I just finished watching the 2007 remake of
Halloween, as done by Rob Zombie, starring everyone and Sherri Moon Zombie's butt. She has a very nice butt, I might add; I hope Mr. Zombie appreciates the booty he married into.
I was fully expecting a cinematic abortion; almost every podcast I listen to denounced this pretty completely. I was expecting something on the lines of suddenly the movie turns into X-Men 3 (which WAS a bad movie, by the way), or suddenly Micheal Myers bursts into song and wails
The Marriage of Figaro as he hacks and slashes "teenagers" getting freaky.
Honestly, I liked this movie just fine, and found it to be much more credible than any of the sequels to the actual movie. I like those just fine too (except Halloween 3 because SURPRISE! it sucks), but let's be honest-- they're pretty silly, and get sillier as they go along.
This version of the Myth of Micheal Myers was interesting; the Meyers family is shown as very discordant and dysfunctional. Mom's a stripper, step-dad's got a bad case of needle dick, big sister's got a touch of the Ho Bag, little Mikey likes to butcher his pets and school mates, and the baby.. is a baby. She's cool.
Micheal Myers is played more as a straight forward psychopath, evincing all of the traditional markers of a burgeoning killer. There is no mysticism here, jut a really BIG man in a mask terrorizing Haddonfield in his quest to find his unknowing baby sister.
This version of events deviated a lot from the original 1979
Halloween, but I don't regard that as sacrosanct like a lot of horror fans seem to do. Don't misunderstand-- I love the original version of the film, and have a copy of that as well as the
25 Years of Halloween DVD that came out a few years back. People tend to hold this up as the end all be all of slasher films, but I'm just not that emotionally invested in most of the slasher genre. I enjoy it in a brainless way, but supernatural stories are more likely to scare me.
The original is a beautifully shot movie to be sure, and very moody and creeping. In this respect I think the original is superior to the remake. Rob Zombie is a very competent technical director, if not given as much of an artistic bent as John Carpenter. But Rob Zombie's kill scenes are much more realistic, frighteningly so. Plus, you gotta respect a kid who stabs a nurse to death with a
fork.
John Carpenter is hit or miss with me-- on one hand we have
Halloween and
The Fog. On the other hand, he also did
The Ghosts of Mars and produced the horrible remake of
The Fog in 2005. So the idea of a remake of Halloween really didn't surprise me, and it was a pretty safe bet that Rob Zombie would get it an R rating, which he did.
I don't know that I would buy a copy of this for full price, but I'll snag it used for sure. It's worth a watch at the very least.
