“Halloween” is a film for true horror genre fans,
made by none other than the ultimate fanboy himself,
rocker-turned-director Rob Zombie.
Having built a reputation with genre offerings “House
of 1,000 Corpses” and “The Devil’s Rejects,” Zombie
uses the same ingredients – gore, topless young girls,
profane language and more gore – that got him fan
devotion and mainstream attention from those films in
his remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 classic.
Whereas Carpenter opted for genuine
jump-out-of-your-seat frights instead of
bloodshed, Zombie prefers the latter, choosing
to show in brutal, bloody detail the havoc Michael Myers, “Halloween’s” infamous whitemasked
killer, wreaks on a small Illinois town. To be
fair, Zombie tries genuinely to develop his characters
(at least Myers) and chronicle a story of a young boy
transformed into a killer, but by showing and telling
so much, Zombie ultimately leaves little to viewers’
imaginations. This is the mirror opposite of Carpenter’s
“Halloween,” whose attempts to scare are successful
because of the film’s very ambiguity.
Carpenter is noticeably vague, for example, about
Myers’ reason to kill. Zombie, on the other hand,
spends at least a third of his “Halloween” exploring
Myers’ psychology as a young boy. As viewers discover
early in the remake, Myers’ homicidal tendencies are
an outburst of his troubled home life.
Young Myers’ (Daeg Faerch) mother’s grungy
boyfriend (William Forsythe) jeers at him for wearing
a clown mask around the house, his elder sister (Hanna
Hall) shrugs him off as a nuisance, and his mother (Sheri
Moon Zombie), the only one who seems really to care
for the boy’s well-being, can barely keep an eye on him
because of her time-consuming job as a stripper.
As if things couldn’t get worse for the tyke, Myers
has to deal with ruthless bullies at school who lampoon
him like his mother’s boyfriend. School psychologist
Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), alarmed by Myers’
killings of cats and dogs, tries to talk the boy through
his problems, but it’s too late.
On Halloween, Myers unleashes his frustration, first
savagely beating to death his main bully with a tree limb
and later slaying his mother’s boyfriend, his sister and
her boyfriend in an equally gruesome fashion.
These scenes, and so many others like them throughout
the film, make it tortuously clear that Zombie knows
what his gore-hound audience wants. He obviously is
not concerned about the highbrow critics or the easily
squeamish.
In a rather jerky transition, “Halloween” shifts
halfway from Myers’ back-story to present day. After
languishing in a sanitarium for 17 years without saying
a word, Myers (Tyler Mane), now a brawny, mask-making
hulk who looks like he could fill in for one of the members of
rock band Slipknot, is ready for fresh air and fresh blood. He’s
scheduled his homecoming on none other than – you guessed it – Halloween.
What follows after Myers makes his arrival is montage
after montage of murder and mayhem, at a rate that gives
viewers little time to recoup.
In “Halloween’s” second half,
Zombie proves less willing to develop his characters,
even vital ones like protagonist Laurie Strode (Scout
Taylor-Compton), Myers’ long-lost baby sister. A slew
of cult film icons, such as Ken Foree and Sid Haig,
make cameos as clueless police officers and pedestrians,
but Myers shows their expendability by slicing and
dicing through them almost as soon as they appear
onscreen.
“Halloween” builds to a climax when Myers and his
sister meet in a showdown that ends in such a way that
a film sequel — an inevitability in today’s movie market
— seems likely. If the seven sequels to Carpenter’s
“Halloween” are foretelling, a new “Halloween” franchise
might as well be ensured.
Maybe next time, if a “Halloween II” remake sees
the light of day, the film marketers will consider an
October release.
Grade: C