Halloween

The opening scenes of 2007's HALLOWEEN, writer/director Rob Zombie's remake of the John Carpenter classic, played about how I expected.  Just vile.  Zombie's reputation as filmmaker was instantly confirmed.   A preoccupation with grime.   We see a highly dysfunctional family spewing ugliness to each other as they move about in squalor.  So vividly disgusting and off putting it was that I considered cutting my losses early and maybe watching KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE again.  

It is the Myers family.  As in Michael Myers, the tall, mute figure who murders without apparent motive.   Zombie attempts a backstory, showing the future career killer as a highly disturbed, bullied ten year old who murders small animals and insists on a wearing a clown mask at home. At this stage, he does actually speak.  His mother Deborah (Sheri Moon Zombie) supports him, his older sister Judith (Hanna Hall), and infant sister Angel as a stripper.  The father is dead, but a slug of a human being named Ronnie (William Forsythe) is Deborah's abusive boyfriend.  There is precious little insight into Michael's psyche, other than he's the product of a troubled household, without even a sliver of hope of a decent father figure.  Even if he did have one, I suspect it wouldn't have made a difference - the kid is just plain fucking evil.

On Halloween night of some unspecified year (if the film was attempting sometime in the 1970s it failed spectacularly),  Michael tears through his house, wasting his sister, her boyfriend, and her mother's boyfriend.  He is convicted of the killings and sent to a sanitarium, where he will be unsuccessfully treated by Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), who writes a bestseller from the experience.  After Michael kills a nurse at the facility with a fork, his mother, now entirely convinced her son is the spawn of the devil or something, commits suicide.  Years pass, then on another Halloween night, Michael returns to Haddonfield to find his baby sister, now named Laurie Strode and living with her adoptive parents.  Lots of folks meet their maker.

At this point HALLOWEEN becomes a watchable but unnecessary remake.  Zombie directly recreates some scenes (and atmosphere) from the 1978 original.  Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) and her doomed gal pals even walk down the same street on location used by Carpenter as he tracked Jamie Lee Curtis all those years ago.  The film becomes an OK hybrid of old and new.  Carpenter's music is effectively rehashed by Tyler Bates.  The violence from beginning to end is of course far more graphic.  An acceptable, if unnecessary slasher movie experience, with some admittedly good directorial touches by Mr. Zombie.  

But other than a handful of moments - including a scene where Michael drops his knife and hands Laurie an old picture of the two of them in better times - the film fails in any attempted psychoanalysis.  When closely considered, none of the HALLOWEEN pictures past or present have really succeeded in this regard.  Most deliver the chills and gore, but I still believe there is so much more to explore in this story.