I tried to keep an open mind, I really did. But it’s so hard when you are watching a remake of John Carpenter’s classic “Halloween,” the story of psychopath killer Michael Myers.
It’s especially hard when it was remade by Rob Zombie, director of “The Devil’s Rejects” and “House of 1000 Corpses.” I figured that suspense and mood would be traded in for gore and shock value. After watching the film, I’m convinced that I have a gift to foresee the future.
Zombie starts it off with an interesting prequel angle. He shows the background of Michael Myers’ childhood (something barely shown in the original) in the same town of Haddonfield, Ill., but it is long and tiresome.
Played brilliantly by child star Daeg Faerch, the eerie young Michael loves to wear masks and kill animals. He is treated badly by the majority of his white trash family. From this, we get a full psychological understanding of why Myers became the killer that we all know and love. But this is not necessarily a good thing because we are forced to see it from Zombie’s angle without any interpretation.
Young Myers eventually has enough and starts killing his sister, her boyfriend and his mother’s lazy alcoholic boyfriend on Halloween night in a gruesome and bloody manner. After his stripper mother (played by Zombie’s wife Sheri Moon) commits suicide because of the trauma involved, his baby sister Laurie is the only one who survives – a hint of what is to come.
Myers is sent to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium, where he meets Dr. Loomis, played true to the original by Malcolm McDowell. Loomis tries to help but fails to connect with him, so he is exiled. And now the original storyline finally starts.
15 years later, Myers (played by the gigantic Tyler Mane) escapes from the sanitarium in detailed fashion through ridiculous super-human strength. His goal: to find and kill his sister Laurie, now a teenager living with her new adoptive parents in modern-day Haddonfield.
Zombie pays homage and stays true to the middle act by including a lot of the original dialogue and plot. Not surprisingly, this is the best part of the film. It’s still creepy when Myers is lurking behind a tree or door, staring blankly at Laurie in the distance and disappearing when she notices, not to mention when the iconic John Carpenter score plays.
Just Laurie’s luck, she is left to babysit two children while her two friends are having a hump-fest with their boyfriends. There was sexual content in the original, but Zombie raises it to a level where it is completely unnecessary and takes away from the classic suspense accompanying her friends’ inevitable deaths. And they are killed in such a gory fashion that it’s almost comical.
Coming out of the theater, I was shocked to see how much Zombie rewrote, especially in the first and last parts. Though the cast is good, the tiresome two-hour film drags on in an inconsistent manner that peaks when it follows the original storyline and leaves nothing to the imagination.
Classics like this should just be left alone. But hey, at least they did a good job with the mask.
