Halloween

Like many of the horror fans out there I went through my phase of being angry and disgusted that they would remake Halloween and especially that Rob Zombie would be the director to do it. This eventually wore off and I came to terms with it. I am a fan of Rob Zombie and as it got nearer to the release date I came to believe that I would probably enjoy the movie, although I figured it still wouldn't compare to the original. Hell, I was even pretty excited to go see it (It's rare these days that we get to see horror films out of Hollywood made by people who actually give a sh*t about the genre, which is why I like Zombie even though I don't find him to be a genius director or anything like that.)

Unfortunately, I was pretty disappointed with what I saw. For the most part, the first half of the movie was interesting and held my attention but once it became night time, the whole film went downhill. Essentially, like many "slasher movies" today, the last 30 minutes or so of the film turned into a string of boring chase sequences. Don't get me wrong, chase sequences are essential to these kinds of movies, but they can't carry a movie for half an hour.

It seemed to me that one of the main problems was that Zombie seemed to drop the ball when Michael Myers completely turns into a silent killer. His talent as a writer is in creating interesting characters (i.e. house of 1000 corpses & the devil's rejects), but with no personality left in his killer, the script and other characters become boring. Rob Zombie is not a suspense director and the attempts he made at it during this film were pretty lame. It wasn't scary and none of the "jump scares" worked. This isn't to say that he is a bad filmmaker, he just seems to be out of his element with this movie.

Although I thought the back story was decent and entertaining enough, I still tend to find Michael Myers a more interesting character with less back story and more mystery like in the original.

I appreciate the effort put into the movie and I have given it a rating of 5 because I still think it was probably better than what they would have made with a different writer and director, but this movie just didn't work for me.

Luckily I got to see this at a drive-in theater along with the original Halloween and Grindhouse, so the night was still pretty great.

On paper, a "Halloween" remake looked interesting. Zombie tries to go back to the character's origin and reinvent him - it's a recent trend in Hollywood ("Batman Begins," "Casino Royale," the upcoming "Incredible Hulk," etc.), so it's not quite surprising that Hollywood greenlit the project and it got the push it received.

But the problem that arises while doing this with "Halloween" is that it comes into conflict with the concept of Michael being purely evil. Although I can understand what Zombie was trying to do by exploring Michael's background, it contradicts the whole point of the original. By providing a reason and displaying a human character on screen, you give the character a soul - and despite what Zombie may claim, this does NOT make Michael scarier. It makes him an average movie serial killer: a guy with a messed up life as a kid who snaps one day and goes on a killing rampage.

Is it scary? No. Gory? Yes. Realistic? At first. And if it were a movie about a serial killer, it would work. But it's not. This is a movie about a monster, a soulless creature; a boogeyman, as per the original film. Monsters aren't scary when we know they're flesh and blood.

Carpenter had a way of framing the action in the original movie. Michael stalks Laurie in her hometown, but we never see any real flesh behind the mask, we never really see him moving around like a normal human being. But we do here. He stands in the middle of an open road, in front of three teenage girls walking home from school, and they all see him. He stands there for a few moments, then trudges away off-screen. We actually see him walk away, instead of just appearing and disappearing as he did in the original film. Which method is scarier? The answer is clear.

Zombie spends 40 minutes or so building up Michael's character before he escapes from the ward. We see him killing animals as a child (and torturing them, too), a stupid subplot with his mom as a stripper and a typical school bully, and a promiscuous sister. The sexual talk is frank and disgusting - the mom's boyfriend (husband?) is talking about how cute her daughter's butt is, and at this point in the film we're not sure whether he might even be the father. It's just shock for shock value. Zombie has a tendency of this - blunt violence and blunt dialogue combined - and in a film like this, it seems cheap and fake and unnecessary. The heavy emphasis placed on the swearing - and I mean this literally (as in, the actors place a noticeable emphasis on the profanity they use) is almost unintentionally funny. Zombie cast his wife in the role of Michael's mother, and she can't act at all.

Donald Pleasence got stuck with the most unfortunate lines from the original film, but we were willing to forgive bad dialogue because of how well-made the film was otherwise. Here, Malcolm McDowell gets the worst of two worlds: he gets to handle an under-characterization with bad, bad, BAD dialogue AND a generally weak film to boot. The sequences with McDowell's version of Loomis are all completely clichéd - Zombie clearly writes his dialogue based on other films' dialogue. The "intimate" scenes at the mental ward between Loomis and Michael are awful. McDowell struggles with typicalities of the genre, such as the Dr. Who Wasted His Own Life By Devoting It To Someone Else's (he explains to Michael that his wife left him and he has no friends because of how involved he became with the case - and the dialogue itself is straight from any cop-vs.-killer flick). The recent film "Zodiac" had a similar theme of men losing their personal lives due to obsession over a murderer, but it was handled better. The whole Loomis character should have been dropped from the remake if all Zombie wanted to do with him was use him as a deus ex machina, by the way.

Overall, this feels like a redneck version of "Halloween," which is going to offend some people, but I can't think of any better way to describe it. It's trashy, vulgar, and silly - and hey, that's fine, if that's Rob Zombie's motif and he wants to make movies pandering towards that sort of audience. I have nothing against it, and I think it may work with some films - I can imagine him making a good re-do of "Natural Born Killers" (although I hope it never, never happens!).

However, when you're remaking an iconic, legendary, incredibly influential horror film - don't cheapen it by "reimagining" it with horror movie clichés and shock-value material. The very worst aspect of this remake is that it simply isn't scary at all - it's a typical slasher flick, a homicidal-man-on-a-rampage flick, which ironically is exactly what Zombie said he wanted to avoid.

The first film was eerie, spooky, and unnerving because Michael's motivations were cloudy and we weren't sure whether Laurie was right or wrong when she said he was the boogeyman. We only knew one thing: he wasn't entirely human.

But ever since that original movie, the filmmakers have attempted to keep expanding upon Michael's history: the second film developed a motivation for his killings (Laurie was his sister), the fourth offered more clues at his background, and now we come full circle with a complete remake of the original film.

Michael's true demonic core - the natural horror element of the series - is stripped bare and all that is left is a disturbed, abnormally tall redneck with greasy hair who hasn't showered in years wearing a silly mask going around killing people because he had an abusive family life as a child. Some things are better left unexplored.

This movie is underrated

Yes its not an oscar movie bue i really like the character development of Michael.

I normally dont like horror movies, i think most of them are pretty cringe.

But this one is worth a watch.

One of the only reasons this movie is hated so much is because Rob Zombie chose to remake it. Everybody said, "the movie should have never been remade, it was fine the way it was." I agree. But he was not just remaking it, Rob Zombie also made a back story for about a good 40 minutes and explained more about how Michael went wrong. And Rob Zombie said he did not want this to be like John Carpenters HALLOWEEN. He wanted it to be his own vision of this movie as if Carpenters never existed. Now some things I liked about this movie was, First of all, the death scenes were great. 2nd, it actually portrayed how real teenagers act today. 3rd, this was a great plot and showed how Michaels Life was and how he became so evil. And third, for once in a lifetime, this Michael Myers actually scared me more than the Halloween movies usually do. This movie has some good acting and killing scenes, and a great unexpected ending. Overall, I give Rob Zombies HALLOWEEN, a 7/10, or a 3.5/5.

Until now, all we know about Michael Myers was his strange and powerful will of killing. But in this one, we witness the born of his rage, disappointments, the reason of his unlimited hate on people and the sense of being wild. So far, I was thinking that he will not stop until his last family member is finished. But when you watch it, you will find the "real" answer of his purpose. The story is different than the original and I think you will like, even you will ask yourself if Michael is totally guilty or not. I mean, I believe that you will start to think he is not a callous killing machine. Recommend you to watch it in a late time of the day.