AKA One Hour and Forty-Seven Minutes of Sheer Torture.

Anyone who knows me knows I am a fucking huge horror movie fan. I’ve seen them all and if I haven’t seen it; point me to where I can get a copy of it. Like most horror fans I got my start when I was very young and impressionable, viewing things I really shouldn’t be watching — to be fair. Now I look back on things, I am 26 and still love horror movies as much as the first time I’ve seen one. I tried to make this short but I have to get my point across…

Don’t Cry Emo Michael… you’ll get your revenge on those mean mean mean widdle bulliez!

The 1970’s and 80’s brought forward a new clique of horror icons, like The Wolfman, Dracula, The Mummy, and Frankenstein to an earlier generation; this time frame brought forward OUR icons, of course I speak of Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, and of course Michael Myers. These for brought forth a decade of violence, scares, and a slew of sequels, 30+ combined. In recent times, like clockwork, Hollywood ran out of ideas and started remaking classics once again — except this time there was no John Carpenters, or David Cronenbergs waiting in the wings to get their chance to remake a film they loved from their childhoods.

The Thing from another World and The Fly were remade 30 years after their original films to great success and amazing effect. To a lesser extent Night of the Living Dead and The Blob remake. These all kept the feeling and point of the original movies yet added their own flare and style and originality to make them classics in their own right. This is what remakes should be to me, and I’m sure to all of the true horror fans out there as well.

There have always been rumblings of remaking horror classics, The House on Haunted Hill and Thirteen Ghosts were remade and were their own entities, they weren’t great but were passable to me — in 2003 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake officially hit theaters, and I was actually excited — my reasoning behind this was that the later sequels just didn’t seem to have the brutal feeling and darker nature of the original and just weren’t coming through anymore and made a parody of Leatherface. The trailers had me feeling good and did their jobs well. I sat in the theater and almost broke my hand punching the seat in front of me in anger. I hated it with such a passion that when the remake of Dawn of the Dead was announced I rallied against it. I wanted no one to see it and I wanted to make sure that it didn’t do any kind of money in theaters to maybe help slow down the remake fever at least a little bit.

Well mother fucker… it was good. I loved it and it did the remake right.

So there I was back at the beginning, maybe it all was just a fluke and maybe TCM2003 was just bad because they had the wrong writing and directing team, not all remakes are abortions to the eyes… Dawn of the Dead made me remember back to the other remakes that came out in the 80’s that I DID enjoy as much as the originals.

Unfortunately TCM2003 did make a lot of money, a LOT. However this allowed other horror icons to make their comebacks in Freddy vs. Jason now I liked this movie as the campy fun it was supposed to be from the very beginning, it kept the feeling of both franchises going perfectly without making them parody themselves. The writing team had little nods and winks to the older films without making them overt or in your face. Then the talks started about remaking Friday the 13th. Fuck no. No way. The reason Dawn of the Dead worked was because it’s hard to fuck up zombies attacking a mall. It really is. Zombies you can get away with almost anything. They are iconic but they don’t have a certain style or anything to fuck up as a whole. The big four do.

They have a lot to fuck up and to be honest even their direct sequels have fucked up a lot of that on their own. They don’t need a remake to kick start the franchise again.

Eventually the talk of a F13 remake died down, especially when Dimension announced that after Busta Rhymes karate kicked Michael Myers in the face in Resurrection that they would be taking it all the way back to basics and doing a remake of Halloween. Fuck. Fuck. Fuckity Fuck! That was all I could think about the entire time I read the press release about them looking into doing it.

Then they announced the writer/director team. Well the team of one. Rob Zombie. I sat and thought to myself hey this isn’t too bad then… I am one of the few who enjoyed House of 1000 Corpses and Devil’s Rejects a lot. I felt after he got over his slump in 1000 Corpses that he came to his own and found his style instead of just re-imagining TCM in the style of one of his own music videos. I thought things were kind of looking up for the remake of Halloween.

Rob loves horror! He watches it all the time! He writes songs about it all the time! He knows and respects the characters, if anyone should remake a horror classic maybe it should be him!

The hype machine started rolling, they started announcing actors and revealing posters and teasers one bit at a time. I was sucked in, and god damn it — they got the mask RIGHT. The mask! The thing they couldn’t get right since Halloween 2! They got it right!

Amazing!

Early script reviews came in…

No press screenings came in…

Talks of Rob rewriting the entire thing due to a script review…

Rob re-shot the ending… and a good chunk of the film…

Oh no…

Please no…

Well August 31st came and went… I’ve seen Rob Zombie’s Halloween.

In fact I have a copy of the work print. The version that Dimension didn’t want you to see, the version that spawned so many rewrites and re-shoots. This is the version that is supposed to be superior to the theatrical version.

I’ve been anticipating watching this for weeks — I haven’t had the time to see it theatrically, and I even have two free tickets to it in my wallet right now.

Earlier today I sat down at home and started to watch the work print edition of Halloween 2007 and let me say this…

Fuck you Rob Zombie.

Seriously fuck you.

Halloween is sacred, you’ve said so yourself. You said that you understood and knew the characters and wanted to bring that all to your version.

Shut your face. Just shut it. If I could I would travel back in time and slit your throat before you recorded Astro Creep 2000 so at least you would have some semblance of legacy being that La Sexorcisto was a great album.

ANYWAY…

You lied to yourself, you lied to your fans, you lied to Halloween fans, and you put out quite possibly the single worst horror movie I’ve seen in at least 4 years.

Now that I got that out of my system, I’ll proceed a little more professionally… I hope.

Let us take a good hard look at Halloween, the original. It starts of with a horrific murder in typical middle class suburbia, and what makes this even more shocking was that it was a 10 year old boy who committed the murder. That’s all we know. A well to-do family’s son, for no reason, murders his sister. That’s shocking, that’s terror, that’s horror. We spend 10 minutes watching someone get stabbed from a child’s view point then we join our main characters. Laurie, Annie, and Linda are 3 different high school girls who happen to be friends and represent different cliques completely yet are drawn to being friends together. We spend a large amount of time getting to know all three of them, and the children Annie and Laurie are babysitting.

They set up the mythology of “The Shape” without showing anything about him. We hear myths and school yard stories about “The Boogeyman”… that’s all we needed to know.

The Shape — that’s all he was known as for most of the film, an emotionless, faceless killing machine. Why was he back in his hometown, why now, why is he stalking these girls? That is what caused the fear and terror in the original Halloween — the unknown. Michael was terrifying because he was the unknown, yet had a dark playful side to things, he enjoyed what he was doing and setting up these murders was just as fun to him as the killings themselves. It just worked and it worked well. Everything we needed to know Dr. Sam Loomis told us, from his perspective, on what he saw in that 10 year old boy. His whole life revolved around keeping Michael Myers incarcerated until he is dead.

All of that, ALL of it, was lost in Halloween 2007. What we’re ‘treated’ to is a redneck family of sluts, whores, alcoholic step fathers, and abuse. Michael is a fat little mama’s boy who got tired of abuse so he abused little animals and anyone else who hurt his feelings. Just like they did to Leatherface in the remake, they humanized him by making him a pansy ass who thinks he’s ugly and if anyone confirms his ugliness he kills.

Michael is also surrounded by a who’s who of Hollywood B Actors. We get it Rob. We really do. You want to be the Quentin Tarantino of horror SO bad that you’ll resort to trying everything he tried first. We understand. It’s okay… well no I lied. It’s not okay. It’s really not. Filling your film with actors from past low budget horror movies does not give your films any more credit or merit in any way. All it does is distract the movie goers by going “hey look! Clint Howard! What’s he doing in this movie!” or going “Udo Kier?! Oh boy!” then forgetting they were in the movie because you gave them shit roles with no real reason.

So 52 minutes into the film we finally meet Laurie and her parents. 52 minutes. What took 10 minutes in the original film took 52 minutes in the new version. It took 52 minutes to absolutely ruin everything that made Michael Myers work — and turn into an almost shot for shot remake of the original.

This film is devoid of anything that made the original any good. Frankly Rob Zombie is sexist, and has no clue on how to write, cast, or direct female roles in anything but a slut, stripper, whore, or annoyance.

That’s right I said it.

He turned Laurie Strode into a typical smutty girl from every other film. She has no heart, no emotion, no soul, and frankly you can’t slap a pair of glasses on a slut and say she’s a wholesome nice young girl. Rob Zombie wrote Laurie as someone who have no emotional feelings for… same goes for her friends… the biggest trap any modern age horror film falls into is character development — well the lack of it. Ultimately you don’t care about any of them, or their families, at all.

Speaking of not caring — Danielle Harris. Jamie Lloyd from Halloween 4 and 5 is in this film. Big fucking deal. Sorry. She brings nothing to the role and can’t act as good as she did when she was 10 years old in Halloween 4. Maybe it’s the sloppy writing, hell it probably is, but still. No one cares. There isn’t a single thing in this entire remake that makes me care about it… nothing… I’ve been seriously trying and trying to find something GOOD about this movie… and the only thing is The Mask… they got that right… thankfully…!

So remember that 52 minutes into the film Laurie Strode is introduced right? Well the next 50 minutes is ALL of the original Halloween. ALL of it. Put into a blender and turned on high.

Gone is all of the suspense, terror, horror, and stalking that the original had. They replaced it with bad techno soundtrack that occasionally drops out and plays the original themes from Halloween or some classic rock song that has no context with the story or anything!

Also they replaced Donald Pleasance with Malcolm McDowell — which originally was a great idea, until he had to read the swill that Rob Zombie wrote down on the page.

Such as this… “Michael! Stop! Michael it’s me… SAMUEL!” (right click and save as to view 3mb WMV video, or view the embedded video below.)

I’ve really rattled on about this… I can’t express my disdain enough, I really can’t… let’s put it this way

If Rob Zombies intent was to secretly make Hollywood hate remakes and appreciate the original films more — he succeeded there. I went back and watched John Carpenters Halloween and love it even more than I have in the past.

Bravos Rob… I say bravos. You just made an entire community of horror fans hate you and wish you never got behind a camera ever again. I hope you and Ewe Boll burn in hell together.

1. Just to reiterate… fuck this movie

   Posted by Stevo | September 9, 2007, 5:52 pm

2. I thaught there was a slight bit of hope that the Halloween remake might not suck Dingle berries when i heard it was being done by Mr.Zombie. Well at this point i think someone needs to shoot this zombie in the head so they can’t eat the brains or anything that may be left of a true fan. I was highley disapointed on how he depicts the female population and population as a whole, yes we know a horror movie needs a whore but every other fucking sentence dosent have to be a sexual innuendo! Also to point out this is the gayest fucking movie i have seen in a while, also to make my point greater i like the movie bridget jones diary, to reiterate…. THIS IS THE GAYEST MOVIE EVER!….. please shoot yourself , drink posion .. anything else you can possibly do to evade the tragedy that lies on the screen. It will honestly be a big ass waste of time. Steve youre a crazy bitch.

   Posted by missalphatrix | September 12, 2007, 10:32 pm

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