Halloween
A lot of people seem to take it personally when a movie they consider a classic is remade, so Rob Zombie surely knew he was in for it when he took the thankless job of doing a reboot of John Carpenter's Halloween. Instead of doing a Van Sant PSYCHO deal, Zombie decided to focus on Michael Meyers' origin for a good chunk of his film. When we meet Mikey, he's a dopey misfit kid in a Kiss shirt living in a run down house. His mom, played by Sheri Moon Zombie, seems to be trying but live in boyfriend and ultra-white trash drunk Ronnie, played by William Forsythe, makes it a challenge. Forsythe really goes over the top in his hate filled cracker performance, talking about skull fucking and calling Mikey a pussy, which really comes back to bite em in the ass. Mikey's older sister is a hot slut and frankly kind of a bitch. After Mikey kills his pet rat, he's off to school. Zombie seems to be following the serial killer psychology textbook in his characterization of Mikey. He's picked on in school by some assholes and comes to the attention of Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), the psychologist, when more of Mikey's animal abuse comes to light. After beating one of his schoolmate tormenters to death with a branch, it's time for the fateful Halloween. A lot of the time Mikey wears a creepy clown mask, which reminded of Alfred Sole's great ALICE, SWEET ALICE. Not the clown part, just some of the shots with the way the mask is framed. Anyway Mikey doesn't get to go trick or treating and resorts to sitting on the curb while "Love Hurts" by Nazareth plays on the soundtrack. Mom's at the strip club working, sister's getting fucked and Ronnie the drunk is passed out. Yeah, love does hurt. But what are you gonna do? How bout killing a few people? That make be the ticket. The killings are pretty brutal and realistic. No splashy gore fx and quite harsh. Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" is on his sister's radio and Howard Hawk's THE THING is on television in a nod to the original film. Mom comes home to the slaughter and Mikey is off to crazytown.
The next part of the film deals with Loomis trying to help Mikey to no avail. Mikey makes paper mache masks and quits talking, Loomis keeps trying to help and so on. Mom ate a bullet after getting sad viewing her fairly extensive 8mm film of Mikey. Fifteen years go by and Loomis gives up so he can hit the road and promote his book about Mikey and how fucked up he is. Mikey has grown to be fuckin huge by the way. Line backer huge, but he seems fairly out of it in his cell making his masks. That is until he escapes after two stupid guards try to rape a mental patient in Mikey's cell. Surprise, that goes horribly and Mikey's out and off to Haddonfield. Now we meet the Strode family, which we all know contains Laurie, Mikey's orphaned little sister. It pretty much follows the Carpenter film from this point on and features a lot of the Carpenter original music and Carpenter style shots of Michael lurking in he background that are pretty cool. Again the killings are fairly sadistic. The flick is chock full of horror film stars of the past and other "cult" actors, that while sometimes unnecessary, are still pretty fun. Ken Foree from DAWN OF THE DEAD does a great Rosey Grier impression as Big Joe Grizzly. There's also Udo Kier, Mickey Dolenz, Richard Lynch, Clint Howard and more I'm probably forgetting. The little girl from some of the Halloween sequels,Danielle Harris, plays one of Laurie's friends who gets topless . Rob doesn't skimp on the nudity. I guess my problem with Zombie's approach is that by showing too much of Mikey's origin you take away the mystery of him. He's not really "The Shape" or the boogeyman so much as a fucked up kid who grew giant and went psycho. Loomis does blab on about a "soulless killing machine" and they do sneak in the line "was that the boogeyman?" but I always felt he was just a huge human killer with a fucked up Shatner mask who goes in a rage when he hears "Don't Fear the Reaper". Up until he escapes from the nuthouse, the whole thing felt more like HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER than a HALLOWEEN film,but I give him credit for having the balls to try something different. I don't get the fanboy rage about this film but when is that ever gonna matter. It's a good looking film, the actor's are fine and there's not a lot of comedy relief, which is a relief. I'll certainly check out Rob's next film.