. He somehow knows exactly where his sister, Laurie, is and starts to stalk her. Let's forget that he hasn't seen her in 15 years or even know that her name was changed to protect her. On Halloween night, he goes around killing all the friends he saw with Laurie until finally he is able to abduct his sister to take her "home". Again here is a vast difference between the two movies, in Carpenter's version, Michael is there to kill his sister, finishing what he started all those years ago. In Zombie's remake, he is there to find his sister so they can be together since she is the only one he cared for out of his family. But since Laurie doesn't know who he is, she tries to escape and this angers Michael enough that he tries to kill her.

Now the ending, how do I put this, is just putrid. During the movie, Michael takes falls, stabs, bullets and he always gets up. At the end of the movie, he and his sister fall from a second story window where she is able to get up faster than him and then he allows her to shoot him in the face. Wow, the 6'5" guy who can walk through windows and walls can't stop a 5'3" teenager. Hmmmm...doesn't quite flow does it?

The biggest problems with this movie are exactly what Zombie thought were the best parts. The broken home angle, overly brutal violence, over the top gore, cursing every other word, and of course, pretty much every woman is naked at some point in the film. I have nothing against nudity mind you (;-p) but it was thrown in there just to have it in there. There are zero scares in the whole film either. It is a very sterile film with no emotion which brings me to the other problem. Filmmakers have to understand, if we don't care about the people being killed, we are going to root for them to die just to get them out of the movie. Plus that creates no interest or suspense in any way. That just turns the movie into an action film in a dark setting.

If you took away the title, the mask and the character of Michael Myers, this would be an average horror flick so I will give it credit for that. However, when you add Halloween as the title, you have a standard to live up to and Zombie just couldn't do it.

I will give Halloween 2 jack o'lanterns out of 5.

Well fans, the lights are coming up so you can stop clutching your chairs or the person next to you. Don?t trip on your bags of candy as you walk out of the theater. An remember, there are no boogie men out there, or are there?!?!?