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Halloween (2007)
It’s an odd, frustrating thing: For all the meticulous care that director Rob Zombie devotes to humanizing the brutal killer Michael Myers—for as much screen time he establishes trying to give this horror icon’s violent nature context and perhaps generate some degree of sympathy for him—the director eventually just surrenders and turns his film into a standard, cruel slasher vehicle in which dumb people are minced and diced by an unstoppable force that advances on his victims with supernatural efficiency. What’s the point of establishing a sympathetic human face when all you’re ultimately left with is a ghostly mask devoid of any human trait, killing characters with only marginally more personality? Zombie takes an interesting idea and turns it into a gimmick. At least John Carpenter’s 1978 classic had the intelligence to know that if you’re going to turn a human villain into a faceless killer, you might as well get on with it. His film, which was genuinely frightening and rightly regarded as one of the finest horror films, established Michael Myers—recently escaped from a mental asylum—as a psychotic, inhuman beast and proceeded to tell the story from the point of view of the people who are terrorized by him in a small town on Halloween night. The closest we got to peering inside his head was a chilling, now infamous shot of the masked Myers pinning a victim to a wall with a long knife and then naively tilting his head back and forth curiously, as if admiring his work without really understanding the consequences of his actions. For all other purposes, his character was simply a force that represented pure evil preying on the innocent. That head-tilt is included in the Zombie version too; the problem is, we expect it this time and it therefore doesn’t generate any more or less suspense than when it did in the original vision. This is strange indeed, because Rob Zombie, who also wrote this screenplay, has decided to retell the story from Myer’s point of view and downplay the other characters. The first third of the film therefore explores Michael Myer’s childhood, as he lives in an abusive household so depraved and ignorant its members would be outcasts even on Jerry Springer. Michael is effectively played as a young boy by Daeg Faerch, who has a face that speaks volumes of pain by simply sitting still and appearing as a blank void to others. His step-father is a white-trash drunkard who uses an injury as an excuse to sit around the house all day and call his family the vilest of names. His mother is a stripper whose advertisements somehow end up at Michael’s school and produces scorn and mockery among his peers; his sister is a non-existent entity in his life, except as a callous name-caller. The message is clear: Michael raised himself, based on the degenerate environment in which he was helplessly surrounded. These initial scenes are well acted by Zombie’s typical cast of supporting characters, including William Forsythe and Sheri Moon as Michael’s parents—actors uncanny in their ability to look like caricatures of real people while still generating sympathetic performances. Zombie makes it plain why Michael Myers commits unspeakably violent acts that eventually condemn him to an asylum under the care of doctor Sam Loomis (played by Malcolm McDowell). And the tragic tone that Zombie initially evokes during these moments of sadistic bloodshed, contrasted to the depraved nature of Michael’s household, made me begin to think that the director’s approach to this material just might work: It is as if Michael internalized the violence he sees around him for so long that it eventually explodes inside of him and gushes uncontrollably from his skin; thus, when the first exploitive moment occurs, we see it as the first step in the making of an unwitting victim of his own life. It seems less like a scene from a slasher film and more like ruminations on Columbine and Virginia Tech. When Michael is taken to the asylum and begins psychiatric treatment from Dr. Loomis, the film creates a less interesting mood that feels more like typical horror territory. The problem is not in the acting or the writing, which are fine, but in Zombie’s insistence to shoot the film from distorted, ominous angles and the use of menacing music to remind us that this is a horror film that will eventually take a gory turn for the worst. Michael crawls fully into the shell of non-emotion, totally lost in his own mind and creating formless masks that reflect his lost personality. The music and the close-ups on his masked face inform us that he’s going to remain this way for the remainder of the film. Since we know this is a Michael Myers movie, we realize how this whole affair is going to turn out: Michael is going to become the Shape of Carpenter’s film, killing without any remorse or hesitation; thus these opening scenes, which demand to be further explored in a better film, are rendered superfluous. They provide an unconventional, interesting setup for a predictable exercise that quickly loses its edge. The final two-thirds of this troubled picture generate no suspense or genuine emotion. Michael, now a towering, silent brute played by Tyler Mane (an ex-professional wrestler who you might recognize as the evil henchman Sabertooth in the first X-Men film) breaks out of the asylum in the most grisly manner possible (we don’t see the breakout in the Carpenter film, but Zombie prefers to linger on every drop of blood shed) and heads back to this hometown to do more killing. Along the way, we see more of Zombie’s regular cast that he used in his previous, better films—Danny Trejo, Sid Haig, Tom Towles, Ken Foree, etc.—and watching them pop up in their respective cameos only to be predictably murdered by Michael makes us wonder if Zombie made this film with his gorehound fan-base’s checklist solely in mind. The last half is a gorefest made completely by-the-numbers. If you’ve seen Carpenter’s version, you know who is going to die, and how. Even if you haven’t, Zombie sets up sequences in such an obvious manner that you can predict with absolute certainty when someone is on their way to slaughter. The original film was genuinely fresh because of the way Carpenter shot it: Yes, we know that Michael is around, but he primarily haunts the borders of the film, and as victims wait for him in one direction, he silently sneaks into frame from the opposite side. Zombie shoots primarily from Michael’s perspective, so that there is never any suspense, only gory payoffs. Even when we aren’t seeing through Michael’s eyes, we are never wrong when we forecast that something terrible is about to happen to one of the characters because we are familiar enough now with slasher films that we know their beats and rhythms. Zombie seems to think that he can overcome his predictability by throwing in as much graphic violence as he can, but without the suspense to enhance the proceedings, the gore simply comes across as exploitive and redundant—especially in the way that Zombie shoots Michael doing disgusting things to topless women. I’m never against gore or sadism as content for a horror film, especially in a grindhouse-inspired picture like this. But in Zombie’s Halloween, they are the only bottom line and apparently the single expectation that the director seems to think his audience desires from his film. There is no trepidation here, no genuine tension. Characters wander into the frame, we suspect that Michael is about to kill them, and he does. End of story, end of film. This standard format ultimately turns the troubled boy from the successful first act into a supernatural Shape no different from any of the countless Halloween sequels and rip-offs. So as good as these early scenes are, what purpose do they serve? Why show us the descent of a tragic little boy, why try so conscientiously to establish him as a human, when in the end he is eventually the type of inhuman creature who cannot be stopped by bullets, knives, or high falls from second story windows? Maybe Zombie is arguing that all the greatest evils begin as humans before they become such terrible forces; fair enough, yet even good films like Max and Downfall showed the internal struggle of Hitler, the greatest evil of them all, as he pushed himself further and further into unredeemable corruption. We know Hitler is wicked, but we can see how he justified his actions. Any justifications or motivations that Michael has about murdering anyone is absent by the time he becomes an adult. One scene in which he finally confronts his long-lost sister (Scout Taylor Compton) tries to give him some context, but it quickly descends again into pointless slaughter before the idea can be further explored. After the first act, Zombie is merely going through the motions and killing time until the inevitable, vicious conclusion that makes yet another sequel inevitable. After the opening scenes, there are little touches here and there throughout that I enjoyed—McDowell’s Loomis becomes an opportunistic bastard who exploits Michael for his own personal gain, and Brad Dourif as the town sheriff provides just the right note of Zombie-esque creepiness. And I like the general texture that Zombie attempts, with every character as a sort of exaggeration of reality, as if we’re looking at humanity through a distorted funhouse mirror that reveals the true natures of its inhabitants. But the other characters are one-dimensional and exist only as disposable fodder, and the overall effect is excessive and boring. Even Michael’s sister, the heroine played so well by Jaime Lee Curtis in the Carpenter film, is only required to scream and run. At least we could see the calculation in Curtis’ eyes, which leads to ill-conceived but sometimes successful attempts to escape from Michael’s wrath. Curtis played Laurie as an average, shy teenager; an effort has been made here to further sexualize her, to make her more spunky and wry. But it’s a pointless attempt when I can’t remember a single thing she actually did in the film except look terrified. I should note that I generally admire Rob Zombie as a director. His House of 1000 Corpses (2003) was a creepy exploitation film with just the right mixture of horror clichés and surreal invention, and The Devil’s Rejects (2005) was even better—an atmospheric shocker about a road-trip into hell that played as a critique of the sophistication of such a plot in a film like Natural Born Killers. Depravity is depravity, after all, so why not admit that we sometimes like to bask in it instead of trying to make it “acceptable” as artistry? But Halloween is a complete misfire; it is neither creative nor scary enough to make its depravity something we don’t mind exploring. This idea sounds absurd even as a write it, but I think that Zombie ought to remake this remake in the inventive spirit of his previous films. I suggest he begin with the same opening sequences, and tell a different story about a terrified little boy trapped in the corners of his own dark mind. Perhaps keep him in the hospital throughout, creating his masks and contemplating his morbid existence. This might not be the gory film that audiences expected, but at least it wouldn’t be as obvious as all the impaling, slashings, and tilted heads of this poor retread. If you’ve seen any standard slasher film, then you’ve seen Zombie’s Halloween. Cast: A Dimensions Films release. Written and directed by Rob Zombie. Based on the 1978 screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill. Rated R for extreme violence/gore, language, and sexuality/nudity. Running time: 109 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: August 31, 2007. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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