Rob Zombie must’ve had one screwed up childhood.
For any human being to write and direct a picture as
vile as Zombie’s update of John Carpenter’s
Halloween requires not only a fondness for
violence on said human’s part, but a serious need to
indulge in repressed emotions. Watching this movie, I
sensed that I was witnessing the work of a filmmaker
who needed to get something off of his chest, to
express serious levels of violence as a form of
psychological heeling. Halloween indulges and
revels in pornographic torture far more than any
healthy horror film should, reaching much further into
the depths of brutality than the envelope-pushing
Saw and Hostel films ever have. Something
profound had to have happened to Zombie in his past to
inspire him to make a picture as ugly as this one.
What would compel Zombie,
whose House of 1,000 Corpses was actually a
rather exciting and alive piece of horror, to make this
version of Halloween—I do not know. Given the
harshness of the picture itself, I shudder to think what
feelings may have contributed to its conception. Either
Zombie just likes the idea of violence, or he took the
idea of “art imitating life” far too seriously when
writing his script. In his Halloween, characters
are stabbed, hit over their heads with sticks and
baseball bats, and strangled with a stunning degree of
realism. The picture is so graphic, in fact, that it
never manages to become scary. Viewers will
merely cringe at the film’s accurate depiction of the
brutality inflicted by villain Michael Myers, rather
than actually think about or be haunted by it. As was
bombarded by his excessive use of gore, I found myself
wishing Zombie would’ve just once thought to himself:
“What would the original ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’
do?” while making Halloween.
Unlike Carpenter’s original
film, which provided precisely six minutes of back-story
on how Michael Myers came to be, Zombie’s Halloween
spends nearly an hour depicting the villain’s
psychological road to evil. This gives the
writer/director an excuse to indulge in an abundance of
unnecessary violence. In addition to slaughtering his
older sister on Halloween Night as he did in Carpenter’s
film, young Michael here also decides to take out a
school bully, his mother’s boyfriend, and his sister’s
boyfriend. This time around, Michael additionally has a
younger sister (he thankfully spares her on his
killing-spree), who comes into play later in the story
in one of the most moronic third-act plot-twists of
recent memory.
Other then the heightened
level of violence and the aforementioned plot-twist, the
rest of Halloween’s story remains rather
unchanged in this remake. Unfortunately, what Carpenter
did with style and tension, Zombie does with
gruesomeness and tastelessness. The time that Michael
spends in jail after his initial crimes is handled in an
entirely boring manner, and his later escape from
captivity is too inevitable and expected to be
thrilling. By the time he returns, years later, to
terrorize his old neighborhood once again on Halloween
night, the movie has already overstayed its welcome.
Much to viewers’ dismay, they must then sit through
another forty-five minutes of Michael’s pointless and
stomach-churning murders. Zombie never seems to
understand that the more blood he throws around
onscreen, the less scary the movie becomes (not that it
was ever frightening in the first place).
Halloween’s poor
quality seems especially disappointing when one recounts
the clear passion that Zombie showed for both
reinventing and nostalgically remembering Old Horror in
his House of 1,000 Corpses, whatever that film’s
problems may’ve been. This is a barbaric motion picture
with hardly any redeeming qualities. (The only thing I
can think of that the movie has going for it is Scout Taylor-Compton’s
refreshingly updated take on the Jamie-Lee Curtis
character of the original.) I certainly hope that Zombie
clears up whatever repressed, violent thoughts he has
inside his head before making his next horror film.
-Danny
Baldwin, Bucket Reviews (9.2.2007)
