#35 - Halloween (2007)
(dir. Rob Zombie)
I love Halloween, and I love Rob Zombie, but this remake is kind of a mess. The biggest departure that Zombie makes from John Carpenter's original film is that he gives Michael a rather extensive backstory. Carpenter showed us just enough to establish that Michael killed his sister for no real reason, while Zombie gives us 40 goddamn minutes of Michael as a stupid little kid. He gets bullied at school, his parents fight, and he likes to kill animals. After he goes on his killing spree, we get a bunch of scenes of him in therapy with Dr. Loomis. Eventually, the film gets around to an adult Michael escaping from the sanitarium, and from there it feels more like a standard remake.
The main problem with all the young Michael stuff isn't that it's bad - it's that it feels totally disconnected from the rest of the film. Giving him a backstory isn't necessarily a bad idea, but all that really comes out of that 40 minutes is "he's evil and Laurie is his sister". I can go either way on Laurie being his sister, but I don't think it adds much here. I mean, how did he even know she was his sister in the first place? It's like two different films crammed together - on their own, either could've worked, but instead it sort of feels like the studio forced Zombie to stick to a relatively faithful remake when he really just wanted to do his own thing.
This isn't all bad, though. I forgot how many great genre actors are in this - Malcolm McDowell, Brad Dourif, Danny Trejo, Sheri Moon Zombie (of course), Udo Kier, Ken Foree, Bill Moseley, Sid Haig, and Clint Howard all appear both in major roles and cameos. Even when the film stumbles, it's fun to see all these actors doing their thing. Zombie also does brutal violence very well, and Michael Myers in this film is definitely brutal and intimidating (as an adult, at least).
I'd call this an interesting failure. It's got enough good elements that it's worth watching, but as a remake of one of the most beloved and important horror films in history, it drops the ball.
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