How to Make A Monster, Baby Halloween' Review...

Posted on September 1, 2007 - 2:20am by michael

"The darkest souls are not those which choose to exist within the hell of the abyss, but those which choose to break free from the abyss and move silently among us." Dr. Sam Loomis

It has become the popular thing to do these days to stop appending numbers to the titles of high-numbered sequels maybe it's just become too much work to do all that research and figure out what number we're on, anyway and Rob Zombie has, then, done the cool thing and simply renamed his Halloween remake after John Carpenter's original film. It's a fitting title, though, since the movie's essentially a re-telling of the same story. But rather than just re-shoot the same story, Zombie goes deeper into the psyche of Michael Myers. The movie has a biographical feel of one of horror's greatest slashers with a distinctive Rob Zombie style, and as it turns out that's not a bad combination . The movie starts off with Myers as a kid, but Zombie shows us how dysfunctional his family is. An stripping mother, her abusive boyfriend, and a slutty older sister with a dirtbag boyfriend. He shows signs of being a normal, if slightly long-haired, kid who just wants to go trick-or-treating and be a regular 10-year-old. But soon begins the chain of events that led to the closing off and then total collapse of his inner self, and his start down the road to becoming the stalking, stabbing Michael Myers that we've all come to know and morbidly love. In fact, it is one of the movie's great strengths that it is able to show so clearly and so linearly Michael's transition from an almost normal 10-year-old to a brutal masked killer that hasn't uttered a word in 15 years. [caption id="attachment_54495" align="alignleft" width="329" caption="Michael's mother Deborah (Sheri Moon Zombie) visits her son at the Smith's Grove Institution For Psychotic Children."][/caption] Donald Pleasance's beloved character Dr. Sam Loomis is now played by none other than Malcolm McDowell, who has a massive list of acting credits but might be most widely known from his role in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. We meet Loomis before he is assigned to the case of Michael Myers and this time we see the process of Loomis getting to know Michael and struggling to understand what's going on in his head as he swings wildly back and forth between a childlike happiness with no memory of his recent murders to violent outbursts of frustration and rage. His normal moments grow rarer and rarer until ultimately he withdraws completely into himself and stops communicating at all. Zombie makes a small but important addition to the story in an event that takes place involving a nurse at his hospital and his mother's reaction, just before we cut to 15 Years Later. At this point the movie returns to the familiar plot of the original film with Michael stalking his way back to Haddonfield to find his sister Laurie while Loomis tries to both find him and convince the police of the reality of what they're dealing with. There are a lot of stand-out performances in the movie, like McDowell as Dr. Loomis, Sheri Moon Zombie as Michael's mother, Deborah, William Forsythe as her abusive boyfriend, and the character of Sheriff Brackett, played by Brad Dourif, one of the giants of horror lore to take a part in the movie. He's probably best remembered as Chucky from the Child's Play films (btw, a "re-boot" of the original film is slated for a 2010 release), but has an impressive filmography, including the Lord of the Rings films and the best scene in the 1998 film Urban Legend. And then there's this kid Daeg Faech, who plays the young Michael. This kid wrote and directed his first film at age 8, and can do French and German accents as well as speak English, French, Japanese, American Sign Language and some Danish. You probably remember him now as the bratty French kid in Hancock that gets thrown up into the sky, but I recommend keeping an eye on this kid, he could be big. Tyler Mane also does an outstanding performance as the older Michael, effectively capturing the unique movement and solidity of Nick Castle's performance in the original film. But Laurie Strode, unfortunately, is played by the instantly forgettable Scout Taylor-Compton, your typical cookie-cutter teenie-bopper actor, the likes of which you can find by the truckful in bad teen comedies and horror movies. Her character is an irritating high school clich without a shred of the charm and charisma of Jamie Lee Curtis's performance in the original film, and is probably the single most important factor in a lot of the popular disappointment with the movie. And it doesn't help that her friends one of whom, Annie Brackett, is played by Danielle Harris, who was Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4 and 5 are equally devoid of interest. But it should be noted that even though Zombie has given us a remake of the original film and remakes are freighted with the stigma of being the result of a lack of originality, he has definitely added something to the series as a whole, which is increasingly rare with each successive sequel in any franchise. He has gone deeper into the persona of Michael Myers without damaging any of the mystery surrounding him which, sadly is more than can be said of his 2009 effort, Halloween II. And he also adds several threads to the story which serve to clarify it and deepen it rather than come off as inexcusable and pointless creative liberties. This recent tendency to add on unnumbered sequels to already prodigious franchises comes with an uneasy feeling of endlessness, but Rob Zombie's Halloween is an example of one of the better additions to the world of high-numbered sequels. I think the producers understand that, given the relative cheapness with which a Halloween film can be made, they're always going to make money as long as there are enough horror fans in the world for whom the legend of Michael Myers will never die, no matter how bad the movies get. But with even the horror talents of Zombie having by now resulted in the relatively disappointing Halloween II, who knows how long that will be? The Bean Meter [caption id="attachment_54500" align="aligncenter" width="261" caption="3.5 Beans out of 5."][/caption]