The original slasher film about Michael Myers, the psychotic killer who dons a mask and terrorizes his hometown, is re-imagined by edgy director Rob Zombie.More of a supercharged revamp than a remake, Rob Zombie’s take on John Carpenter’s Halloween expands the back story of masked killer Michael Myers in an attempt to examine the motivation for his first deadly attack, as well as some reasons for his longevity as a horror icon. Zombie’s Myers is a blank-eyed teen (played by Daeg Faerch) whose burgeoning mental problems are left unchecked in a horrific home environment; harassed by schoolmates, a randy sister, and his mother’s deadbeat boyfriend (William Forsythe, terrific as usual), Myers’ homicidal explosion seems inevitable, and intervention by Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell, who offers a fast-talking, hippiefied version of the Donald Pleasance character) does little to impede his development into a mute, unstoppable killing machine (Tyler Mane) bent on finishing off the only survivor of his family’s massacre–his sister, now grown into teenaged Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton). Opening up the psychological motivation of a cipher like Michael Myers is an interesting approach, but Zombie’s script possesses neither a depth of character nor dialogue to offer more than a clichéd thumbnail character sketch, and devoting over a hour of the unrated cut’s 120-minute-plus running time to this history feels bloated and self-indulgent (especially when compared to the lean efficiency of the Carpenter original). Zombie’s Halloween isn’t terribly suspenseful, either; he has a keen eye for visuals and the details of chaotic environments, but his scares are nothing more than brutal showcases for his special effects team. The end result barely surpasses the original film’s numerous sequels, though the Who’s Who of cult and character actors in the cast (including Zombie regulars Sid Haig, Bill Moseley and Ken Foree, as well as Brad Dourif, Udo Kier, Clint Howard, Richard Lynch, Danny Trejo, Dee Wallace, and Danielle Harris) adds a touch of late-night monster movie charm. However, the film’s best performance belongs to the director’s spouse, Sheri Moon Zombie, who brings unexpected pathos to the role of Myers’ downtrodden mother.
The two-disc Unrated Director’s Cut offers a full disc’s worth of extras that should please Zombie fans; chief among the supplemental features is his commentary, which details the film’s shooting history and the numerous edits required to deliver the theatrical version. A making-of featurette offers further details of Zombie’s vision for the film, and there are featurettes on his cast choices and the many masks that Myers makes while incarcerated. Seventeen deleted scenes (two of which feature Adrienne Barbeau and Tom Towles) and an alternate ending (all with Zombie’s commentary) are also provided, as well as footage from the casting sessions. A blooper reel, which is highlighted by unchecked mischief by McDowell and Dourif, offers the set’s sole moment of levity. – Paul Gaita
Rating: 
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October 21, 2010
#1
Review by Alexander Stephen Brown
Rating:
The original Halloween is a classic and will in my book always receive a five star rating. Recently there has been a great deal of remakes that were flops and catered to the teeny bopper crowd such as, The Fog, The Omen, Dark Water, etc. However there has been only two remakes that I thought were diserving of our attenion, one being the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and Halloween.
What I liked about the remake was it gave us something fresh to work with. In the original Halloween we never really knew why Michael was bad, in this remake, the first thirty minutes or so expore the childhood of Michael Myers. People say that the dialog concerning Michael’s family was wrong. Trust me, I have seen broken homes and Mr. Zombie gives us exactly what you would expect from a trashy family.
Besides satisfying my curiosity of Michael’s childhood, I found this to be similar in many cases to the original, but at the same time the material was quite fresh with new chills and scares. Zombie took a masterpiece and reminded us why it is called a masterpiece. He accomplished a great job capturing a 70′s look and theme, and did a great musical score as well. This is possibly the best horror remake that I’ve ever seen.
October 21, 2010
#2
Review by ThatsMrGrinch2U
Rating:
I don’t know why everyone is bashing this film, but I am a die-hard fan of the Halloween movies and the horror genre, and I thought this movie was a nice remake to the best and original Carpenter film. It’s certainly more entertaining than the crappy sequels that previously came out, and this film sets a more serious and modern harsh reality of what it could be like if this happened today. Carpenter’s original film took place in 1978, so I found it to be a nice homage for Zombie to begin the origins of young Michael Myers in 1978. For the first time, we actually get to see what kind of family and childhood that Michael grew up in, which explains so much to his psychotic condition. As a child, Michael’s facsination with torturing and killing innocent animals presents an accurate profile for such a future serial killer. This film actually has some explanations behind it, which is vacant in all other Halloween films. Zombie’s direction is rough and gritty, but certainly adds to the atmosphere and chilling story — my heart was pounding when young Michael was slaying his sister and her boyfriend. As for Zombie using the same cast as his other films, it’s really no different than what Carpenter did either (How many Carpenter films was Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, Donald Pleasence, Nancy Loomis, and Adrienne Barbeau were in? I can count at least 3). I’ve seen the original film about a thousand times, and Zombie’s remake can never replace Carpenter’s classic, but this film is worth the effort and respect. I’m looking forward to the Unrated DVD version, which will have a lot of scenes restored that was cut from the theatrical release.
October 21, 2010
#3
Review by M. G Watson
Rating:
My first reaction to Rob Zombie’s remake of HALLOWEEN was: “Why?” The film is near-perfect as it is, and didn’t need to be remade or, as the idiotic studio-suit buzzword goes, “re-imagined.” But what the hell. Since Hollywood isn’t interested in new ideas, and Zombie has apparently run out of such ideas as he has, I guess it was inevitable. This leads me to my second reaction, post-watching-the-film, which is, “Is Rob Zombie a f-ing idiot or what? Doesn’t he get why this was a good movie in the first place?”
I don’t say this to be abusive. I do believe Zombie has some talent and aesthetic style. The problem is that his style – at least as it pertains to HALLOWEEN — is the wrong one. You don’t use a sledgehammer to do a flyswatter’s job, and you don’t let a sadistic, gore-infatuated fanboy direct a horror masterpiece. The original HALLOWEEN was great for a lot of reasons, but chief among them, it didn’t overanalyze its villain. And this is the real point that needs to be made here, because what Zombie does to his HALLOWEEN is part of an much wider and sillier trend in modern horror – the need to provide a reason why its killers do what they do.
If I had to sum up the original, John Carpenter-directed version of the film in one phrase, it would be this: “Yes, Virginia, there really is a Boogeyman.” That’s basically it. The motivations of the film’s masked, mouth-breathing murderer, Michael Myers, are never explained to any meaningful degree, because – gasp! – they don’t have a rational explanation. Michael doesn’t get an “origin story”; no insight is provided as to why he murdered his sister Judith as a young boy, or why he’s re-enacting the crime on a much larger scale as an adult. He’s killing Because. Just BECAUSE. That’s as much why as you get. It’s almost Biblical. (“Who are you?” Moses asks the burning bush. “Who I AM.” God replies. “I Am Who I AM.”) As Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) explains to the Sheriff, Michael is not so much a human being as an embodiment of Evil itself, a Bad Thing that Happens to Good People. He’s the Book of Job in a William Shatner mask. (That’s why, incidentally, he’s credited at the end of the film not as Michael Myers, but as “The Shape”: he’s taken the shape of your fears, whatever they might be.) But HALLOWEEN is not less scary for this lack of information. Quite the contrary. It’s scarier precisely because we don’t get the satisfaction. There is no “Why?” where Michael is concerned. He just Is.
Zombie isn’t satisfied with that answer, and so he’s approached the film from a different angle – the angle of the “origin story.” Here, Michael’s origin is that as a child, he was abused, neglected, picked-on, and basically f’d from birth. As a result, he developed into an unspeaking, sadistic, remorseless killer. Very neat. Very plausible. And completely missing the point. Because by reducing Michael to a set of influences, mere cause and effect, he’s also taking away nearly all his power as a villain. There’s a reason we don’t look behind the curtain in Oz; we might discover the Wizard is a sweaty dwarf on a treadmill. That’s not cool. That’s boring. And so is this film. Because not only does Zombie ruin the best aspect of HALLOWEEN – the almost-supernatural Boogeyman angle – he also viciously stomps the other aspect that made the original special – its sense of restraint. Carpenter had enough sense to understand that what is left out of a movie is often just as important as what is left in. Instead of a few perfectly set-up and executed murders, we get a gigantic massacre that quickly numbs. Instead of a few drops of blood, we get buckets of steaming gore (always the first refuge of the hack who can’t actually scare his audience). Instead of long cat-and-mouse games with totally unsuspecting victims that rack up the tension to an unbearable degree, climaxing in sudden death, we get drawn-out bludgeonings, followed by nonfatal stabbings, followed by near-escapes, followed by more bludgeonings and finally, fatal stabbings. Zombie’s complete lack of subtlety, his refusal to leave anything to the imagination, isn’t just bad film-making in and of itself; it’s completely unsuited to the telling of this particular tale. Using him to do a HALLOWEEN remake is like using a rusty chainsaw to perform eye surgery.
I suppose you could make an argument that since this is a remake (excuse me, a “re-imagining”), Zombie was entitled, even obligated, to go in a different direction than Carpenter, one which has Dr. Loomis actually apologizing to Michael for “failing” him instead of blasting him with a .38, ’cause tha’s what you do with Pure Evil when you find it. But even here the film falls down, because if Michael is a pure sociopath, as Malcom McDowell’s version of Loomis maintains, Loomis has little to apologize for. See, while the jury’s still out about whether a psychopath/sociopath can be actually be “made” in childhood (as opposed to simply “born wrong”) there is universal agreement that neither sociopathy nor psychopathy are actually curable. How can a doctor fail the incurable? And this brings us back to the whole idea that made Carpenter’s flick scary: that pure Evil is something outside of human influence, happening on its own terms for its own reasons and not subject to psychological analysis or treatment. (Donald Pleasance’s Loomis ultimately got that Michael couldn’t be “reached” – except by bullets.) Put simply, the genius of the original HALLOWEEN is that it ducked all the moral-psychological elements Zombie embraces and concentrated on one simple idea, best summed up by the last two lines of dialogue in the film:
LAURIE STRODE: (sobbing) Was that the Boogeyman?
DR. LOOMIS: As a matter of fact…it was.
October 22, 2010
#4
Review by MommaMia
Rating:
I am a huge fan of the original Halloween, so took a chance on this one. Although I always thought that the original film left gaps in the story…why was Michael the way he was?…yes, Rob answered this for us folks, but how difficult it was to watch this poor boy living in this over the top dysfunctional home! It makes sense to the story, but I found it too disturbing to watch. He was a much more believable Michael, we understood where he was coming from, his pain was too huge for a young child to handle…but did I really want to know these details and suffer along with this young boy? Heck, no! To top it all off, Zombie movies (which I should have known!) are far too grotesque and bloody for my taste. The original movie had just the right amount of gore, suspense, scary music and fear. I didn’t need to be taken to the next level of horror, so I shut the movie off. I never finished it because what I had seen was more than enough. I wondered, afterward, about our society and what makes us love these type of movies. If these horrific events happened to anyone we knew, we wouldn’t be so anxious to watch them on the big screen. The fact is that the world is hard enough, scary enough, dark enough…we hardly need to be on a journey of insanity for two hours and then watch the bonus features so we can see more about how they made the gore fest come to life! This one is just over the top, and not enough of an improvement on the original to make it worth seeing. Watch some quality horror, something that scares you, but doesn’t make you want to be sick.
October 22, 2010
#5
Review by Robert J. Herman
Rating:
All this talk about how this movie brilliantly delves into the Myers past, is completely overlooking one thing. In Carpenters’s Halloween, Michael’s family was 100% noraml. This movie is nothing but a stolen remake from a man who has run out of ideas of his own. Borrowing from others to assure his ego that he’s Rob Zombie the awesome one.
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