Rob Zombie Presents Rob Zombie's Halloween Directed by Rob Zombie

Remakes - we all love to talk shit about them. We're in an era where it has been determined commercially viable to constantly remake older movies, especially horror movies. A remake is not inherently bad, one of my favorite movies of all time is John Carpenter's The Thing, a remake of Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World, which is a damn fine movie itself. Classic movies tend to get remade the most, but I personally like the idea of taking movies from the past that were flawed and remaking them. For example, I hated Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, but I really liked the remake of it from a few years ago. The new one took the premise and built upon it, improved it and ended up being a better movie because of it. On the flip side, John Carpenter's The Fog definitely had room for improvement, but The Fog remake instead ended up being far worse than the original.

John Carpenter's work has been getting remade a lot in the past few years, and even though the quality of the new versions is nil, I don't get my panties in a bunch over it, because, fuck it, he's getting paid, so I'm sure he's happy about it. Unfortunately, the John Carpenter remakes are kind of becoming an obnoxious franchise of self-parody - I mean, go ahead, remake mediocre movies like Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog, but then they announced remakes of Halloween and The Thing.

When I first heard that they were remaking John Carpenter's Halloween, my reaction was, "Well, whatthefuckisthismotherfuckingcocksuckingbullshit?!" And I'm not even a HUGE fan of Halloween or Michael Myers, but come on! Then I heard Rob Zombie was attached to direct, and my attitude changed to, "Well... maybe it can work." Let me explain - I really think Rob Zombie is a great director, but, in my opinion, is a mediocre writer (I feel the same way about M. Night Shyamalan post-Unbreakable, but I don't feel compelled to write about him).

House of 1000 Corpses, as a whole, was a crappy movie, at least when you look at it as one single narrative with its assigned beginning, middle and end. But - if you take it apart and look at each scene independently and appreciate it visually, the colors, the design, the cinematography, and, of course, the gory special effects, it could have actually worked as an abstract, art house horror movie if the narrative was either abandoned or at least backed away from just a bit.

Rob Zombie followed up House of 1000 Corpses with a quasi-sequel, The Devil's Rejects. The two movies are almost like parallel dimensions, where the over-the-top bad-acid-trip cartoon monsters from House of 1000 Corpses are re-imagined as ruggedly naturalistic real world serial killers in The Devil's Rejects. The visual style of Rejects is beautifully retro, even winning over horror-movie-hater Roger Ebert for its artful homage to 70's era grindhouse flicks (and might I add this came out a year or so before the movie Grindhouse attempted to make that kind of thing the latest trend in horror cinema.) Unfortunately, the plot of Rejects meanders aimlessly, and while each scene stands on its own, strung together it leaves the narrative lacking, especially since there's supposed to be a pretty heavy point to the movie about how one's morality can become compromised when the pursuit of justice becomes the pursuit of vengeance. Oh, and the end sucks ass. Seriously. Fuck Skynard, and fuck Freebird.

So anyways - Rob Zombie's Halloween. When the credits rolled, as I was walking out of the theater, I could visualize one word, in ten foot tall flaming letters: RETARDED. This is not just a remake, but also a prequel. In the original, Michael Myers was a little tyke from what appeared to be a well-to-do family who killed his sister and never spoke again. In the remake, Michael has a home life very similar to that of real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas - instead of his mother being a prostitute, she's a stripper, and instead of a legless father, he has his mother's wheelchair bound, abusive boyfriend. Not only does New-Michael off his sister, he takes out his mom's boyfriend, his sister's boyfriend, a bully from school and some animals for good measure, in case you were, y'know, doubting his psycho-cred. Then after the night of the initial murders, he goes to the loony bin and chats up a storm to Dr. Loomis, makes masks to pass the time, kills a nurse, and finally turns into a giant (what the fuck were they feeding him in that institution, steroids?!)

The rest of the movie is a condensed retread of the original, because, afterall, we just killed 30 to 45 mins on Michael Myers' new, more edgy, more extreme back story, and, as we learned from Grindhouse, 3 hour movies don't put butts in seats. Michael Myers is now a Rob Zombie cartoon monster, in addition to the aforementioned gigantism, his mask, which represented blank emptiness in the original, is now all worn with lines in the face to make it look more edgy, extreme and haggard. Oh, and New-Michael Myers has the magical ability to sense that Laurie Strode is his sister, a development that was left for the original Halloween's sequel, and which was, in my opinion, totally stupid back then. Why Zombie felt like honoring that part of the Halloween "canon," yet [spoiler!!! felt the need to kill of Dr. Loomis /spoiler] I will never understand. And of course, since the final act of the original is one long drawn out series of "is he dead? oh no he's not!" (which was great in the original, btw) Zombie has to get more edgy and extreme than the original and drag it out even longer, to the point where you feel like the movie has ended five times before it actually ends.

Wow, see how many times I used the phrase "more edgy and extreme?" Yeah, Halloween 2007 is like Halloween 1978 filtered through a Mountain Dew commercial. Personally, I like my Michael Myers as a normal kid who up and killed his sister one day, never spoke after that, and chose to stalk Laurie Strode because she won the bad luck lottery and happened to deliver a key to the wrong house on the wrong day. If Rob Zombie wanted to remake Henry: Potrait of a Serial Killer, or, hell, make a whole new movie about Henry Lee Lucas and the controversy surrounding him, I think that would've been awesome, but cramming this shit into a remake of the one good movie in the Halloween franchise was just weak.

In the end, I wish Rob Zombie the best of luck on his future films and hope that he takes his fat paycheck from this, collaborates with someone whose equally as great of a writer as he is a director, and makes something totally awesome that will blow everyone away. I think he has it in him.