Halloween [Remake]

Mikey likes it

2007

Review: September 14, 2007

Director: Rob Zombie

Starring: Scout Taylor-Compton, Malcolm McDowall, Daeg Faerch, Tyler Mane

If you feel like it.

THE SETUP:

Remake of the first film with a greatly enlarged case study section.

DISCUSSION:

I was pretty indifferent to this, but became more interested as the reviews came out. Plus there’s not that much else I want to see right now. I have seen the original twice and am not a huge fan, although I feel like I have a decent sense of why it was important. I have more of a sense of that after watching this new version.

We open with a quote from the fictional Dr. Samuel Loomis as though he were Dr. Samuel Johnson or something. The people next to me in the theater were laughing uproariouly from the start. In fact, the entire audience seemed ready to embrace this as a comedy as much as a horror film. We then join Daeg Faerch as young Michael Myers, playing with his pet rat. He has stringy blond hair that falls over his face and vacant blue eyes. Downstairs his mother, played by the director’s wife, Sheri Moon Zombie [who is quite good and so pretty], has a hilarious white trash fight with her injured, shiftless, layabout husband, played by William Forsythe. There’s also an older sister and a younger sister, an infant. Meanwhile, upstairs, Michael has cut up his rat.

SPOILERS > > >
Michael goes to school, where he is made fun of by bullies [both his stepfather and the bullies call him faggot]. They call his mother in and she meets Loomis, played by Malcolm McDowall. They’re concerned because Michael has a dead cat in his knapsack. So? Lots of kids like to play with animals. Anyway, Michael waits for one of the bullies after school and bludgeons him to death! This scene is fairly powerful.

So then it’s Halloween night. Mom is off to her stripping job, dad is drinking in front of the TV, and the older sister is supposed to take Michael out trick or treating. Only the sister dumps him in order to screw her boyfriend. We see mom stripping, intercut with Michael sitting sadly on the curb, as we hear “Love Hurts.” One suspects that we’re seeing Sheri stripping largely so we can see Sheri stripping.

So for some reason the older sister’s boyfriend thinks it would be erotic to screw while he wears the famous William Shatner mask. Michael comes in, duct-tapes his sleeping stepfather, and slits his throat. He waits for the boyfriend to come downstairs and bludgeons him with a baseball bat. He goes upstairs and kills his sister, and is found by his mother, back on the curb, holding his infant sister.

He is institutionalized and placed under the care of Dr. Loomis. Michael says he doesn’t remember the killings and didn’t commit them. He cries and is hugged by Loomis. I think we all have to wonder how many murders might have been averted if he had only received a few more hugs like that one. He’s really into masks, and eventually won’t stop wearing them, and won’t speak. Then, since it’s been a few minutes since we’ve had some violence, he kills a nurse. My audience erupted into knowing laughter when she had the poor judgement to turn her back on him. Then mom goes home and shoots herself.

15 years pass, and now Michael is like seven and a half feet tall. He’s a little ridiculously huge, and this, I think is a mistake, because he’s so massive it’s distracting more than anything. All we’ve seen him do is be catatonic and make masks, his apparent mass-building workout regimen kept from view. Then my babycakes Tom Towles, who I fell in love with during House of 1000 Corpses [I walked out after he was killed] shows briefly as a guard assigned to transfer Michael to another facility. In the middle of the night. For some reason. Michael kills them all and escapes.

There’s then a funny cameo by Ken Foree of Dawn of the Dead, who Michael steals his union suit from. They’re the same size? And, halfway through the film, we meet Laurie Strode and her friends. This is where the real problems begin

We're introduced to our new Laurie Strode, played by Scout Taylor-Compton. I consider her a very poor casting choice. She's about as perky and chipper as you'd imagine someone named Scout to be, she wears Lisa Loeb glasses and speaks in overly cute little chirps that verge on baby talk. Now of course, no one could be Jamie Lee, and that's fine, but Jamie Lee has a steeliness to her that seems like she really could reach inside herself to find the strength she needs to fight back, whereas Scout looks like she would strive to form a campus action committee. I did try to give her a chance, but she's essentially a Muppet. Anyway, she and her friends go to school and talk about some sort of shenanigans that night during babysitting that will allow some of then [not our good Laurie] to screw, and there's a replay of the still-effective scene where Michael is standing outside the school looking in.

That night the killing begins. Linda, the cheerleader, goes with this nasty, stringy burnout to have sex in the Myers house. I don't know too many OC-type "hot" cheerleaders who hook up with undernourished scunges, but maybe this is Zombie's fantasy. There's a replay of one of the more memorable scenes from the original, where Linda thinks her boyfriend has come in wearing a sheet. Apparently she doesn't notice that her boyfriend has grown two feet in the past four minutes.

So there's another attack, and finally the guy comes after Laurie. You do get the FUN of seeing terrorized kids, which I don't think the original had. But this Laurie is fucking dumb. She gets a knife, stabs him in the shoulder, leaves the knife in ["Oh, I won't be needing THAT again!"] and runs and uselessly screams by a locked door, rather than trying to, say, get out of the house. Then she's hiding as he stalks abound, but making so much noise with all her little sobbing and whimpering that half my [rather rowdy] audience was shushing her, and the other half were laughing at those people. Then at one point Laurie has a gun, but sure is shy about using it, leading to irritation on my part, and causing someone in my vicinity to mutter "Man, she didn't even fire one shot! Jesus!" There is a notable shift from the first film right at the end, and poor Scout has a nasal, whiny delivery of "Waaas thaaaaat the boogeymaaaaaan?" that made my entire audience erupt in hysterics.
< < < SPOILERS END

So what went wrong? I think this film is a victim of a syndrome I first noticed in Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein… in that one, I think [this is all my supposition based on no evidence] he thought "people are going to find the part before the monster shows up to be boring." The result is he seemed to put more effort into directing that part and making it snap, the result being that the second half, where perhaps he thought the presence of the monster could carry the weight, is more boring! That's what happens here. Zombie's direction in the first half is very snappy [and assured, he has definitely continually improved just in terms of sheer moviemaking mechanics], but once Michael goes on his rampage, things get boring. You'd think it would be hard to make a suburban killing spree boring but, well, there ya go.

Some others have faulted the fact that Michael is now entirely humanized to account for why the second half makes so little an impression, and there may be something to that, but I think another big issue is that we just don't get to know this Laurie as well. Nor would we want to. But the way the movie is structured, Michael is the main character, so our feelings are invested with him, and Laurie is just this kind of secondary character who shows up halfway through. The third thing is that in the original we didn't know Michael's motivation. We only found that out in the second movie [and I still think it's kind of stupid]. Here we find it out, it still makes very little sense, and it opens your mind to asking; "Why then why is he killing all these other people?" Which obviously takes you away from experiencing the terror.

The original Halloween was [I think] one of the first horror movies to use a placid suburban environment as an environment for terror. At least that was my general impression of the movie. And it was one of the few where the final girl tropes were actually integral and organic to the story; Laurie survived because she wasn't distracted by sex and she was smart and independent. Now I know, this is a different movie, it's not trying to be the same thing. It's just that what it turned out to be really isn't all that interesting.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

If you want. It's probably more interesting for fans of the first film.

RELATED FILMS:
HALLOWEEN is the John Carpenter original, starring the incomparable Ms. Jamie Lee Curtis, and is a lot richer, with a lot more enduring resonance than this film has.