We all owe Rick Rosenthall, Tommy Lee Wallace, Dwight H. Little, Dominique Othenin-Girard, Joe Chapelle, and Steve Miner an apology.
"Halloween" Review
Malcolm McDowell- Dr. Sam Loomis
Daeg Frarch- Michael Myers, age 10
Tyler Mane- Michael Myers, older
Sheri Moon Zombie- Deborah Myers
Scout Taylor-Compton- Laurie Strode
William Forsythe- Ronnie White
Danny Trejo- Ismael Cruz
Danielle Harris- Annie Brackett
Brad Dourif- Sheriff Lee Bracket
Hanna Hall- Judith Myers
Richard Lynch- Principal Chambers
Lew Temple- Noel Kluggs
Bill Mosley- Zach Garrett
Tom Towles- Larry Redgrave
Leslie Easterbrook- Patty Frost
Steve Boyles- Stan Payne
Ken Foree- Big Joe Grizzly
Dee Wallace- Cynthia Strode
Mickey Dolenz- Derek Allen
Daniel Roebuck- Lou Martini
Sid Haig- Chester Chesterfield
Skyler Gisondo- Tommy Doyal
Jenny Gregg Stewart- Lindsey Wallace
Kristina Klebe- Lynda
Udo Kier- Morgan Walker
Clint Howard- Doctor Koplenson
Directed by Rob Zombie
Screenplay by Rob Zombie, based on the 1978 screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
Released by Dimension Films
Rated R for strong brutal bloody violence and terror throughout, sexual content, graphic nudity and language
Runtime- 109 minutes
Website: http://www.halloween-themovie.com/
Rob Zombie's "Halloween" is, without question, the worst "Halloween" movie ever made.
Ever.
It's worse than Tommy Lee Wallace's "Halloween III: Season of the Witch," worse than Joe Chapelle's "Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers," and worse than both of Rick Rosenthal's movies, "Halloween II" and "Halloween: Resurrection." So, before getting into the nitty gritty of just how awful Rob Zombie's third directoral effort is, I want to apologize, on behalf of the entire movie nerd world to Wallace, Chapelle, Rosenthal, as well as Dwight H. Little ("Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers"), Dominique Othenin-Girard ("Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers"), and Steve Miner ("Halloween H20"). For all of the faults and problems your own entires may have had (and I'm a fan of the original series, and I like the sequels, so I don't think they're personally all that bad), their "collective badness" doesn't even compare to the pile of supreme awfulness that the fine folks at Dimension Films just released. Not even close. So you're all safe now, in perpetuity, from being labeled with that particular slight.
Now, onto the pain.
Zombie's remake/reimagining/whatever else the heck you want to call it starts off well enough. We get to meet the Myers "family" of Haddonfield, Illinois, which consists of Deborah Myers (Sheri Moon Zombie), Judith Myers (Hanna Hall), Baby Boo (played by three different little babies), and little Michael (Daeg Faerch), along with stepdad Ronnie White (William Forsythe). They're not exactly what you'd call a warm, caring family unit. The mother works as a stripper (she may be the only one that does work), the stepfather doesn't work at all (we see him with a cast on his arm and sitting in a recliner in the living room watching television most of the time), and the older daughter is disrespectful and promiscuous (you initially assume that because she engages in scantily clad dress). They all scream at one another, most of the time with vicious profanity, and there's probably some level of physical abuse involved (we don't see any, but the stepfather often says that he's going to hit someone, so it's probably happened in the past). The baby is too young to really understand any of this, and Michael is a bit of a loner, as he spends most of his time in his room wearing a plastic clown mask and mutilating his pet rats. The only people in his family he seems to be close to are his mother and his baby sister.
One day, at school, Michael gets into a fight in a bathroom with an older student. The principal (played by Richard "E.D. Wardo" Lynch) breaks up the fight and calls Deborah to school for a meeting. While at this meeting we meet the school psychologist Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), who tells Deborah that her son is disturbed (the school found a dead cat in a plastic bag in his locker). Deborah doesn't believe that her son is the disturbed weirdo that Loomis and the principal make him out to be. Meanwhile, Michael is outside, waiting for the older student that he got into a fight with in the bathroom. Michael follows the kid into the woods and beats him to death with a tree branch (one of the better tree limb beatings you're likely to see in any movie). Michael has made a "typical serial killer progression" from small animals to humans. The story then moves to Halloween night. Michael wants to go out trick-or-treating, but he doesn't have anyone to take him. His mother has to go to work at the club, his stepfather is too busy watching television, and his sister has a date with her boyfriend. So Michael doesn't go trick-or-treating. He decides instead to kill dang near everyone in the house.
So, after some decent, horrible reverse Kim Richards, Deborah comes home to find out what Michael did (the only one he doesn't mutilate is Baby Boo). The police then show up, arrest Michael, and he is then incarcerated in the Smiths Grove Mental Hospital. We find out there was a big, expensive trial that found young Michael guilty of several counts of murder and that he is to be in Smiths Grove until... well, whenever. The state appoints Dr. Loomis to examine Michael, to find out why he did what he did. Loomis talks with Michael every day. Michael claims that he doesn't remember what happened and he just wants to go home. Deborah comes to visit him one a week. As the days and months and eventually years go by, very little "progress" is made in Michael's treatment. He starts to retreat into his own mind, barely speaking, constantly making new masks that he says "help hide his ugliness." Loomis tells Michael's mother that he can't do much more for her son, that there's very little hope of Michael ever being rehabilitated. Michael is never getting out of Smiths Grove.
Of course, we know that's got to be a bunch of hooey. The movie has about another hour to go at this point. And this is also where the movie ceases to be interesting, because the rest of the flick, which takes place about seventeen years later, is basically an accelerated remake of the John Carpenter original. Michael breaks out of Smiths Grove, kills a bunch of people, arrives in Haddonfield, puts on the mask, and starts looking for his now we know isn't missing or dead baby sister, Laurie Strode (as played here by Scout Taylor-Compton). And then Dr. Loomis finds out about the escape, goes to Haddonfield, and starts looking for Michael. You know the rest. Well, basically.
The biggest problem with this movie is, even with the somewhat interesting first part, it all feels so pointless. Everything happens so dang fast. It's like we have about three potentially interesting movies all badly crammed into one. There's the creation of the monster movie, the young murderer in a mental hospital that has to be examined movie, and the escaped mental patient on a killing spree movie. We only get the basic beats of each of those stories. There's no time to explore anything, focus on anything, or really let anyone act. There's no tension, no suspense, no sense of anything beyond the director telling us "this is happening. Just watch." It's not interesting. We, as the audience, can't get involved in what's happening or even really care about any of it. If we're supposed to "care" about the monster, which I assume is the point of the first part of the movie, why isn't there more exploration of young Michael's feelings about life in general? And if this young boy is supposed to be black hole of nothingness and pure evil, why don't we get to see how that affects the people around him? Again, we get the main beats of what happens, but what about the rest of it? Why exactly does Michael's mother keep visiting him in Smiths Grove if she saw what her son did? Why isn't she revolted by that? What makes her keep showing up every week? And what about Loomis? We don't get to see the breadth of his frustration with Michael and how his treatment affects him. And what about this big butt trial that happened? What was that like? And what about the employees and other doctors at Smith's Grove? What do they all think about the little kid who murdered his family? None of that is really dealt with in any satisfactory fashion. And think about this: the movie starts out with Michael Myers as a child, spends about forty minutes with him as a child, and then in the second part Myers is suddenly seven feet tall. Again, if we're supposed to sympathize with the monster, how exactly are we going to be able to do that if this little disturbed kid is suddenly seven feet tall?
And the second part, which is, again, just an accelerated version of the Carpenter original, probably would have been a fine movie in and of itself if it was a direct remake of the Carpenter original and actually spent time building up the trip to Haddonfield and the whole Loomis chase of the monster. We also could have seen more of Laurie and her friends Annie (as played by Danielle "Jamie Lloyd" Harris) and Lynda (Kristina Klebe). Zombie probably could have made a fairly decent, brutal slasher movie remake with an action movie vibe to it. But we don't get that. Instead we get a whole heap of pointlessness.
Malcolm McDowell gets shortchanged as Dr. Loomis. McDowell is given an interesting look throughout (he starts out as this sort of hippie psychiatrist, turns into a kind of serious doctor looking for answers, and then a tired man scared of what he spent two decades examining), but he never gets a chance to really do anything with any of it. He's never really pressed into action. Most of his dialgoue in the second half is a waste of time because it's so bad. McDowell probably could have done something interesting with the role if given a chance, but for whatever reason Zombie just wasn't that interested in doing anything with him. Sheri Moon Zombie is pretty decent in the first half of the first half, but we're once again never given an opportunity to understand any part of her alleged personality. Why is her life her life? Why does she keep coming to see her murderer son? Zombie should have allowed his wife to do more than dance around in her underwear. William Forsythe is hilarious as Ronnie White, the scumbag stepfather. He's supposed to be nasty and bad and evil (which he sort of is when you start describing what he does), but Forythe plays him with such bravado, and his dialogue is so profane it's hard to take him seriously. Why didn't Zombie tell him to back it down a notch to make him slightly more menacing? Daeg Faerch is the only one, beyond the actors doing the cameos, that comes out of the movie relatively unscathed. He's great as the killer kid. If only the whole movie were about him. And Tyler Mane, as the "traditional" Michael Myers, does a fine job as the unstoppable killing machine. If the movie were all about him, Zombie would have had a winner. Michael Myers probably would have been, in that sense, "scary again."
Scout Taylor-Compton is cute as Laurie Strode, but we're not given much time with her. She's just sort of there to exist as Laurie Strode. Danielle Harris, who I'm willing to bet was only cast in this movie as a sick in-joke so Zombie could go all artist on us and show everyone his contempt for the sequels, gets to be hot and cute and naked, but much like Taylor-Compton isn't given much time to do anything beyond exist. Heck, the only person who is likely to get any sense of actual sympathy from the audience is the Smith's Grove orderly character Ismael (played by Danny "Machete" Trejo), and even then, probably not that much.
Now, onto the cameos. While it's always fun to see these people on screen, they all basically serve as a distraction from what's going on. Richard Lynch, Udo Kier, Clint "Slinky" Howard, Udo Kier, Lew Temple, Tom Towles, Bill Moseley, Leslie "Lt. Callahan" Easterbrook, Ken "Peter" Foree, Dee Wallace, Daniel Roebuck, Brad "Chucky" Douriff, Mickey freaking Dolenz, and Captain Spaulding hisself Sid Haig all do fine work (Howard, Foree, Dolenz, and Haig especially), but why exactly are they in this movie? Even the ones that get more than a minute of screentime don't get to do all that much, so, again, why have them in this movie? You know, it was kind of fun ten years ago when Robert Kurtzman had all of the horror icons in "Wishmaster," but that movie was itself fun and ridiculous. Zombie's "Halloween" is taking itself seriously and yet here we have all of these personalities showing up causing a distraction, taking us out of the story and wondering why they're all in this thing. Again, it's nice to see everyone, but it would have been nice to see them get to do slightly more than just be there.
And now onto Rob Zombie himself. All of the goodwill he generated after "The Devil's Rejects" is and should be all gone now, especially after his incessant press hooha on how he hated the sequels and how he wanted to make a better movie than all of those movies and how he wanted to make Michael Myers "scary" again. He didn't do it. He didn't even come close. Even if this movie has "his signature" on it, whatever that is, even if it is his movie, his "Halloween" is still awful. It's terrible. He is now David Goyer after "Blade: Trinity." Everything he does now should be suspect from the second his name is mentioned as a director or even as a producer. It's mind boggling that this movie is this bad. And he himself owes all of the other "Halloween" directors a personal apology. Good luck ever seeing that.
So what do we have here? A redneck house, gratuitous southern rock, hip and edgy white trash bullstuff, vicious profanity, Sheri Moon Zombie wearing a bathrobe while making breakfast, rat killing, gratuitous kid wearing a plastic clown mask, gay bashing, urinating in the school bathroom, gratuitous scenes of the director's wife pole dancing, gratuitous KISS shirt, gratuitous Richard Lynch, dead cat in a bag, photos of dead dogs, the "Halloween" theme, hat stealing, a deadly beating with a tree branch, a wicked bloody nose, pleading for life, gratuitous "Thing from Outer Space," a wall picture of JFK, William Forsythe wearing flip flops, candy eating, candy corn finger punting, recliner duct tape bondage with throat slashing, sex, boobs, sandwich making, aluminum baseball bat to the back of the head, bloody shoeprints, gratuitous "Don't Fear the Reaper" by the Blue Oyster Cult, gratuitous "putting on the Michael Myers Bill Shatner mask" stuff, incestual leg touching, knife to the gut, hallway back slashing, gratuitous therapy sessions with making fun of the European guy's accent, gratuitous Danny Trejo, gratuitous mask making and mask wearing, gratuitous family dinner in the insane asylum, fork to the throat, gratuitous home movies, suicide by gun, an in joke about the many wives of Donald Pleasance, the college book lecture circuit, gratuitous Bill Mosley, Leslie Easterbrook, Tom Towles, chain breaking, head bashing, throat slashing, dead body dragging, praying in Spanish, attempted drowning, television to the head, gratuitous Clint Howard and Udo Kier, gratuitous Rush's "Tom Sawyer," gratuitous Ken Foree, truck stop bathroom crapping, porn, turd talk, truck stop bathroom stall ass kicking with knife to the gut, gratuitous "Mr. Sandman," gratuitous left wing parents, gratuitous Danielle "Jamie Lloyd" Harris, girl talk, gratuitous Brad Douriff, gratuitous Sid Haig, a dead coyote crucifix, sex, talking on the phone while sitting upside down on the couch, gratuitous homage to the "bed sheet" scene from the original "Halloween," naked strangling, gratuitous Mickey Dolenz as a gun shop owner with a flagrant violation of the handgun purchase waiting period, glass coffee table smashing, neck snapping, Danielle Harris topless, a director's shot at "Halloween 4" and "Halloween 5," a pumpkin head hanging body, door breaking, hiding in a bathtub, body carrying, knife dropping, unmasking, gratuitous boring end scene in a drained out empty pool, gunshots to the back, car window smashing, head crushing, gratuitous hitting the ceiling with a 2 x 4, smashing through a window, a confusing ending that's about as convincing as the ending to "The Devil's Rejects," and gratuitous home videos over the end credits.
Best lines: "I'm all broken up, bitch, I can't work!," "Can't you see I'm making eggs over here?," "Man, that bitch got herself a nice fucking dump," "Fucking whore!," "Michael, stop jerking off in there!," "Hey, shitpants!," "Hey, I heard your sister got caught selling blowjobs," "What the hell is going on here?," "Are you saying Michael did this? Michael loves animals," "If I see that Myers pussy he's fucking dead," "Judith, I'm going to be late," "All right, Michael, calm down," "Bitch, if you don't think I'm making a mental list of all your fucking bullshit!," "What about trick-or-treating?," "Come on, babe, I want to do it with the mask on," "Michael, answer me!," "Happy Halloween, Boo," "Why do you talk so funny?," "Can I go home today?," "Mommy, is everyone at home okay?," "Hey, Mikey, how you doing?," "Do you like my mask?," "Michael, take off the mask," "Let's go fuckmit, time to go!," "Have a doughnut, Larry," "Do you know how many sit-ups it takes to burn off a goddamn donut?," "Trick-or-treat baby," "I was good to you, Mikey!," "Sam, it's a fucking massacre," "Oh, shit," "Oh my goodness. Oooh," "Naughty girl. Naughty, naughty girl," "Let me introduce myself. I'm Big Joe Grizzly bitch!," "Mr. Nichols is a horny old pervert," "Did you ever hear about the Mexican wolfman?," "Chill, spaz monkey," "Look at her face, she's an angel, she's Mother fucking Theresa," "It must be nice living in denial. I must try it sometime," "Hey bitches!," "Oh no, five-oh," "You want a ride? No, bacon mobiles make me nervous," "Goddamn sonofabitch! Who would do sick shit like this?," "My calf is cramping, man," "What are we hunting?," "You be careful. There are a lot of nutcases out on Halloween," "Why are you so obsessed with the Boogeyman, Tommy?," "Doc, I may have been born, but I was not born yesterday," "Monsters sell books," "Hey, don't pull on it, you're going to stretch it out," "Micahel! Stop!," and "Was that the Boogeyman?"
You shouldn't go see "Halloween" in the theatre, and I don't think you should see it on DVD, either. Take it out of the library when it does hit DVD, that way you won't have to pay for it. Because Rob Zombie's "Halloween" is nothing short of a goddamn disgrace.
Don't even bother with it.
The 411: Rob Zombie's "Halloween" is a piece of crap. It is the worst "Halloween" movie ever made. If it ends Zombie's movie making career it wouldn't be that surprising. My Drake what the hell was Zombie thinking?
