Rating of
2.5/4
This remake is better than all of the sequels
goodfellamike - wrote on 10/26/08
The first half of Halloween displays to us a rather dysfunctional family unit; led by the mother (Sheri Moon) and her boyfriend (William Forsythe), they appear to be absentee parents to three kids: newborn baby, Laurie, promiscuous teen Judith (Hanna Hall) and unpredictable teen Michael (Daeg Faerch) who has a penchant for torturing and killing small animals. Michael snaps and beats a bully to death then goes home and murders three people on Halloween night. He is then put in a mental institution and examined daily for over a decade by Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) who becomes obsessed by how shut down and emotionless his patient is, becoming more and more internal and dangerous as the years progress. These scenes are what work best in the film, establishing the unseen institution years the original film vaguely mentioned. It’s never fully explained just why Michael becomes so crazy, but director Rob Zombie turns him into a more fully developed character.
The second half of the film involves the now hulking Michael’s violent escape from the institution and his search for his sister, Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton), now a teenager living under a different name with a foster family. Laurie’s best friends become immediate targets for Michael, including Annie (Danielle Harris, who has played a Michael Myers’ victim in two previous Halloween films) who is the daughter of the sheriff (Brad Dourif) and Lynda (Kristina Klebe) who recreates the scene where Michael shows up dressed as a ghost. Michael plows through just about everyone in Laurie’s life and has a confrontation with her that builds to a drawn-out finale full of chases, fatalities and lots and lots of screaming. This second half of the film is pretty much a straight remake of Carpenter’s work with the usual Rob Zombie touches, though not quite as effective.
The performances are all over the place: McDowell is oddly cast (and unsuccessfully made-up to look younger during the institution years), but not quite as intense as Donald Pleasence was; Scout Taylor-Compton is required to do little more than provide an abundance of blood-curdling screams; comic relief is given by Forsythe as the wheel-chair bound father figure and Ken Foree as Joe Grizzly, a truck driver who meets an unfortunate demise in a bathroom stall; there’s even a sympathetic role for tough guy Danny Trejo, but one has to wonder why there are even appearances by horror veterans Clint Howard, Udo Kier, Dee Wallace, Richard Lynch and Sid Haig who collectively have very little to do; I guess enough familiar faces add a little fun to the mix.
One would expect no punches pulled in the gore department coming from the director of House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects, but this Halloween isn’t as graphic as you‘d think and never really tries to outdo the original. It’s more disturbing than scary, but there are at least a few good “Boo” moments to recommend it. And Zombie even pays homage by using Carpenter’s original score, albeit electronically enhanced. It’s hard to improve on John Carpenter’s 1978 atmospheric masterpiece of the same name, and director Rob Zombie certainly has not done that, but he has succeeded in humanizing Michael Myers to great effect and created a movie better than any of the original film‘s sequels. Any horror film can have a knife-wielding maniac in a mask, but there’s something more deeply disturbing about this 2007 update, we feel we know Michael Myers a bit more than we did back in the 70’s.
This is the third, but not final remake of a John Carpenter film in a few years, with Escape from New York still to come. What’s next, another Ghosts of Mars? Final Grade: B-
