Let me get this out in the open before I even start this review – I enjoyed the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, and I thought Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead was a damn fine film. So you can see from this that I’m not against remakes per se. I’m also a fan of Rob Zombie’s music and I loved The Devil’s Rejects (although House of 1000 Corpses was almost a total mess).
So when I bring out the axe to hack into this “re-imagining” of John Carpenter’s seminal classic, one of the most influential of all horror films, I haven’t been grinding it in preparation. I suspected it would be bad (but I’m often wrong – I suspected both the remakes above would be awful) but I really had no idea of the depths of its badness. Obviously the studio agrees – I can’t think of any other reason to open this film in August instead of the original planned Halloween date.
Where the original Michael was an apparently normal product of suburbia (and all the more effective for it) the new Michael is now shown in all his clichéd maladjusted glory as part of a family of trailer trash consisting of stripper Mom, drunken abusive step-dad, slutty older sister and younger baby sister. Zombie ups the body count this time around by having Michael beat to death one of the kids who’s been bullying him at school, then when he flips out on Halloween night after his sister refuses to take him trick-or-treating, preferring to go upstairs to get frisky with her boyfriend, more carnage ensues. While Mom is wrapping herself round a pole in the Rabbit In Red club, Michael tapes a drunken Forsythe to his chair and cuts his throat, bludgeons his sister’s boyfriend with a baseball bat, then goes upstairs and stabs his sister (lots of times).
This actually works quite well but from here things go rapidly downhill. We get a completely pointless and tedious, badly written interlude where the institutionalised Michael has a few sessions with Dr Loomis, stabs a nurse with a fork, then stops talking for 15 years, while growing into a massive mask-wearing hulk who’d look more at home in a Friday 13th movie.
When Michael eventually gets to Haddonfield to re-enact the events of the original film (with a couple of extra murders thrown in), the film turns into generic slasher movie #999. Numerous scenes and snippets of dialogue are taken directly from the original in what is obviously intended as a respectful homage but only serve to emphasise the inferiority of this version. The camera goes completely ballistic whenever Michael goes into action, twitching and shaking all over the place. None of the characters are given any development at all in terms of either dialogue or screen time and this is where Zombie makes his biggest mistake.
The original Halloween wasn’t just about Michael Myers. Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie is on screen for most of the film’s running time and she is one of cinema’s great heroines, a strong likeable girl the audience really cares about. Even cannon fodder like Annie and Lynda are given enough development to get to know them and care what happens to them. By contrast Zombie’s Laurie, Annie and Lynda are pretty much interchangeable and are really only required to get naked and scream. By wasting so much time on Michael as a child the second half of the film feels rushed, and where Carpenter spent 90 minutes building an atmosphere of dread and cranking up the tension Zombie has to cram too much in and just can’t engage the audience. The suspense Carpenter’s original built had you on the edge of your seat. The only reason to be on the edge of your seat watching the 2007 version is to get an early exit from the cinema.
Most of the performances in the film are lacklustre to say the least, with the notable exception of Sheri Moon Zombie, who shows there is more to her repertoire than just Baby Firefly. William Forsythe goes entertainingly over the top while Malcolm McDowell is the biggest disappointment, a pale shadow of Donald Pleasence, and really fails to make any impact. The constant popping up of genre stalwarts like Udo Kier and Ken Foree for extremely brief cameos is very distracting and actually does more harm than good.
There is only one scene in the entire film that comes remotely close to capturing the atmosphere of the original – little Lindsey watches TV while a hulking Michael, knife in hand, stands motionless behind her. Because of that, because of Devil’s Rejects, because of the scene where Walton Goggins is shot in House of 1000 Corpses, I’m willing to forgive Rob Zombie for this colossal mis-step in what will hopefully still be a promising career in film.