Cinema review
Directed by Rob Zombie
Starring Malcom McDowell, Sheri Moon Zombie, Tyler Mane, Brad Dourif
Release date 28 September 2007
Michael Myers is a trailer trash kid with a foulmouthed stepfather and a mother who makes ends meet as a stripper. Naturally he’ll turn to evil…
Taking the core ingredients of John Carpenter’s groundbreaking original (namely suspense, mystery, a stately sense of pace and gently underplayed humour) and throwing them into the nearest trashcan, Rob Zombie has delivered a clunking and embarrassing reimagining. This is a film that is frightening for all the wrong reasons.
In delving into Myers’ troubled upbringing, Zombie loses all sense of the uncanny. Part of the chilling nature of Michael Myers in the original was the character’s sense of faceless evil; in the brief moment we saw him as a child we caught a glimpse of a normal looking boy and his normal suburban parents. Compare this to Halloween 2007, which turns what should have been a brief prelude into a patience testing 40-minute kid-goes-postal narrative. It’s an exercise in cinematic tedium.
This is a deeply patronising movie, and Zombie seems determined to tell the audience exactly what to think at every turn. A musical montage is obviously intended to underline the sense of Michael and his mother’s deep emotional despair, but it ends up looking more like a shallow MTV video. Then when we (finally!) meet the adult Myers he’s played by hulking former WWF wrestler Tyler Mane - at which point the film develops into an inferior rerun of the original.
Memorably played by Jamie Lee Curtis first time around, the role of our heroine is here filled by Scout Taylor-Compton. Whereas Curtis had character and genuine presence, Taylor-Compton is every bit as blank as the killer’s featureless mask. She’s not helped by the fact that Zombie insists on shoehorning in the idea that Laurie Strode is Myers’s sister, a concept that was dreamed up for the 1981 sequel in order to keep the story going. Laurie’s two friends are similarly faceless, merely a pair of victims who Zombie insists on keeping topless for as long as possible.
If you were feeling generous, you could point to the fact that Malcolm McDowell is initially amusing as Dr. Loomis. But following his early scenes as a hippie child psychologist, McDowell is given so little to do that he soon becomes just another familiar face in a movie filled with tiresome in-joke cameos (Udo Kier, Brad Dourif and Dee Wallace are all utterly wasted).
The plot has so many holes it wouldn’t be surprising if Myers has been stabbing away at the script with his carving knife. How does Myers know he has an adopted sister and where to find her? Why do the orderlies at the asylum choose to move him in the dead of night? Why would a hulking man, who is known to be insane and dangerous, be allowed to make masks and display them on his wall?
Not scary and far from a clever spin on old material, Halloween is a film that simply didn’t need a remake. The simplicity of John Carpenter’s original idea has proved timeless and hugely influential – it’s just a pity that it influenced Zombie to make this. Jonathan Wilkins
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