[Movie Review] HALLOWEEN (2007)
You know something? Of all the stonkingly bad reviews I’ve given – and there hasn’t been that many – the one that I thought I would get some sort of backlash on was Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan. But you know what? Nothing! Not one e-mail telling me I was wrong, not one comment left after the review flaming me for my opinion! But looking back at my review of Rob Zombie’s work print of his remake of Halloween? Jesus Christ, you’d think I’d have called somebody’s mother a two-bit whore and then wished cancer upon the same woman! I got e-mails that very nearly went into double figures (he he!) telling me that I was wrong about the film and that I was wrong to open the review with the following statement:
“… With (minor) critical acclaim leaning more in favour of the ‘leaked’ work print of Rob Zombie’s remake of the John Carpenter classic, Halloween, over the eventual Dimension-pushed theatrical release, rumours are circulating the movie industry that the ‘leak’ was a deliberate one by Zombie himself or someone closely affiliated to him so that his “original” vision could be seen…”
… because, I’ve been told, the ‘work print’ is NOT the stronger movie at all and that I really shouldn’t judge Zombie’s attempt until I have seen his final version. So, with some free time on my hands yesterday, I took myself along to a cheap matinee screening of the film so I could see whether I’d been pre-emptive, premature and too keen in my harshness of the now much-maligned remake of one of my favourite films of all time!
Has my opinion changed?
Well, I’ve seen both versions now so let the ‘fair’ judgement begin okay? There are certain indisputable facts in life: If you start scratching your dick a couple of hours after sleeping with a woman and you’re still scratching three weeks later then that bitch wasn’t as “clean” as you thought she was! One man CAN make a difference – George W. Bush fucked the reputation of an entire country! And of course, my own personal favourite and the one most pertinent to this review; You can spray perfume on a dog turd and wrap a bow around its middle but there’s no amount of dressing up that can stop a turd from being a turd!
I originally referred to Rob Zombie’s work print as “… offensive, iredeemable gumf with plus points so absolutely minor they aren’t even worth mentioning… A horror movie for the sort of people who pull on a door handle when the sign right next to it says “Push” and who think ‘Beef Wellington’ is something that the cows wear on their hooves in the wet season! A film so bad that it’s actually one of those types that transcends it’s awfulness and becomes relatively good…” and whilst it’s commendable to see he’s removed that thoroughly disgusting and entirely unnecessary rape-sequence, the rest of the changes are not so positive. The ending is even more stupid then the one in the work-print, and that was an atrociously stupid finale let me tell you!
The dialogue is still silly, clunky and deliberately cruel to the ear and the acting (Sheri Moon Zombie specifically) is still far from acceptable (with Malcolm McDowell being a crushing disappointment in the role of Loomis) but maybe it was a bit ridiculous of me to assume that a round of copious reshoots and heavy editing would have been able to alter that huh? In fact, the new cut is so haphazard and desperate to up the explainations for Michael Myers being who and how he is, that the things that shone brightly in the work print (i.e. cult icons Dee Wallace Stone and Brad Dourif bringing real dignity to proceedings) get lost in the theatrical version.
Those moments of outright stupidity still exist (Myers stands in the middle of the road, in daylight, whilst the girls scream insults at him before he walks away – none of the girls think this is worth reporting to their parents or being suitably freaked out by the sight of a nigh on seven foot man in a mask and overalls!) and utter distaste is replaced by utter nonsense (giving Danny Trejo a death scene now, when you’ve set him up in the manner you have contradicts what you’re saying about the character of Michael Myers one minute and then bizarrely supports it the next).
The work-print side stepped the build-up/execution of tension and atmosphere in favour of just outright gore and I genuinely thought that, if nothing else, the final theatrical release would improve on that at least. I was so wrong.
The issue that pissed me off the most when I saw the work-print remained from the get-go through to the finale credits crawl of the theatrical version: When Rob Zombie first started talking up this project he seemed very deliberate in emphasising that his was to be a self-reliant, original vision of the Michael Myers mythos. Not a sequel or a prequel but a complete “re-imagining” that, William Shatner mask aside, held no connection with the John Carpenter original, the under-rated sequel or any of the other abominable franchise entries! Somewhere between pre-production and filming his own script, Zombie went back on his word because he’s delivered a film that cribs the timeless musical score, the best scares and, bizarrely enough, the driving factor of the 1981 sequel. Admittedly, it’s all sandwiched into a forty minute mini-movie with none of the finesse or craftsmanship that John Carpenter achieved but it’s still a huge let down to know that Zombie’s idea of a “self-reliant, original vision of the Michael Myers mythos” is to dig into ‘what makes a monster’ in the most crass, cliched and leaden of ways for fifty odd minutes before throwing things forward with a nigh-on scene-by-scene retread of Carpenter’s classic condensed into a thirty to forty minute window!
And it’s a tactless, talentless retread at that as I cannot speak highly enough of John Carpenter’s Halloween, a film I rate as my 15th all time favourite in my top 100 and which I described in Issue # 2 of Off The Shelf – The John Carpenter Collection as :
“… This is one of the greatest horror movies ever made – a true genre defining slice of cinema! Carpenter plays with typical horror conventions with abandonment here, whether it’s showing his killer in broad daylight, having the nerd instead of the popular girl become the heroine or introduce new and unexpected means of murder to shock and delight his audience. What you don’t realise on first viewing is just how timed and effectively precise Carpenter has marked the whole running time. Unlike something recent like, say, Neil Marshall’s The Descent (which puts us through an hour and a bit of characterisation and false scares before getting down to the meat of the movie, but boy what meat it is!), Carpenter hands out the minimal amount of screen time needed to get us invested then starts up the slaughter and rather amazingly does not let up. To this day, still containing some of the best scares in the horror genre, Halloween is an undisputed masterpiece from its defining stedicam opening through to its ‘Oh Fuck He’s Disappeared’ ending!”
The same problem remains. Had Zombie made this film as a standalone, with a fresh “killer” and not working under the iconic stature of Michael Myers and John Carpenter’s tremendous theme music, then this film may have got itself an ever so generous pass. However, seeing as it’s not a standalone movie about a new ’slash-and-stalk’ character, but a retread of a genuine horror classic and a defining genre character then it needs to be discussed as such and, as Zombie has found out at the hands of the mainstream and online critics, the results are not pretty!Regardless of whatever version you watch, he still introduces us to our victims an hour in with no degree of care or attention so we do not care for his Laurie Strode anywhere close to as much as we did with Jamie Lee Curtis’ version of the character! His entire third act is an amalgamation of Carpenter’s entire original. So much for a self-reliant, original vision huh? Hell, the stalk-and-slash elements that do come to work are soon easily recognised as almost carbon-copies of scenes from the 1978 masterpiece (e.g. Laurie trying to get back from one house to the other with Myers slowly stalking behind her) and, when the film stops trying to look “inside” the mind of Michael Myers and get down to the stalk-and-slash elements copied directly from the original source movie, you can still – like with the work-print – kind of find yourself begrudgingly taken a long on a bit of a ride!
I concluded the review of the work-print with the line:
“… The worrying thing is if this is the ‘better’ version between this and the theatrical cut then I honestly don’t think I can bring myself to lose two hours on the final edit…”
… but I took a leap of faith based on the amount of mail I got regarding the “need” to see the final version. All I can say is that if I felt a little burnt by the experience with Rob Zombie’s work print then the final theatrical version must have covered me in petrol, set me alight, pissed on me to put me out and then relit me again because I’m deducting the overly-generous two and a half ‘star’ review down to a (still relatively overly generous):
So for all of you who told me the theatrical version was a superior experience? Well, I guess I don’t agree huh?
They can release the work-print on DVD alongside the theatrical version. They can even throw out a Director’s Cut Extreme Edition if they want to. This film is still going to suck ass and there’s no getting around that at all!
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