Welcome to Mike's Movie Review! Before I get started, allow me to introduce myself. I'm Mike, and I enjoy watching movies, and sharing my thoughts, ideas and interpretations with others. I do tend to write a lot, because I have a lot to share, so you should probably be prepared to receive a lot of information. Now that you know a little about me, I'll start off with my premiere movie review. The subject: Rob Zombie's Halloween.
John Carpenter's original 1978 horror vehicle, about a psychopath who stalks and murders babysitters on Halloween night, began an era in the genre that has for better or worse lasted to present day. It also helped launch horror's sub-genre: slasher films. There is an excellent review of Carpenter's Halloween at the web site And You Call Yourself A Scientist! and my own examination here of Rob Zombie's re-imagining, which I have seen twice, has been influenced in part by this analysis. There's another spot-on review at DevonLohan.com, which makes its points a helluva lot pithier than I do, but seeing as how this is my first review I hope you'll forgive me.
Zombie's interpretation of the Michael Myers story is formed around the killer's dark origins, exploring the forces that shaped him into the rampaging beast he ultimately becomes. In this, Zombie succeeds brilliantly. The story does not explain what the force is that compels Myers to kill, because it can no more be explained than that which drove serial killers such as Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, or John Wayne Gacy to murder. In this regard, Zombie's adaptation is very much like the original film. What exists in Michael Myers is a force too terrible to imagine, and which ultimately consumes his very soul. While killers such as Gein, Gacy, and in later years Ted Bundy and Dahmer, show that they at least retain enough of their humanity to be able to walk among people and interact with their prey on a human level, this is not present in Michael Myers. What's there is only pure killing instinct, animal-like mentality.
The movie opens with ten-year-old Michael Myers, already a twisted little psychopath with a penchant for mutilating small animals to death. Sheri Moon Zombie (Rob's wife and the star of his previous two movies, House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects as well as his music videos) delivers a very good performance as Michael's long-suffering mother, Deborah. She's the one who has to hold the entire household together, being the only member actually working -- which happens to be at the local strip club, setting up the school restroom conflict that leads to Michael's first human kill later in Act One. Her verbally abusive and physically useless second husband Ronnie, played here to slimy perfection by William Forsythe, has been reduced to a cripple following some event that is implied to be a major ass-kicking as a result of his mouthing off to the wrong person(s). All he can do to pass the time is drink, hurl insults, and make passes at his wife's teenage daughter Judith. Speaking of Judith, she really isn't much better. Treading down the same path of bad decisions her mother made, she takes her anger at her stepfather out on her little brother. Into this mix baby Laurie is thrown, and she can only react to the daily traumas surrounding her by crying very loudly.
Sheri Moon Zombie's portrayal of a woman who fell into a really bad life and is barely able to hold things together makes her the star of the movie's first half. As it becomes clear that her son has needs she cannot possibly see to, Michael's degeneration into a full blown murderer is completed as he makes one of the bullies who torments him toward the end of Act One his first human victim. But, with the adults all distracted this goes unnoticed. And that is the central theme of the first act: how this sick and evil monster managed to fall through the cracks. This is how most, if not all, serial killers end up doing what they do for as long as they do -- they fall through the cracks, with the people around them too wrapped up in their own troubles or distracted by other events to notice what's happening. And by the time they do in this film, it's too late; on Halloween night, Michael Myers goes on the killing spree that leads to his commitment for the next seventeen years.
Act Two takes place at Smith's Grove Sanitarium, where Michael is committed to the care of Doctor Sam Loomis. This is where we see the final degeneration of Michael Myers into the beast of prey he is destined to become. His mother, unable to deal with this after having lost everyone else dear to her, commits suicide. After that, there really isn't anything left to show of Michael Myers' development, so we cut forward to the scene where Doctor Loomis, having failed to make any progress with his patient, is finally forced to give up and move on with his own life. Malcolm McDowell turns in a competent performance here, making the character far less of the near-raving psychiatrist portrayed by the late, great Donald Pleasance and more a man compelled to warn others of the evil he has witnessed in the only way he can and still maintain credibility: a book followed by the lecture circuit. This results, ironically and tragically however, in Loomis's dismissal later in the film as an opportunist making money off of a terrible tragedy. I thought this a more realistic a depiction than that of Pleasance's Doctor Loomis; in the original, his ravings are brushed off as those of someone projecting his own imaginings onto a comatose patient who hasn't spoken, or moved of his own volition, in years. By contrast, the remake suggests that while the administrators at Smith's Grove take the threat Michael Myers poses seriously enough to keep him chained considering his violent tendencies, the perception of exploitation of the maniac's victims by an opportunistic psychiatrist perhaps exaggerating the danger leads many to do the precise opposite.
Then comes Michael's escape from Smith's Grove, which in Rob Zombie's story is even more savage than the killer's initial spree. Again the director takes care to treat the killings in a plausible light, though the final one borders somewhat on the absurd as Michael ends the life of the one person at Smith's Grove that was kind to him. There is no mercy, and the scene is clearly meant to demonstrate the complete lack of any redeeming qualities in the killer. After that, the full-blown re-make portion of Halloween begins. And this is where the movie's few flaws begin to come through.
Because the new film makes Michael Myers the chief focus, it is only natural that what made the original film so popular with audiences would be cut to pieces (no pun intended). In Carpenter's movie, the main character is Laurie Strode, and it is with her that our sympathies lie. As AYCYAS points out, one of the things that makes Jamie Lee Curtis's character stand out from most horror movie heroines is that she is intelligent, resourceful, responsible, and cares deeply about her charges -- in other words, responsible. Since she is too shy to chase after boys, as her friends do, she directs her energies toward her emerging maternal instincts. The result is that Curtis's Laurie Strode is smart enough to sense the danger coming, though because it is not yet fully apparent she cannot yet fully see it. In short, Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode is almost the complete antithesis of the slasher film heroines who come after her; rather than someone who is the "final girl" solely because of her virginity, Curtis's character is the last woman standing because of her perceptive abilities and her inherent responsibility and care for the children whose lives are entrusted to her. The relationship between Curtis's Laurie Strode and Tommy Doyle is like that of an aunt or mother, and so her fight is motivated along those lines. Newcomer Scout Taylor Compton's rendition of Laurie Strode, by contrast, is irritated with her young charges and acts like someone who'd rather be doing something else than babysitting these annoying little brats. The cuts in character development in the movie's second half makes Compton's Laurie Strode fundamentally no different than the slasher "heroines of the 1980s and 1990s. This is not to say that Compton, who made her starring debut in this film, does a bad job with the material she has to work with -- in fact, she does an incredible job. But the script's lack of development for her character doesn't leave her with much to work with, and it shows. I don't consider this the fault of the actress, or necessarily the fault of the script writer, for the reason stated above.
Again, the loss of character development in the second half was a natural consequence of devoting so much of it to Michael Myers and his poor mother. I just thought it a shame that Zombie couldn't spend the extra time and money he was given to film extended scenes making the main victim more sympathetic. Another flaw is the inclusion of the revelation, which wasn't told until the sequel to the original Halloween, that Michael is after his baby sister. What made Carpenter's horror film so frightening is that there appeared to be no rhyme or reason to Michael's predations. Succumbing to the pressure in the early 1980s to make a sequel, by which time Friday the 13th and other slasher movies necessitated pandering to newly-established genre guidelines just to be able to compete at the box office, Carpenter wrote in the whole sister-Samhain business that future sequels ended up following until the eighth installment. But in the first movie, this is not yet revealed. So why did Rob Zombie need to include elements from the sequel in a re-imagining of the original Halloween?
The most obvious reason of course is in the exploration of Michael Myers' origins, but another reason is probably the director's stated desire to make it next to impossible to do a remake of Halloween II. After eight films, over the course of which Michael Myers degenerated into a caricature of himself (as also happened to Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Krueger and Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees), Zombie obviously felt it was time to lay the franchise to rest despite his breathing new life into it. So he set the film's climax up so there would be little chance of a sequel -- at least, not one that he would be asked to helm. In so doing, however, Zombie played around with the franchise's continuity. And one of the worst mistakes any storyteller can make is to fail to maintain the integrity of a story's continuity (a very pet peeve of mine).
Another way in which Zombie's retelling makes the mistake of borrowing from Halloween II is in the amount of blood depicted. The gore and elaborateness of the killings in that installment was pumped up, whereas in the first movie Carpenter does far more with a simple knife, a minimum of blood, and jump-out sequences to scare the audience, than the gross-out factor of blood and complicated death scenes possibly can. In Halloween II, however, Carpenter and director Rick Rosenthal are compelled to indulge in gross-outs and elaborate killings. This, too, was done in order to pander to the guidelines established in the endless array of copycat slasher movies that followed the original Halloween. Because the new slasher sub-genre demanded copious amounts of cinematic blood, entrails, nudity and over-the-top murder scenes something got lost that few if any have been able to recapture. So I suppose Zombie can be forgiven for following the formula set down in what amounts to genre stone.
Despite these flaws in Rob Zombie's Halloween, the movie manages to work very well. What blew me away was how real the characters were. The dialog was superbly written, and delivered by an excellent cast of actors and actresses. Tyler Mane, a former professional wrestler who cut his acting teeth as Sabertooth in the X-Men movies, does a fine job taking the core elements of Nick Castle's portrayal of the Shape and pushing it to its logical extreme. Mane makes Michael Myers a rampaging beast, the proverbial bull in the china shop, but takes care to reign it in when circumstances dictate. (Mane does a splendid job playing around with his co-stars in the manner of a cat playing with its food before killing it.) The result is a depiction that truly brings to mind a very dangerous animal, a predator that can stalk its victims by hiding and biding its time until the moment to strike arrives. And once that moment comes, that's when things get brutal.
Then there is the outstanding performance by Halloween 4 and Halloween 5 veteran Danielle Harris, who as fans of the franchise know made her cinematic debut as the daughter of Laurie Strode. Her portrayal here of Annie Brackett is excellent, her youthful appearance (Danielle is now thirty, by the way) combining with her acting skills to make a very plausible performance. Sheri Moon Zombie, as I said, delivers an incredible performance. And Brad Dourif as sheriff Leigh Brackett far outdoes Charles Cyphers' portrayal. Whatever you might think of Rob Zombie's movies, you have to give him credit for knowing how to pick his cast members. There was not so much as a single bad actor in this movie, and even the minor roles were played as if they were major. Look for cameos by horror veterans, as well as other cast members from House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects (I bet you can't recognize Bill Moseley).
Overall, Rob Zombie's Halloween stands as an equal to John Carpenter's vision. It isn't perfect, but then no movie is. A lot of fans dreaded this movie, making negative judgments even before filming was completed. But for those of you who like Rob Zombie's films, and who are willing to approach this one with an open mind, I think you'll find yourself enjoying it.
