Halloween – Unrated Director’s Cut (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)

3 Comments

1. Robert J. Herman

   October 23, 2010 at 12:10 am

   Review by Robert J. Herman for Halloween – Unrated Director’s Cut (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)
   Rating:
   All this talk about how this movie brilliantly delves into the Myers past, is completely overlooking one thing. In Carpenters’s Halloween, Michael’s family was 100% noraml. This movie is nothing but a stolen remake from a man who has run out of ideas of his own. Borrowing from others to assure his ego that he’s Rob Zombie the awesome one.
   
   Try Again
   
   It Sucks

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2. M. G Watson

   October 22, 2010 at 11:22 pm

   Review by M. G Watson for Halloween – Unrated Director’s Cut (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)
   Rating:
   My first reaction to Rob Zombie’s remake of HALLOWEEN was: “Why?” The film is near-perfect as it is, and didn’t need to be remade or, as the idiotic studio-suit buzzword goes, “re-imagined.” But what the hell. Since Hollywood isn’t interested in new ideas, and Zombie has apparently run out of such ideas as he has, I guess it was inevitable. This leads me to my second reaction, post-watching-the-film, which is, “Is Rob Zombie a f-ing idiot or what? Doesn’t he get why this was a good movie in the first place?”

   I don’t say this to be abusive. I do believe Zombie has some talent and aesthetic style. The problem is that his style – at least as it pertains to HALLOWEEN — is the wrong one. You don’t use a sledgehammer to do a flyswatter’s job, and you don’t let a sadistic, gore-infatuated fanboy direct a horror masterpiece. The original HALLOWEEN was great for a lot of reasons, but chief among them, it didn’t overanalyze its villain. And this is the real point that needs to be made here, because what Zombie does to his HALLOWEEN is part of an much wider and sillier trend in modern horror – the need to provide a reason why its killers do what they do.

   If I had to sum up the original, John Carpenter-directed version of the film in one phrase, it would be this: “Yes, Virginia, there really is a Boogeyman.” That’s basically it. The motivations of the film’s masked, mouth-breathing murderer, Michael Myers, are never explained to any meaningful degree, because – gasp! – they don’t have a rational explanation. Michael doesn’t get an “origin story”; no insight is provided as to why he murdered his sister Judith as a young boy, or why he’s re-enacting the crime on a much larger scale as an adult. He’s killing Because. Just BECAUSE. That’s as much why as you get. It’s almost Biblical. (“Who are you?” Moses asks the burning bush. “Who I AM.” God replies. “I Am Who I AM.”) As Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) explains to the Sheriff, Michael is not so much a human being as an embodiment of Evil itself, a Bad Thing that Happens to Good People. He’s the Book of Job in a William Shatner mask. (That’s why, incidentally, he’s credited at the end of the film not as Michael Myers, but as “The Shape”: he’s taken the shape of your fears, whatever they might be.) But HALLOWEEN is not less scary for this lack of information. Quite the contrary. It’s scarier precisely because we don’t get the satisfaction. There is no “Why?” where Michael is concerned. He just Is.

   Zombie isn’t satisfied with that answer, and so he’s approached the film from a different angle – the angle of the “origin story.” Here, Michael’s origin is that as a child, he was abused, neglected, picked-on, and basically f’d from birth. As a result, he developed into an unspeaking, sadistic, remorseless killer. Very neat. Very plausible. And completely missing the point. Because by reducing Michael to a set of influences, mere cause and effect, he’s also taking away nearly all his power as a villain. There’s a reason we don’t look behind the curtain in Oz; we might discover the Wizard is a sweaty dwarf on a treadmill. That’s not cool. That’s boring. And so is this film. Because not only does Zombie ruin the best aspect of HALLOWEEN – the almost-supernatural Boogeyman angle – he also viciously stomps the other aspect that made the original special – its sense of restraint. Carpenter had enough sense to understand that what is left out of a movie is often just as important as what is left in. Instead of a few perfectly set-up and executed murders, we get a gigantic massacre that quickly numbs. Instead of a few drops of blood, we get buckets of steaming gore (always the first refuge of the hack who can’t actually scare his audience). Instead of long cat-and-mouse games with totally unsuspecting victims that rack up the tension to an unbearable degree, climaxing in sudden death, we get drawn-out bludgeonings, followed by nonfatal stabbings, followed by near-escapes, followed by more bludgeonings and finally, fatal stabbings. Zombie’s complete lack of subtlety, his refusal to leave anything to the imagination, isn’t just bad film-making in and of itself; it’s completely unsuited to the telling of this particular tale. Using him to do a HALLOWEEN remake is like using a rusty chainsaw to perform eye surgery.

   I suppose you could make an argument that since this is a remake (excuse me, a “re-imagining”), Zombie was entitled, even obligated, to go in a different direction than Carpenter, one which has Dr. Loomis actually apologizing to Michael for “failing” him instead of blasting him with a .38, ’cause tha’s what you do with Pure Evil when you find it. But even here the film falls down, because if Michael is a pure sociopath, as Malcom McDowell’s version of Loomis maintains, Loomis has little to apologize for. See, while the jury’s still out about whether a psychopath/sociopath can be actually be “made” in childhood (as opposed to simply “born wrong”) there is universal agreement that neither sociopathy nor psychopathy are actually curable. How can a doctor fail the incurable? And this brings us back to the whole idea that made Carpenter’s flick scary: that pure Evil is something outside of human influence, happening on its own terms for its own reasons and not subject to psychological analysis or treatment. (Donald Pleasance’s Loomis ultimately got that Michael couldn’t be “reached” – except by bullets.) Put simply, the genius of the original HALLOWEEN is that it ducked all the moral-psychological elements Zombie embraces and concentrated on one simple idea, best summed up by the last two lines of dialogue in the film:

   LAURIE STRODE: (sobbing) Was that the Boogeyman?
   
   DR. LOOMIS: As a matter of fact…it was.

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3. Alexander Stephen Brown

   October 22, 2010 at 10:33 pm

   Review by Alexander Stephen Brown for Halloween – Unrated Director’s Cut (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)
   Rating:
   The original Halloween is a classic and will in my book always receive a five star rating. Recently there has been a great deal of remakes that were flops and catered to the teeny bopper crowd such as, The Fog, The Omen, Dark Water, etc. However there has been only two remakes that I thought were diserving of our attenion, one being the remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and Halloween.

   What I liked about the remake was it gave us something fresh to work with. In the original Halloween we never really knew why Michael was bad, in this remake, the first thirty minutes or so expore the childhood of Michael Myers. People say that the dialog concerning Michael’s family was wrong. Trust me, I have seen broken homes and Mr. Zombie gives us exactly what you would expect from a trashy family.

   Besides satisfying my curiosity of Michael’s childhood, I found this to be similar in many cases to the original, but at the same time the material was quite fresh with new chills and scares. Zombie took a masterpiece and reminded us why it is called a masterpiece. He accomplished a great job capturing a 70’s look and theme, and did a great musical score as well. This is possibly the best horror remake that I’ve ever seen.

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