I've said it before: I'm a huge horror movie fan.
That's an understatement.
I'm a person who took a 1500 mile road trip to spend an afternoon at the mall the original
Dawn of the Dead was filmed in.
Bear this in mind when I tell you that over the weekend, I saw Rob Zombie's take on
Halloween.
When it comes to Rob's movies, I'm about 50% with him. I thought
House of 1000 Corpses was more derivative than homage, and was severely lacking in nuance, whereas I though
The Devil's Rejects was a brilliant piece of celluloid.
When it comes to
Halloween, well, it's a bloody classic, on par with
Psycho, really.
And, like that bit of Hitchcockian brilliance,
Halloween should have been left alone.
Let's start with what made the original so fantastic before I begin excoriating the dreck which poisoned my eyeballs this weekend...
The origin of Michael Myers (the killer, for all you uninitiated) given in the 1978 film was brief, sketchy and mysterious. He was a young boy of about 10 who, one Halloween night for unexplained reasons, viciously murdered his older sister (after she had the worlds FASTEST fuck with her boyfriend, clocking in at about 48 seconds from the time they went upstairs to the time the boyfriend leaves the house). After the murder, his parents, who had been out, find him outside, in his clown costume, holding the bloody knife and completely catatonic.
Flash forward about 15 years and Michael, now an adult, escapes from the asylum and returns home, killing several teenagers (seemingly at random) and eventually stalking and trying to kill the female lead, Laurie Strode (Played by up-and-comer Jamie Lee Curtis). It is during this sequence that we, as an audience learn that Michael is not just purely evil, but nearly superhuman in his durability, even taking 6 shots at close range and falling out of a second-story window before completely vanishing.
What made this such a brilliant film was the simplicity of it mixed with the fact that it deliberately
OMITTED motive. Michael was raised in a typical, middle to upper-middle class family (as was evident in the brief intro scene) and his attack lacked any kind of reasoning. Essentially, the monster was any one of us. Somewhere, without any kind of warning, one of our children would wake up and become the embodiment of evil.
Now, on to Rob Zombie's version.
Here, Rob took it upon himself to give Michael a more complete history. We learn more about his family (very different from the original version) where his mother is a low-pay stripper, his step-father figure (we're never sure of the marital status between his mother and this man, though it is clear they are in some kind of abusive relationship) is a drunk who has been in some kind of severe accident, his sister is, apparently either a high-school hooker, or simply just a slut, and Michael, himself, is a sensitive soul who is tormented both in and outside of the home because of it (so many characters call him "fag" it becomes a cliche of a cliche.) As with many in that kind of situation, Michael asserts control and dominance in the only way he feels he can: by harming and killing animals.
I have to admit here; if this film were
NOT called
Halloween, I would have been okay with this bit. It was, though simplistic by psychological standards, a pretty good dramatization of the background of a garden-variety sociopath, leading up to spree-killing, or even (though not as likely) serial-murder. Unfortunately, this film
WAS called
Halloween, and therefore, it pains me that Zombie took one of the key pieces of the lore of this movie and ripped its soul out.
The film progresses to Michael's mother meeting in school with Dr. Loomis (played here by Malcom McDowell, one of my favourite actors) Pre-murder. During this, we get the first glimpse of Michael's approaching breakdown. He tracks down and brutally beats a school bully to death.
This scene was actually quite well done in it's stark honesty. It wasn't overly gruesome, but the visuals of the bully pleading for his life were well played and sufficiently under-stated to be actually quite disturbing.
From here, though, the film REALLY breaks down.
Not wanting to type for much longer, and also not wanting "spoil" much of the movie, I'll keep the rest a bit vague.
Somewhere along the way, Michael has gone from having a bit of an affection for his clown mask (he wears it quite a bit) to having an almost debilitating and all-consuming schizophrenic need to deal with his fracturing personality by wearing various masks to bring his personality traits to the fore-front. This, while a fascinating phenomenon in reality, is
NOT supported by any of the psychology presented in the film (okay, I admit, I'm a psychology geek, as well).
Eventually, Zombie gets to the meet of the original story. Sadly, he's spent so much time giving the history of Michael (and causing us to try to sympathize with him), he has only about 1/3 the amount of time to tell the story, and he has to try to get us to fear someone he spent 2/3 of the film trying to get us to understand and even care about. That makes the last 1/3 of the movie very confusing.
Additionally, Whereas the original film had Michael presented as a slow, but determined juggernaut of death, this version presents Michael as being fast and brutally strong, spending much of his "stalking time" in an enraged rampage, smashing through walls and generally behaving in a "Hulk-like" manner.
Finally, my last point.
Look, I know it's the 21st century. I'm an open minded guy. My question, though is this:
Rob, why did you put up such a STRONG bisexual vibe one the female characters? They went from being best friends (in the original) to seeming like friends who fuck each other when their boyfriends are busy. I've got no sweat with the whole bisexual thing, but if this was your intention, then don't beat around the bush with it. Don't
hint at the bisexuality, come out and say it. Not gratuitously, mind you, but there isn't anything wrong with it. As I said, it's the 21st century: we can HANDLE the fact that sexuality isn't what our parents told us it is.
