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 Immediate thoughts on the Halloween remake now that it's out? That's what we posed to the Retro Slashers reviewing team, and here are the results:
Thomas Ellison:
I told myself this morning I was going to see Rob Zombie's Halloween, have a good time no matter what, then come home and write a brilliant review for Retro Slashers. But I'm stumbling around for words to describe the experience of watching this train wreck. The positives are Daeg Faerch's performance, the numerous cameos, and Zombie's stripping away all supernatural elements surrounding Michael Myers. No curse of thorn or evil druids this time, just a little kid that sank into psychosis and never returned. In many ways, this Myers is much closer to the original since John Carpenter based the character on a kid suffering from schizophrenia. Maybe things wouldn't be as bad if Zombie had made the whole film about Myer's childhood, as it is we get a Cliff Notes version of Halloween halfway through the film. All of the problems that have plagued the other Halloweens released by Dimension Films are present and accounted for so here's hoping the next installment will be handled by a different company. If you're a Halloween or slasher fan, then you're going to hate this film. Maybe over time and with repeated viewing I'll grow to like or even enjoy the film. Right now all the grim and gritty bits have left a bad taste in my mouth. By far the best of the slasher remakes but that's like being the smartest person in a class full of mongoloids.
Chris Youngblood:
This film was going to be a difficult feat from the beginning. Choosing a re-make of a classic story is a difficult decision but the story lines in all of the sequels got way to stale. Rob Zombie took a difficult task when he agreed to "reimagine" this film as he got a lot of flak and even death threats from the die hard fans of Carpenter's classic who were afraid that he would ruin the original. But Zombie played it smart. He clearly held the original in high respects and informed us that it was not his intention to re-do Carpenter's brilliant work from the original. Zombie's version is a compliment to the original. Adding alot of backstory that was actually well done and well written gives the film a different direction right from the beginning. The one thing his version does not capture is the suspence that Carpenter created. All in all Zombie's version was excellent. He wanted to make the story his own and had the blessing of John Carpenter to do it. And that is what he did, he made it his own.
John:
Cinematic shit on a stick. I've only seen the workprint, but no amount of work could save it, I'm sure - with reports the theatrical version is either a little better or a little worse - in either case it's Suckola City, all the way. I actually dug House Of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects, and this doesn't stand proudly alongside either one of them, little own JC's Halloween. The shaky-cam gave me nausea, the fanfiction-like exploration of Michael's childhood gave me drowsiness, and the swearing felt seemingly culled from AOL chatroom flamewars (did they say skullfuck back in the 70's?). Thank lordy we have the immortal mental image of Ken Foree's taco turd as lovingly described by Rob Zombie's cutting-edge dialogue. I'm as easy as they come when it comes to movie quality - put it this way, I really like Whodunnit (1982) and Savage Water (1978) - films even the most hardened fan can't defend. But even I can't polish this poop. Assuredly though, like a sort of filmic Stokholm Syndrome, I'll "learn" to enjoy it over time as the only viable alternative to living with the harrowing memory of sitting through this blight.
Amanda By Night:
Blech! It was absolutely horrible. I mean, truly.
Richard Mogg:
Remakes are candy. From their attractive neon packaging to their sugar-only ingredients, remakes notoriously fail in retaining the greatness of their originals because they merely exploit the exploitable. Not all remakes, mind you. There have been the odd few that have taken their inspirational blueprints and successfully altered them into something unique (John Carpenter’s The Thing and 1988’s The Blob immediately come to mind). But here, Zombie is not merely remaking a classic with a new twist; he’s remolding it in his own image. How many times must we all see his annoyingly-skanky wife strip and swear like the crack whore she is so conceivably infatuated with? In all honesty, the biggest surprise I had with this film was that there were actually some sequences where Zombie’s wife didn’t come off as total trailer-trash.
Filming style, editing, dialogue and logic were all as interchangeable as Zombie’s previous work in House Of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects – neon nonsense, shaky quick-cuts and a whole wack of (sigh) despicable profanities. Swearing used to be an effective obscenity in films because it was used skillfully (they’re taboo words, after all). But for some reason Zombie feels that filling each sentence with at least 3 major F-words (or worse) will create fear or distain in the audience… did Zombie drop out of elementary school or something? Unfortunately, it’s this small bag of tricks which Zombie also brings to his newly-created Michael Myers. Zombie has him scream wildly, kill tons of people, kill tons of animals and finally (depending on which version you’ve seen – I’ve seen both) kill dear Dr. Loomis. Why? Because, at least in Zombie’s eyes, Myers has to be a hulking mountain of a man with superhuman strength that strikes in mammoth proportions (“more human than hu-man”). Strangely enough, that description also fits for the recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes (what’s with today’s fearmakers anyhow?) and the close connections to the new-Leatherface don’t stop there.
The most puzzling thing of all however, was that there actually was a sequence in Zombie’s Halloween that didn’t completely insult the audience. By showing a talkative, young Myers post-murders in prison with (a bizarrely unkempt) Dr. Loomis, we as Halloween fans are shown a side of Michael Myers that has rarely been dealt with. Sure, the reinserted footage shot on the set of Halloween 2 (to be cut into the television version of 1978’s original) showcased a young Michael incarcerated, but Michael was mute and no interaction between him and Loomis was recognized. However you may feel about Zombie’s opus, the scenes showing Michael becoming increasingly withdrawn and silent work extremely well, and stand on their own. This may indeed be the true start of a filmmaking talent for Zombie… it’s just too bad it took three terrible offenses (one of which is a grotesque insult to a John Carpenter classic) to do it.
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