Halloween: Movie Review (2007)

(Originally published 2007)

Remaking a horror classic doesn’t have to be a horror show. All one has to do is look to Zack Snyder’s "Dawn of the Dead," John Carpenter’s "The Thing," Werner Herzog’s "Nosferatu" and Philip Kaufman’s "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" to see that it can be pulled off with panache.

Too bad the same isn’t true for Rob Zombie’s "Halloween," which takes Carpenter’s 1978 film of the same name and runs a knife through its gut.

The film is a misreading of everything that made Carpenter’s low-budget classic work — attention to its two main characters, which was key, and especially attention to designing a landscape that allowed suspense to roam and mount.

Unlike Zombie, who numbs with his overbearing use of gore, Carpenter didn’t rely on excessive violence to build momentum. Instead, he leaned on the energy generated by his spellbinding score and the idea that in the heartland, a bogeyman with a thing for butcher knives and Halloween masks could wreak such havoc.

This new "Halloween" is mostly about backstory.

Unlike its inspiration, which didn’t tell us much of anything about the serial killer Michael Myers, here we get a movie that pummels us with all the reasons why 10-year-old Michael (Daeg Faerch) went on his killing spree.

Naturally, his family is the problem — and what a family Michael has. Every one of them is white-trash poison. His mother (Zombie’s real-life wife, Sheri Moon Zombie) is a pole stripper, his step-father (William Forsythe) is an abusive alcoholic, and his sister is the typical self-involved teen who would rather have sex with her sketchy boyfriend than be nice to her brother. Their command of the English language is reduced to a run of expletives, which join the over-the-top gore in that they lose their impact simply because they’re employed so freely.

To keep his mind off his family, Michael, who favors a clown mask to hide his cherubic face, takes to torturing animals, which Zombie shows in detail (nothing is sacred here — it’s all for the screen, not for the imagination). Then, when things really get out of hand at home, he let’s his family have it with the sort of brutality that makes you question the film’s R rating.

Flashforward 17 years and Michael (now played by Tyler Mane) has escaped from a mental institution. His aim is to reconnect with his long-lost sister, Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) — who has none of the sweet awkwardness Jamie Lee Curtis possessed in the original — and to kill her friends along the way. Trying to stop him is his psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell, awful), but will Loomis get to Michael before Michael gets to Laurie?

Since it’s at this point that "Halloween" becomes a near play-by-play of the original, albeit with much less finesse, tension and subtlety, it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out.

Grade: D