Halloween - The Beginning

This movies takes a different approach to what makes Michael Myers terrifying. In the past his inhuman mas murders were shocking because of the absolute lack of emotion and more machine like manner in which things occur. Zombie offers audiences a background on myers. Where before the terror came in the lack of explanation, Zombie creates terror by showing how empty and how reasonless he was at 10 years old.

An interesting note about the movie is after Michael at 10 you never see his face. This part may not be different from standard Halloween movies, but unlike those, in this film you have already seen Michael's face as a boy. This then leaves the audience placing the boys face beneath the mask of the 30 year old monster making the idea of these overly brutal killings more difficult to chalk up to another death in a slasher flick. The movie gives less focus to Lori Strode and much more focus on Michael and his progressions from 10 to 30.

Zombie makes the smart call of not completely taking his own new plot line, but also not creating an exact carbon copy, leaving in specific scenes and details but still skipping over some of the more memorable ones. No, it is not John Carpenter's movie remastered, but then if you want that just run it through some filters to make his movie look new. Instead, this movie feels like a Zombie movie but in all the right ways. Best Halloween in a very long time.

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.

I'm an indie filmmaker, and Carpenter's "Halloween" is one of my pillars of the film-making faith. I was not at all happy when I heard there was going to be a remake.

Zombie's "House of 1,000 Corpses" was kind of decent, and I loved "The Devil's Rejects," so I was looking for a remake that butchered the original but was at least interesting to watch, which is more or less what I got.

In RZ fashion, it was intense at times, and beneath the un-needed profanity, blood, and nudity there was a captivating story, but there was ZERO SUSPENSE, and ABSOLUTELY NO REAL SCARES. As soon as the movie ended I told my friends, "This should've been called 'Michael Myers,' not 'Halloween.' Up until Halloween night of 1995 (or whenever the present was) it was an interesting and intense story, then it fell apart. Halloween night came way too fast, and there was not nearly enough time to get to know the girls (especially Laurie), and no real reason to care about them. I actually thought as I was watching it, "Wow, it's night already, how'd that happen?" Michael stalking Laurie while waiting for night to fall was sorely missed, and the lack of it took away the suspense that made the night terrifying... which is why this movie was not at all scary.

So, my $0.02, it should've been called "Michael Myers," not "Halloween." It was interesting until Lynda and Bob all of a sudden are at the Myer's house. Had there been more building to the end (Halloween night) it may have been more effective, but as it was it seemed unconnected and rushed, like RZ said, "I got this great back story on Michael Myers... oh, crap, I gotta remake the original film... here..." And, of course, it wasn't the least bit scary. It was intense, Judith's death was a little hard to watch, but there's a HUGE GAPING DIFFERENCE between something being scary due to suspense and something making you feel uncomfortable because it is intense, RZ didn't even come close to accomplishing the former.

Definitely not Carpenter's "Halloween," not a bad movie, not a scary movie, but overall an interesting movie... hopefully RZ drops some cut scenes to better tie the end into the rest of the film when it comes out on DVD.

I can't give it more than 5-stars because of how I feel about remakes, so on a remake scale of 1-5 I give it a 4, had the ending better fit into what came before it I would give it a 5... had it been remotely scary I'd break my own rule and add on another star.

Every story is worth telling, it's just how you tell it - Me. Have Fun!

When Rob Zombie was offered the chance to remake Halloween, he went to John Carpenter to gain his blessing. Carpenter's response was, "Make it your own." Zombie has achieved something few filmmakers do in remaking a classic. He has taken the original version and added more meat to it.

Meyers's character development is very interesting. We first see him as a subdued boy who (allegedly) kills small animals to feel superior, then follow him as he progresses into a repressed, zombie-like murderer who kills everybody he comes across. When comparing the 1978 Meyers with the 2007 Meyers, the latter version is much more frightening (though, Tyler Mane deserves much credit for that). Carpenter's Meyers is a robot; Zombie's Meyers is a monster.

Zombie's ensemble of supporting actors is one of the film's strongest aspects. Most of the Devil's Rejects cast returns, all portraying much different characters. Danny Trejo and William Forsythe give particularly memorable performances.

In light of today's Hostel/Saw horror violence, Halloween is rather tame. While it certainly surpasses Carpenter's version in both content and intensity, Zombie practices some restraint in how much violence is shown, leaving much of the horror to sound effects and imagination.

I honestly don't understand why people are so hard on this movie. The ending drags on for a bit, but otherwise it's a pretty solid film. Remakes have become regular ventures. You can either resist them and be unhappy with half of the movies released, or welcome them and hope for a good ride every now and then. Halloween is a great popcorn flick! Just sit back and enjoy yourself.

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.