Maybe… maybe this isn’t the best introduction to the Halloween property for Flip Flop Slap Fight.
I have a confession to make. Despite being a huge fan of John Carpenter and of slasher flicks in general, I’m kind of lukewarm on 1978’s Halloween. I fully recognize the skillful way that the scares are constructed and the new trails that Carpenter was blazing, but I feel like I came to it too late. By the time I caught up with the saga of Michael Myers and Lori Strode, I had already seen countless Nightmares and Friday the 13ths and 3rd and 4th tier slashers that borrowed the same basic formula of that seminal work. Even before I realized it, action and sci-fi movies like Predator and Alien had inundated me with the slasher vocabulary. So, while I appreciate the film, I don’t believe I have any sort of nostalgic attachment to it that would cause the knee-jerk rejection of a remake. Yet, I reject this remake. I reject it pretty hard.
Rob Zombie’s reputation as an icon of horror seems to rest mostly on the critically lauded The Devil’s Rejects. I’ve seen bits of that movie over the years, but it really isn’t the type of horror that interests me, so I don’t have a strong feeling about it one way or the other. This is really the first full piece of work I’ve seen from R. Zombie, auteur (unless you count the music video for “Thunder Kiss ’65”). On a purely mechanical level, I would say he has a solid foundation for horror film-making. Yet, he doesn’t seem to have any clue as to what makes the original Halloween work. Even a neophyte knows that the core tenant of Michael Meyers is that he lacks motivation. He is a blank slate of pure evil, or at least he is presented that way in the original film, and that is the basis of the terror he sews. In the remake, we spend an inordinate amount of time immediately after the horrific murder that Michael commits on his sister and her boyfriend, watching his examination by Dr. Loomis over the course of several years. Now, I’m not one to penalize a film for exploring new territory, especially in a remake. If Zombie were able to reexamine the story in a novel way that sheds new light on the havoc wrought by Meyers, I would be all for it. Unfortunately, the extended sequence showing young Michael in the psychiatric ward follows precisely the same path as you would expect. Nothing new is learned, and it instead feels like we’ve padded out the simple story with thirty minutes of exposition that results in no new insight into the character or what drives him.
Once that unnecessary diversion is complete and the story converges with the original screenplay, the film derails even further. Jamie Lee Curtis is iconic as the original Laurie, and the poor actress who steps into her shadow never really has a chance to make the role her own. I mentioned in my previous review the unrealistic way that many horror writers treat their protagonists, and the central group of teenagers in Halloween are written so falsely that it made me grind my teeth while I watched what passes for casual banter between them. Never once was I challenged to sympathize with the victims, because they were not presented as real people. Even more frustratingly, the film contorted itself in remarkable ways to place its female cast in the most compromising positions it could manage before slicing and dicing them to pieces. Look, I grew up in the 80’s, and I’ve been conditioned to appreciate a little T&A along side creative kills as a healthy part of any horror movie. Yet, the particular combination of violence and sexualization of women actors (portraying teenagers mind you) in this movie bothered me quite a bit. I feel like I’ve seen far too much of Rob Zombie’s particular brand of kink, and I’d feel better if he kept that shit locked up in his personal browser history.
In all, Halloween is not a film that needed to be remade, and if such an endeavor had a chance to be successful, then Rob Zombie was not the man for the job. I am genuinely gobsmacked by the lack of understanding Zombie has regarding why John Carpenter’s original became the flag-bearer for slasher fiction. He seems to have taken the worst lessons from Carpenter’s many imitators over the years, and squandered the opportunity to re-contextualize the slasher genre for a new generation. We’ll see in a couple days, for the season’s final review, if the franchise has any juice left after this debacle.
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