Many people have a problem with the fact that Rob Zombie’s translation of Halloween is in so many ways different from Carpenter’s, in style and substance, as well as realization. Some find it simply a mess; others find it an affront to one of the most beloved slasher killers in film history. My main problem with Zombie’s, one among many, is simple, the film is boring.
Halloween starts off by introducing the Michael Myers character as a child, reducing him to the dime-store clichés you are likely to hear on a 60 Minutes expose on one of America’s favorite misunderstood killers, grew up in a bad home, mom was a stripper, step-dad and sister felt –appropriately– creeped out by the kid, he liked to torture animals then take pictures of them, did I mention he had bully problems at school? This causes more problems then not, while Michael’s first killings take on quite the brutal punch, the character who should be pure evil, is given a motive for being the way he is, and that is not the case as well as it removes what made the original character so terrifying.
This sequence of Michael’s past takes around forty to fifty minutes to finish up before we skip forward to the present (or is the grind house seventy’s? You never can tell in this movie). Michael (Tyler Mane) has been stuck in a mental hospital for years, his mom is gone and the only two people who partake in one way conversations with the beast and his kindly, more then slightly loony psychologist Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) and one of the hospitals janitors (Danny Trejo). Well, needless to say, Myers makes his escape and heads homes to Haddonfield on, you guessed it, Halloween, to once again wreck havoc on the one town in America next to Springfield, Ohio and Crystal Lake I would never wish to live in.
One of the films problems is the tone, which switches drastically from when Michael was a kid to when he when he was an adult. Another problem is the characters, which show absolutely none of the flare of humor of those Zombie brought to life in The Devil’s Rejects (2005), instead playing mostly as a large group of hicks and white trash, whose stereotyping becomes quite tiresome very fast, and by fast I mean I wanted them all to die by the middle of the first scene so I didn’t have to listen to them anymore. The characters who aren’t hicks, Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Thompson) and her friends (including Danielle Harris, making a welcome comeback to her third entry in the series, or is it forth?) play out as boring stereotypes of today’s teenage girls, yet speak absolutely nothing like them. Another (yes, another) of the films problems, is the pacing, or lack thereof, that goes hand in hand with the repetitiveness of the films third act. How long can you drag out having poorly written characters run through a house, just to be taken out and replaced by nearly identical poorly written characters in the same or another house? I think Zombie set a record on that one.
That isn’t to say Halloween lacks any merit. The film has an intriguing, gritty, grind house look that fits the proceedings appropriately, the history Zombie sets up for the film is brutal and effectively disturbing (bye–bye Juni Cortez, wish it would have happened sooner); but after a while I was simply waiting for the film to do something interesting with the material it was given, followed by the realization that I no longer cared.
*½ out of ****
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