Halloween (2007/Theatrical Film Review)

 

Stars: Malcolm McDowell, Tyler Mane, Daeg Faerch, Sheri Moon Zombie, Scout Taylor-Compton

Director: Rob Zombie

Critic's rating: 1 out of 10

 

Review by Chuck O'Leary

 

At the 25th anniversary convention for John Carpenter's Halloween in 2003, somebody asked an on-stage panel a question about the possibility of remaking Carpenter's horror classic.  Charles Cyphers, who played Sheriff Brackett in the first two films in the series, had the perfect answer: "Why remake a masterpiece?"

Furthermore, why remake a suspense masterpiece with a torture-porn schlockmeister like Rob Zombie?

Carpenter's 1978 original is a skillfully-made exercise in how to slowly build suspense and a pervading sense of dread.  Zombie, on the other hand, is all about splatter.  Clearly a slasher flick of a lower pedigree with more killing and gore such as Friday the 13th, The Burning or even Halloween II would have been more Zombie's speed.

For instance, the original Halloween has a body count of four people and one German Shepherd.  Only three of the murders of human beings are seen on screen, and they're accomplished with little bloodshed.  In Zombie's remake, there's already four brutal, blood-soaked killings even before 10-year-old Michael Myers gets sent to the insane asylum.

As pointless and totally unnecessary as Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho and John Moore's remake of The Omen were, at least they respectfully stayed relatively close to the blueprints of the masterful originals.  Zombie, though, ends up desecrating a classic by making one terrible choice after another.  By adding more characters and killings for killing's sake everything else is under-developed.  The rock-star-turned-director (whose real name is Robert Cummings) and his Director of Photography, Phil Parmet, also have no idea how to use a widescreen composition -- the original was  shot in real anamorphic Panavision as opposed to cheapo Super 35mm used in this  bigger-budget remake -- to the effect Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey did on the '78 original.  And the climax, which was nerve-racking in Carpenter's Halloween is choppily edited and darkly photographed to the point of incoherence in the remake.

Several death scenes were added during a week of reshoots in late June, 2007, a couple of which are noticeable in how disjointed they remain from the rest of the film.

In Carpenter's original as well as in most of the subpar sequels, Michael Myers was a frightening, mysterious figure; evil incarnate in the shape of a man.  Here Zombie ruins the Myers' mystique by explaining that Michael Myers is simply another result of an abusive upbringing.  The first 30 minutes of Zombie's film are devoted to the dysfunctional childhood of 10-year-old Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch).  His mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) is a stripper, his teenage sister (Hanna Hall) is a skank, his stepfather (William Forsythe) is a drunken, verbally-abusive couch potato and he gets picked on at school -- somehow the idea of evil incarnate randomly emerging from middle-American averageness was a lot scarier than the "bad childhood" psychological profile Zombie provides here.

After murdering four people in a day, Michael is sent for a permanent stay a Smith's Grove Mental Hospital where he's put under the care of Dr. Samuel Loomis (a positively bored-looking Malcolm McDowell, who won't make anybody forget Donald Pleasence) and appears to be the only patient in the entire facility.

In the first of many misguided changes, young Michael is heard speaking several times as a 10-year-old before he quits talking altogether a couple years into his incarceration.  After 17 years at Smith's Grove, Michael grows into the near seven-foot former wrestler Tyler Mane, who's the equivalent of the Undertaker or Kane from the WWE.  MM's gone from being "The Shape," sneaking up on victims and eerily seeming to appear and disappear at will, to being a long-haired Hulk in a mask and mechanics overalls more likely to charge after victims like a bull.

One of the obvious problems with Zombie's Halloween, and there are many, is that Michael Myers is the only character Zombie cares about – not unexpected from the sick pup who clearly sympathized more with his trailer-trash killers than their victims in his two previous torture tests of torture-porn, House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects (reviewed on Blu-ray elsewhere on this site).  In fact, Zombie has made the white-trash scuzbucket version of Halloween in which most of the characters are made to be as unkempt and sleazy-looking as he is.  Too many characters have long hair and look like they're in desperate need of a bath and barber.  Even Michael appears so cruddy looking after his escape that you should be able to smell him before you see him.

The screen time of the three babysitters has been curtailed significantly, and they're hardly developed at all in Zombie's re-working of Carpenter and Debra Hill's original screenplay.  In Carpenter's original, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) was a great heroine, a shy, but ultimately courageous wallflower who we're rooting for all the way.  In Zombie's version, Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) is less sensitive, less intelligent and more of your typical teenage airhead.  And her two closest friends, Annie (Danielle Harris, who appeared as a child in "Halloween 4 and 5" and Lynda (Kristina Klebe), are both turned into one-note sluts lined up for the slaughter.  Even Dr. Loomis is made less sympathetic, going from an intensely dedicated professional in the original to somewhat of a self-involved opportunist in Zombie's pitiful "re-imagining."

Hideous beyond words and a strong contender for worst film of 2007 as well as the worst remake ever, Zombie's Halloween adds lots of brutality, bloodshed, nudity, vulgarity and a much higher body count, but he totally forgot about the most important element that made Carpenter's original a masterpiece -- suspense.

Even worse than the worst of the Halloween sequels, the only thing scary about Rob Zombie's Halloween is what a disaster it is.