Halloween -- 2007 -- R

I watched the work print from last May and then the Unrated DVD version. Both had stron and weak points, but I’ll focus on the actual release that’s out there.

The big change here is the addition of Michael Myers’ backstory, starting the day of the murders when he was 10 before he was locked away. It follows his first killing through the killing of his family, his term in the asylum, and then a rehash of the original 1978 film. It’s a slasher, so that’s pretty much the whole plot.

What it did well was the backstory. Since there was nothing before except snippets in the other films, Rob Zombie was starting with a fairly clean slate when it comes to painting the backdrop of one of the unholy trinity of slasher villains. Seeing Michael’s home and social life really put a logic to his mentality as a killer, and this whole bit was done very well and very interestingly. I admit to being quite glued for the whole term of it.

Then we got to the true remake part...this it did very badly. It was as bad and the beginning was good. Where with the original, the deaths had some measure of (dare I say) creativity and suspense, the deaths this time are fairly standard using the butcher knife and just hacking away as quickly as possible. This is due in part to the tight time constraints the movie fell under after the backstory portion, since there was more ground and loose ends left to cover in the last hour than in the original, since we had a couple of additional characters to kill off.

While the deaths do fit the profile of removing the anchors in Laurie’s life, they also made less sense plot wise because of how much he had to move around to do it. If you actually picture what he had to do in some parts versus what you see him do in others, it is very strange. For instance, he watches one house all afternoon, and as soon as Laurie leaves, he moves in and whacks the people there. Then he walks to his old house and waits there for the kids to show up, hump around and then he whacks them (not that he shoudl have know they would show up). Then he moves on to another house he could not possibly have guessed to show up as the kiddos are humping there only to kill one and almost kill the other...wait, almost? Sure enough, she survives with mortal wounds, gasping on the ground when Laurie finds her.

But as I mentioned, it all happens quickly. No suspense. No build of wonderment. No chase. No girl’s panty clad hiney stuck in a window. No, he walks in and slice! We didn’t even get that classic moment where the kid goes to the car, door’s locked, gets the keys, goes back, door’s unlocked, gets in, realizes about the same time we do, and then blood on the windows. Nope, just a bunch of hacking and it’s over...every time. It gets tedious.

Then, rather than end the movie as Carpenter intended with the "boogeyman" still out there, we go beyond that and take it way, way, way too far. Maybe the intent was no sequels to this one.

For character, the beginning was excellent. If our heart went out to anyone, it was Michael’s mom. But in the second half, they were cardboard. Sure, we knew them from 78, but something could have been done with them...I mean, something. But no, they were cardboard cutouts.Laurie wasn’t bad, but we actually got to see her do more than just have sex.

And oh, let’s not get me started on the acting and dialogue of the guys in charge of the asylum. I’m not sure which was more horrible. The delivery of the rather asinine dialogue was just hideous and felt like they had the script sitting on the desk as they were reading it. When the guy said, "If our security was inadequate, you should have warned us." I wanted to scream, "IT WASN’T THE SECURITY OF THE BUILDING, IT WAS YOU’RE FREAKIN’ GUARD!!!!!!!" But of course, that was never acknowledged. In fact, based on the work print version, it looks like the whole slaughter in the asylum was added later and they just reused the "he just escaped" after-dialogue. Scenes were shifted around and this was one of them that got the shift, and they never re-did any part of it. They should have just dumped it completely. It didn’t help.

This movie was setup to be something really good, but by either time constraints or just plain laziness, it slumped into a stereotypical slasher in the second half. Granted, the original Halloween defined slasher flicks, but it had something special that its clones didn’t. This one is more like the clones than the original, which is unfortunate because they did a great job setting it up.