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354 out of 537 people found the following comment useful :-
Rob Zombie tries to give a monster a soul., 31 août 2007

Author: MovieAddict2009 de UK

On paper, a "Halloween" remake looked interesting. Zombie tries to go back to the character's origin and reinvent him - it's a recent trend in Hollywood ("Batman Begins," "Casino Royale," the upcoming "Incredible Hulk," etc.), so it's not quite surprising that Hollywood greenlit the project and it got the push it received.

But the problem that arises while doing this with "Halloween" is that it comes into conflict with the concept of Michael being purely evil. Although I can understand what Zombie was trying to do by exploring Michael's background, it contradicts the whole point of the original. By providing a reason and displaying a human character on screen, you give the character a soul - and despite what Zombie may claim, this does NOT make Michael scarier. It makes him an average movie serial killer: a guy with a messed up life as a kid who snaps one day and goes on a killing rampage.

Is it scary? No. Gory? Yes. Realistic? At first. And if it were a movie about a serial killer, it would work. But it's not. This is a movie about a monster, a soulless creature; a boogeyman, as per the original film. Monsters aren't scary when we know they're flesh and blood.

Carpenter had a way of framing the action in the original movie. Michael stalks Laurie in her hometown, but we never see any real flesh behind the mask, we never really see him moving around like a normal human being. But we do here. He stands in the middle of an open road, in front of three teenage girls walking home from school, and they all see him. He stands there for a few moments, then trudges away off-screen. We actually see him walk away, instead of just appearing and disappearing as he did in the original film. Which method is scarier? The answer is clear.

Zombie spends 40 minutes or so building up Michael's character before he escapes from the ward. We see him killing animals as a child (and torturing them, too), a stupid subplot with his mom as a stripper and a typical school bully, and a promiscuous sister. The sexual talk is frank and disgusting - the mom's boyfriend (husband?) is talking about how cute her daughter's butt is, and at this point in the film we're not sure whether he might even be the father. It's just shock for shock value. Zombie has a tendency of this - blunt violence and blunt dialogue combined - and in a film like this, it seems cheap and fake and unnecessary. The heavy emphasis placed on the swearing - and I mean this literally (as in, the actors place a noticeable emphasis on the profanity they use) is almost unintentionally funny. Zombie cast his wife in the role of Michael's mother, and she can't act at all.

Donald Pleasence got stuck with the most unfortunate lines from the original film, but we were willing to forgive bad dialogue because of how well-made the film was otherwise. Here, Malcolm McDowell gets the worst of two worlds: he gets to handle an under-characterization with bad, bad, BAD dialogue AND a generally weak film to boot. The sequences with McDowell's version of Loomis are all completely clichéd - Zombie clearly writes his dialogue based on other films' dialogue. The "intimate" scenes at the mental ward between Loomis and Michael are awful. McDowell struggles with typicalities of the genre, such as the Dr. Who Wasted His Own Life By Devoting It To Someone Else's (he explains to Michael that his wife left him and he has no friends because of how involved he became with the case - and the dialogue itself is straight from any cop-vs.-killer flick). The recent film "Zodiac" had a similar theme of men losing their personal lives due to obsession over a murderer, but it was handled better. The whole Loomis character should have been dropped from the remake if all Zombie wanted to do with him was use him as a deus ex machina, by the way.

Overall, this feels like a redneck version of "Halloween," which is going to offend some people, but I can't think of any better way to describe it. It's trashy, vulgar, and silly - and hey, that's fine, if that's Rob Zombie's motif and he wants to make movies pandering towards that sort of audience. I have nothing against it, and I think it may work with some films - I can imagine him making a good re-do of "Natural Born Killers" (although I hope it never, never happens!).

However, when you're remaking an iconic, legendary, incredibly influential horror film - don't cheapen it by "reimagining" it with horror movie clichés and shock-value material. The very worst aspect of this remake is that it simply isn't scary at all - it's a typical slasher flick, a homicidal-man-on-a-rampage flick, which ironically is exactly what Zombie said he wanted to avoid.

The first film was eerie, spooky, and unnerving because Michael's motivations were cloudy and we weren't sure whether Laurie was right or wrong when she said he was the boogeyman. We only knew one thing: he wasn't entirely human.

But ever since that original movie, the filmmakers have attempted to keep expanding upon Michael's history: the second film developed a motivation for his killings (Laurie was his sister), the fourth offered more clues at his background, and now we come full circle with a complete remake of the original film.

Michael's true demonic core - the natural horror element of the series - is stripped bare and all that is left is a disturbed, abnormally tall redneck with greasy hair who hasn't showered in years wearing a silly mask going around killing people because he had an abusive family life as a child. Some things are better left unexplored.

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183 out of 267 people found the following comment useful :-
A Gory Bastardization of a Horror Classic, 31 août 2007

Author: ringer7 de United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

The basic problem with Rob Zombie's remake of the classic horror flick Halloween comes from its purpose. The only reason he should have even considered attempting such a feat is if he seriously felt he could service the film by giving it an update and improving some of its shortcomings that result from the tests of time. Sadly, Zombie not only does nothing to improve the film, he hacks and slashes away all of the mystique the original had and rips open brand new gory, messy, and pointless holes throughout.

The character of Michael Myers in the original film came from a fairly well-to-do suburban family, yet inexplicably turned out a rotten, merciless killing machine. It is pretty essential to Michael's "Boogeyman" persona that he appear as something almost supernatural, and certainly nothing the audience could ever sympathize with. Yet Zombie drags a newly fashioned back-story out for half of the movie, trying to give reasons for why Myers does what he does, stomping all over the mystery that surrounded the original character and struck fear into all members of the audience. It is also a major part of the character of Dr. Loomis that Michael be the impossible case study, one that even the most accomplished psychologist couldn't comprehend. Instead, Zombie (in typical fashion of his God-awful career) makes Michael the product of a run-down, white trash environment. Any movie-goer would find it difficult to not laugh at the ridiculous caricatures Michael's family members portray, if they were not already bored to death by Zombie's fetish with white trash, and his predictability as a director.

Zombie saw it fit to remove almost all of the classic scenes that made the original so memorable and replace them with blood-strewn bodies of naked women at every turn. I'm not sure who exactly thinks "porn + gore = horror", but I'll tell you that there is a major difference between a creepy, mysterious mask-wearing man chasing after a scared babysitter and popping out from behind every corner and one bashing in someone's head with a baseball bat repeatedly to no one's amusement. It's fine if some people in the world enjoy goriness every once in awhile, it's not fine if Hollywood directors begin to confuse this with horror. Repeated sadistic killings are not what scares an audience, they're what sickens them. Mystery, suspense, and the creepy aura of the unknown are what make up a good horror film, and the original Halloween is THE classic example of this. Also, as a side-note but something that needs to be mentioned, who the hell talks like Laurie and her two friends in this film? These three girls, the blonde friend in particular, converse as if high schoolers find it extremely cool to drop the f-bomb every other word and sound as annoyingly immature as possible. The entirety of the dialogue written for their parts suggests no one involved in the making of this film has any idea what teenage girls talk like, so one of them decided to make it up and make them all look like total fools. I had already given up on the film by this point, but it seriously made me and everyone I came with kind of concerned that a film could get all of the way through the editing process and into theaters with such odd dialogue that would actually cause us to look at each other with quizzical faces.

My one piece of advice to moviegoers everywhere is, instead of putting more of your hard-earned money into the pocket of a hack director like Zombie and fueling the fire of awful modern horror films and terrible remakes, stay at home, dim the lights, and watch the original classic to remind yourself of just what makes a horror movie tick, just how great movies of that genre once were, and just what it feels like to truly be scared - heck, that's exactly what I'm going to do to try and push this steaming pile out of my memory. It's bad when a horror movie comes out that's filled with lots of cheap gore, overused expletives, and pointless nudity, it's far worse when it's done as a remake of a classic. The only people this film will strike horror into the hearts of is fans of the original, and sadly this is not the type of horror they paid to see - they, like myself, will be absolutely horrified at just how bad the abomination of a remake that is Rob Zombie's Halloween truly is.

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328 out of 562 people found the following comment useful :-
Way, WAY better than I expected, 31 août 2007

Author: funnygy de Wisconsin

I'm not a big fan of the recent trend of remaking all the classic horror films of the '70s and '80s, but I decided to go see the new "Halloween" anyway, if for no other reason than I'd never seen any of the original films in a theater. (That, and I figured they couldn't do much worse than the god-awful "Halloween: Resurrection", the most recent entry before this remake.) IMHO the original "Halloween" is one of the greatest horror films ever, and certainly the best "slasher" movie (unless you count Hitchcock's "Psycho", but that's another topic.) I really expected to be let down, even though I haven't seen any of Rob Zombie's other movies.

For the first five minutes, I thought, "Great, they took this classic American slasher flick and turned it into a white trash festival." But once Michael started talking (which he never does in the original film) something clicked, and I was hooked. The new film takes the Michael Meyers "mythos" (if you will) and fleshes it out, giving the audience a frightening insight to the true horror that exists all around us before eviscerating us with the shocks and gore we really paid to see.

The movie loses some of its momentum when it jumps to the present day, when too often it reverts back to simply restaging some of the trend-setting scenes from its predecessor - Laurie staring out the window at school and seeing the weirdo in the coveralls and the white mask staring at her, only to vanish seconds later. But hold on, friends - just when you think you know what's coming, the new "Halloween" veers off on its own course, and from then on all bets are off.

One of the most significant updates to the "Halloween" legend is the development of Dr. Loomis, the Van Helsing to Meyers' Dracula. The original Loomis (played memorably by the late Donald Pleasance, who kept returning for sequel after sequel despite his age and - in later years - ill health) was little more than John Carpenter's answer to Captain Ahab. Each film saw him trying to convince another group of skeptical law enforcement officers of the imminent slaughter, never to be believed until the bodies started piling up. The new film's Loomis, however, is a more complex character; he's not the selfless hero the old Loomis was, but he's not quite a villain either, as long as one can forgive him for giving up on Michael to turn his experiences into a cottage industry of "true crime" books and public speaking engagements. When Loomis and Michael are reunited later on, there's more going on then can be seen in a first viewing.

Zombie's "Halloween" succeeds on all fronts. It brings modern touches to a format that had long since fallen into cliché without changing it so much that it becomes unrecognizable. It manages to restore the menace and dread of the iconic Michael Meyers character in an era when masked psychopaths usually prompt the audience to laugh rather than gasp. Most importantly, it delivers the goods horror fans demand but includes enough depth and subtext to make it more than just cinematic junk food.

In short, I was pleasantly surprised with this new version of "Halloween". Like Zach Snyder's redo of "Dawn of the Dead", the 2007 "Halloween" could never replace its predecessor, but does make for a very admirable companion piece to a horror classic, blending the old and the new into an entertaining and thought-provoking fright film.

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152 out of 219 people found the following comment useful :-
Rob Zombie, I am a forgiving person, but this is going to take a very long time, 1 septembre 2007

Author: Kristine (kristinedrama14@msn.com) de Chicago, Illinois

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

OK, now my problem with Halloween(2007) is this is a film that DID NOT need to be remade. Halloween('70's) was absolutely perfect in every aspect, in my opinion, it's the scariest movie of all time. But when I heard that Rob Zombie was on to direct this movie, I actually thought for a minute there was a possibility this may be a good remake. I saw it this morning at the theater, I am in absolute disgust. Just it's not like he just re-made the movie into his own idea, no, he took some of John Carpenter's excellent ideas and just made them into crap. Now I'm separating this from the original, Halloween(2007) was actually by itself a bad film. Which really disappointed me since The Devil's Rejects was done so well, this was just a typical stupid unoriginal slasher movie. Now, Rob had a good idea where he developed Michael's character in the beginning, where we had a better idea on why he became Michael Myers. But after that, everything went downhill, because Rob just rushed all the other IMPORTANT characters, so they got no development what-so-ever.

Mike Myers is a tormented kid, his mom is a stripper, his step dad is an alcoholic jerk, his big sister treats him bad, and he is picked on at school. But he kills small animals as well, leading him to go onto bigger things, like humans. He massacres his family, excluding his mom and his baby sister, he is taken to a mental institution and escapes 15 years later and is going after Laurie, his baby sister who is now grown up and is preparing her and her friends for a night of hell.

The acting on the teenage girl's parts was just horrendous, like extremely bad, I was actually hoping for them to get killed, how sad was that? Laurie was just a whiny little priss, not at all likable like Jamie's performance, same with the other two girls, they couldn't live up to the other performances. These girls were just annoying, not likable at all, while the other actresses at least had that going for them and made them likable vicitims. But it just seemed like they wanted their 15 minutes or some kind of big break, because it didn't even take them 10 minutes to take their tops off. On a movie on it's own, it's just too unoriginal and I'm disappointed in Rob because I thought he was really improving. Comparison to the original Halloween, perhaps Rob should have read the tag line THE ONE, THE ONLY, HALLOWEEN, because this was a huge slap to John Carpenter's face on his brilliant classic.

2/10

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160 out of 243 people found the following comment useful :-
Hack-o-ween, a terrifying experience, 31 août 2007

Author: adevlin-1 de United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I have always been a big fan of the Halloween series. I've seen every one, and even though some of the sequels are cheesy, I thought it was still a good watch. When I found out that Rob Zombie, supposedly one of the best new horror directors was making the next film, I was actually pretty psyched because I thought it may revive the series. But let me tell you. This is the not only the worst Halloween movie, this is in my top ten bottom movies. Rob Zombie completely misses the point of Michael Myers. Not knowing what makes him tick IS WHAT MAKES HIM SCARY! The original Halloween is frightening because the child Michael myers has NO REASON to kill his sister, he just does and never speaks another word. He's evil by nature, not by nurture. This plot line makes it seem more horrifying because its not personal, and the audience feels like it could happen to THEM! When I watch a horror movie, I don't want to see how the killer had a hard life, and really could of been a good guy. Why would a director make an audience sympathize with a serial killer? I can only see that succeeding in a dark comedy, but in a horror movie it just does not work.

Another problem with this movie is the gore. Gore can work in certain scenarios, but when you uses it excessively in a movie there are few cases when it makes the movie scary. In this "reimagining" not only are there unnecessary character deaths that destroy any sort of realism, but there is no creativity in the death scenes. Every time a girl got killed she was in the process of having sex or just finished having sex. By the third time you see a couple get murdered, I was like "Alright we get it, they're crazzzy teenagers having sex and they're gonna get killed!" I mean I know it's never been done before but it got to be old the third time. At some points I wondered if it was actually a snuff film.

The dialogue was some of the weakest I've ever heard, even for cheesy slasher films. And the sad part was, this film was trying so hard to be serious that it was hard to ignore. I know the dialogue in other Halloween's is rough but for a film that had so much hype, and was supposed to "reinvent" a legend, I'd expect a little more than immature lines about sex that are awkwardly delivered. I am a teenager and I know teenagers talk about sex, but nothing like that. This film had some of the weakest writing I have ever seen.

There are some good performances, particularly by Malcolm McDowell, who plays Dr. Loomis, but his part is profoundly damaged by the script, so even he looks foolish in the film. Brad Dourif also was good, but didn't have a lot of screen time. Other than that there were some good cameos(Danny Trejo, Ken Foree) but they're barely in it. Unfortunately, Rob Zombie confuses Michael myers with Jason and makes an 11 year old normally sized boy into a 26 year old 7 foot monster. Conveniently he gains amazing physical prowess staying in a mental hospital.

Avoid this movie at all costs. I actually paid my friend a couple dollars to stay to the end, because it was that bad. I was hoping it would get better it but it did not. I mean I tried to like this movie, but it was just so terrible. The movie wastes so much time trying to develop Michael myers, that it barely develops the victims that he stalks. You just don't care about the teenagers he kills because you barely know them when he catches up with them. It's basically a movie about a killer killing random people. Seriously, just rent the original and watch it again, it's cheaper and even if you've seen it a thousand times its better than this. Rob Zombie is a terrible writer, and a terrible director who likes to show off his wife. (Who's a stripper in this movie of course). He is a hack and is only acclaimed because some people think excessive violence is cool. I doubt there's many people scared by his techniques. I'm just trying to forget this movie ever existed, and no matter what anybody says, I plan to never see another rob zombie film again. I think the fact that Saw IV is premiering in October, and Halloween is coming out in August really should tell you how bad it is alone. Trust me though, even die hard Halloween fans, this is not worth a watch.

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140 out of 208 people found the following comment useful :-
Execrable., 1 septembre 2007

Author: Travis Johnson (travisj-ohnson@hotmail.com) de United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I won't claim to have gone into the movie unprejudiced; I was prejudiced. I hate remakes, and I don't care for either of Rob Zombie's previous films, so I was expecting something bad. Bad like the Texas Chainsaw remake. Or Hostel. Or Marie Antoinette. Or The Devil's Rejects. Instead, I saw a film that explored depths of stupidity, ineptitude and tedium that I hadn't even imagined.

The movie begins and right from the start you know it's a Rob Zombie film because the first thing you hear is blaring crappy 70s c**k-rock. We are then taken inside the Myers' home. The family is just like the one you might have seen on one of the daytime talk-shows last week. Michael is a long-haired kid in a Kiss t-shirt. His step-dad is a verbally abusive drunk who calls him a "pussy" and a "queer". His mom is... would you believe it?.. a stripper. His big sister is kinda slutty. At school, he has problems with bullies. The only good thing in his life is little baby Laurie (yes, even though Zombie said he would be ignoring the mythology created in the sequels, it's made quite clear that Michael and Laurie are siblings) and Halloween. He just can't wait for Halloween but, alas, when the day comes nobody will take him trick-or-treating. We see a montage of poor little Michael sitting dejectedly on the curb as his mom works the pole, his sister f***s her boyfriend and Nazareth's "Love Hurts" plays on the soundtrack. I swear I'm not making this up. This scene had me laughing out loud. Deciding to not just sit there and be sad, Michael slaughters his step-dad and big sister. Then it's off to the sanitarium, where Michael develops a relationship with Dr. Loomis and visits with his mom, who ends up blowing her brains out whilst watching home-movies of the good old days. It's at this point- about half-way through the movie- that Zombie seems to suddenly remember that he's supposed to be remaking Halloween, not making a Lifetime movie-of-the-week, and so... Flash forward 15 years. Michael escapes, and the movie switches gears from unintentional hilarity to excruciating boredom. In the original movie, Michael was a ghost who silently slipped from house to house. Michael2007 doesn't need that kind of stealth, because he's 7 feet tall and can throw people across a room and tear a wall down with his bare hands as he makes a direct line to Haddonfield (which now seems to be in Texas), killing everything in his path, just to tell Laurie that he loves her. Occasionally he pauses to change masks. His long greasy hair always hangs in front of his face. He looks like a reject from a nu-metal band, and the movie looks like a music video. No beautiful, floating Steadicam shots here. Just a bunch of shaky post-Blair Witch/28 Days Later stuff and more of Zombie's now-trademark pointless freeze-frames.

I will try and say some nice things about this execrable film. Why? Because I'm a nice guy. The cast is very interesting (aside from Zombie's ugly, scrawny wife). We have Sid Haig and Ken Foree. Sybil Danning is a nurse. Udo Kier is in it somewhere, too but I'll be darned if I could spot him. Danielle Harris, who plays Annie, is really hot. There's lots of blood and naked breasts. Rob Zombie and Eli Roth are terrible filmmakers, but they should be applauded for putting blood and naked breasts back into mainstream horror. This one even has blood-smeared naked breasts. That sort of thing used to guarantee an X/NC-17, so I guess that the MPAA is loosening up.

Unfortunately, however, all of the blood, naked breasts and interesting casting in the world can't make up for a complete and utter lack of talent and imagination. For a dude who claims to be a horror fan, Zombie has a remarkable lack of understanding of what makes the genre work.

Edgar Allan Poe's seminal collection of macabre stories was called Tales of Mystery and Imagination. One important element of the horror film is mystery. The re-makers don't get this. They think that everything needs to "make sense" and be neatly explained. Why? Do dreams "make sense"? The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is full of mystery and unanswered questions. Why do these weirdos do what they do? How did they get that way? Where are the women? Or take the killer in Black Christmas. Who is he? Where did he come from? Who are Billy and Agnes? These things don't need to be explained, though the viewer can, using her own imagination, invent explanations if they are wanted. But the re-makers don't understand, and so the Black Christmas killer is given a name and a back story, and Leatherface a skin condition. Now, really, what's more creepy/intriguing- a guy who wears a human skin mask to hide a disfigurement, or a guy who wears one because he just does?

In Carpenter and Hill's Halloween, Michael Myers is The Shape, The Boogeyman, the thing that makes strange, unexplained sounds in the night. He's part mass-murderer, part ghost. His mask is blank and white so that an audience can project it's own personal anxieties onto it. He's whatever scares you. Nobody knows how he went from being a little boy to being a supernatural slayer, or even if he ever really was a little boy. It's the unknown that fascinates and terrifies.

But people like Rob Zombie are insensitive to this. I guess it all goes hand-in-hand with the rampant cynicism and disdain for any sort of spiritual belief that is so common today. Rather than the thrill of the spectral, horror audiences are invited by Zombie into the sordid, depressing world of white-trash family dysfunction and pop psychology.

If that's what you want, stay home and watch Dr. Phil and save $9.

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92 out of 121 people found the following comment useful :-
Despicable, 3 septembre 2007

Author: Derek237 de Canada

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Rob Zombie's Halloween is such an awful film, such a profound failure of gigantic proportions, that I am confident there will be people labeling this as brilliant, or even a masterpiece. It is an assault on the senses, an assault on good taste, an assault on good bad taste, and the fact that it is an abomination of a beloved horror classic is a mere footnote on the list of all things wrong with it.

A large factor that irked me about the movie was the fact that it always seemed to be on a boil: never on simmer, never having any breathing room. Rob Zombie doesn't know how to create suspense, nor do I think he really wants to. Instead, I think his intention was to make a movie that scars and deeply disturbs the audience, which I feel he was unsuccessful in doing. Zombie is quite successful, though, at forcing loud noises to make the audience jump, shaking the camera in order to make nightmarish, nauseating imagery, and showing brutal, disgusting killings.

The first half of the movie plays out a lot like a prequel, and attempts some hackneyed "portrait of a psychopath" motif. Michael Myers is a product of his environment: a stripper/prostitute for a mother, a slut for a sister, and a bad-natured, alcoholic father. Michael is very much the star of the movie, as opposed to any other Halloween movie where he is the antagonist, and all of the attempts to explain Michael or even get viewers to sympathize with him pretty much fall flat, as the profile of this killer always seems to take second place to his actual killings, especially in the second half. Zombie's biggest mistake is trying to be something more than a dead teenager movie, and failing at it by compromising and trying far too hard to be disturbing, not to mention the painfully simple-minded explanation as to why Michael becomes a killer. Sure, the original 1978 film was very vague with the explanation of Myers being "purely and simply evil," but vagueness proves to be much more disturbing than half-assed social commentary. If Zombie really wanted to make an assessment of the lower class, he should have focused the film on the character Laurie, how in willfully creating a monster of himself, Michael Myers, through his inadvertent altruism, creates a beauty out of his sister, Laurie, and salvages her innocence. There are some hints that the movie is trying to head this way, as if it were an idea in the air (consider the colour spectrum conversation as a possible metaphor of Michael, being black and nothing, and Laurie, being white and everything), however, to draw that kind of conclusion from the things we actually see in the film is really, really reaching.

Kudos to Rob Zombie for creating one of the most accurate depictions of teenage girls: they talk fast, giggle at their own stupid jokes,are the centers of their own universe, and have little substance. And, coincidentally enough, resemble pretty much every girl in the theatre audience where I saw the movie (thanks to Canada's 14A rating- yes, our ratings board is a joke). The only good performance in the movie is Malcolm McDowell as Dr. Loomis, who really holds a candle to the great Donald Pleasance. There were even one or two moments between Loomis and Michael I found to be actually kind of moving. None of these little moments help the movie, though. Rob Zombie wanted to bring his unique vision to this story, but did it all so badly, and made so many miscalculations that I was just repulsed by it. It's a trashy film that's deluded into thinking it's deeper than it really is. Even the very worst of slasher films at least have no delusions about what they really are, and I find them more enjoyable than Zombie's disgraceful remake of Halloween.

When you get right down to it, Halloween is a despicable movie about despicable people, and its cynical insight of the world makes me pity its writer/director for expressing such thoughts and ideas to tell a story. I hated the movie, but at least it had the energy to provoke me into hating it. Many directors don't seem to mind when people hate their movies, as if they'd want any reaction other than indifference. I doubt Rob Zombie would lose any sleep if he read this review, but then again, neither would Tom Green after reading reviews of Freddy Got Fingered.

My rating: 1/10

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117 out of 174 people found the following comment useful :-
Tricked out of $10 bucks for zero treat, 1 septembre 2007

Author: fertilecelluloid de Mountains of Madness

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Clearly, Rob Zombie has no grasp of what made the original "Halloween" so effective, so he "re-imagines" it with his white trash aesthetic. It still doesn't work. Zombie's "Halloween" is a boring abortion of a movie that has a decent first half hour that depicts the abusive nature of Michael Myers' upbringing. That was never the point of the original, of course, because THAT Michael Myers was spawned in middle class, suburban smugness. Still, I was willing to go with Zombie's mythology if he could make it convincing. He can't. The film is predictable, illogical and insufferable. The last hour is a dull carbon copy of everything that happened in the original without the suspense or subtext. I wanted this movie to end so badly. The film's slaughter scenes are vapid, Zombie's dialog is idiotic, and The Shape possesses no mystery. Zombie can not write real people; he can only write trash talk and abuse. Since "Halloween" requires that there be real people in its storyline, the film is a colossal failure in all departments. Zombie's version of Laurie Strode, the role originally played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is an annoying, squealing cut-out. Malcolm Mcdowell's Dr. Loomis is an embarrassment. Lots of horror movie veterans make an appearance, but who the f__k cares? I'm really sick of horror directors thinking it's cool to fill their films with actors from past classics. It merely reminds us of how great things used to be before hack directors like Zombie were canonized as horror genre gods. I liked "The Devil's Rejects" very much and hated "House of 1000 Corpses", so my feelings about Zombie are mixed. This "Halloween" is far worse than "Corpses" and not equal to one minute of "Rejects". It's simply a rotten misfire that isn't shocking, exciting, involving or "cutting edge". It makes the "Texas Chainsaw" remakes look like spun, celluloid gold. This film may have rung the death knell of the current horror boom. Thanks, Rob.

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122 out of 186 people found the following comment useful :-
Tonight on Jerry Springer: Michael Myers!, 1 septembre 2007

Author: jockk407 de orlando, FL

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Just got back from seeing the "re-imagining" (barf) of John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN. It doesn't even begin to compare to the original, but you knew that. But...if one attempts to take it on its own terms, as Rob Zombie seems to want the audience to do, is it worthwhile? The question is, regardless of the original, has Rob Zombie made a good movie? Well, the answer is YES, but it was called THE DEVIL'S REJECTS.

What we have here is noisy, distasteful, pointless, and sloppy. Everyone speaks leftover dialogue from THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, and what worked for those characters fails miserably for these. Every character in this film speaks as though they are 10 seconds away from throwing the first chair on Jerry Springer. Scenes aren't allowed to build, they jerk and sputter. The best moments come early, between young Michael and his mother (both played very well)...but even those scenes are constantly undermined by bad, choppy editing and surrounding characters (particularly the father) who are horribly written and seem to be played for laughs.

The middle scenes in the hospital are interesting, but ultimately rendered pointless once the final (and worst) third of the film kicks in. Laurie, Annie, and Lynda are feckless foul-mouthed twits this time around, generating zero sympathy. Apparently in keeping with Zombie's theme from HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES and THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, the villain is the hero here, and this time it doesn't work. Since the only sympathetic characters are the supporting players who get pointlessly offed after barely a minute of screen time, the only one to root for is Michael. Is that really what Zombie had in mind?

Judging from the reaction of the audience I saw this film with, it's what he accomplishes. People were laughing when characters were killed. Brutal, calculatedly cruel scenes are featured of nurses stabbed in the neck with forks, children beat to death with poles, teenagers stabbed to death multiple times, animals tortured (offscreen), and slutty topless girls strangled and beaten to death. The audience didn't scream, they laughed. It isn't because the film is funny...it's not. It isn't because the film is so bad it's good...it's not. I've never believed the theory of audience de-sensitizing due to TV, movie, and game violence. Until I witnessed this film.

I've seen movies more violent, more disturbing, more exploitive. But never so pointless, all the while pretending to be about something...anything.

Zombie's creation is a movie about morons, intended for morons. He is a talented and intelligent filmmaker who has made a movie driven by so many distasteful obsessions it practically throbs on the screen. But unlike his previous work, there's no point, not even for sheer trashy exploitation. Characters exist only to be killed. Women disrobe, everyone's vocabulary consists of nothing but four letter words, and the movie hisses and bangs and screams its way to a final, protracted, unexciting chase between an irresponsible babysitter we care nothing about and a 7 foot tall slasher with a Halloween mask fetish and an obsession with a sister he barely knew.

By the time the film screeched to the credits and the lights came up, I had already fought with the four women in front of me (the dumb-ass mother had brought her three daughters, the dumb-assettes, who managed to giggle and snort and talk through a good portion of the movie). The argument continued after the movie was over, complete with name-calling. The entire theatre stared as they silently shuffled out.

This is the reason I despise seeing movies in the theatre anymore. But I realized at least this nasty confrontation had given me something the movie had not: an element of excitement. These four girls had no consideration for anyone around them. They were rude, obnoxious, unreasonable and stupid.

And as my friend and I vacated the theatre, it finally hit me...THEY were the audience this film was intended for.

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73 out of 91 people found the following comment useful :-
Horrible, 12 septembre 2007

Author: ejdawg76 de pennsylvania

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I thought this movie was terrible, i am a HUGE fan of the Halloween movies, i could not wait for this movie to come out so when it did i went opening night only to real disappointment, i feel Rob Zombie destroyed the movie, it was not scary one bit, i felt like the actors were trying to be the ones in the original, i didn't care what happened to any of them, where in the original i wanted to see them live. He killed all these people and left Annie alive, that was kind of odd, even the background of the movie having Michael Myers parents be like white trash was just stupid, i think a lot of people would end up being killers. Michael Myers was pretty much supposed to be just pure evil without there ever really being a reason, thats what pretty much scared me about the originals. I never really review movies at all because i am pretty easy to please but this was such a disaster i had to share my opinion:)

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