Films That Witness Madness
review
ROB ZOMBIE'S HALLOWEEN
When THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE was remade, it was a smash at the box office. It was a surprisingly good remake of a great, great film, keeping in both tone and feel of the original: dark, gritty, and, most importantly, scary. Though bloodier, louder, and altogether slicker than its namesake, TCM03 showed how a remake should be done. It helped to unleash a tidal wave of remakes into the theaters with classics like RINGU and DAWN OF THE DEAD being brought back to life with an eye on todays horror audiences. Now opinions may vary, but the majority of fans would agree that most of these remakes are not only lacking but completely unnecessary. After all, it it isn't broke, why bother spending 30-plus million dollars trying to fix it? It shouldn't have surprised anybody when a HALLOWEEN was announced. What was surprising was that Rob Zombie would be at the helm.
Rob Zombie does not make horror films for mainstream viewers. In many respects, he doesn't even make films for your average horror fan. His films - HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES, a terrible film, and THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, a pseudo-sequel which starts terrible but morphs into something great about halfway through - are aimed squarely at the more sadistic horror fans. Populated with, I suppose you could call them, anti-heroes who maim and mutilate at will, Zombie's films are, in my opinion, the antithesis of the classical horror film. Where a horror film should aim to either frighten or disturb the viewer - if possible, both - Zombie's films are unusually sympathetic to their psychopaths at the expense of their victims. While this may work for the kind of viewer whose appetite is more for the Psycho Movie - that breed of slasher that concerns itself primarily with the killer, like Zito's MANIAC or Ellison's DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE - for the average horror fan, it creates a level of disconnect between audience and film that is hard to overcome. In the 1980s, the slasher film came under fire from many critics for, supposedly, allowing audiences - some would say force the audience - to align themselves with the killer. Viewing the film was akin to being an accomplice to murder, though fictional, of course. Had Zombie been making his films during that decade, he would most certainly be first on the firing line. His killers, with a smile on their faces, systematically kill everything that moves. The gross exaggeration in their characterizations and the total lack of personality Zombie gives to their victims removes the more disturbing elements inherent in the situations he creates for them and replaces it with a kind of gleeful malice. Whether or not you share in that malice determines whether or not you enjoy the film.
That's the kind of style Zombie brought to HALLOWEEN. It's one of the many reasons his remake is so hated. This is a man who simply doesn't understand subtlety. Carpenter's film was cool, slick, and suspenseful. Zombie's film is loud, scattershot, and sadistic. And that's fine. This is, afterall, a Rob Zombie film. Not a John Carpenter film.
A brief aside: With all the different terminology tossed around for these new versions - remake, re-imagining, re-envisioning - it's important to note two things. One is that a film based on an already existing screenplay constitutes a "remake". The second, perhaps more confusingly to some, is that a second film based on an existing literary work, like a novel or short story, cannot be constituted as a remake unless the screenwriters took the previous adaptation into regards during their adaptation. So while HALLOWEEN is a remake of a John Carpenter film, Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS is not. It is a new adaptation. Carpenter's THE THING is a strange breed, a film more closely based on John W. Campbell's story "Who Goes There?", but also contains enough references of the Christian Nyby / Howard Hawk's 1951 film to classify it as a remake.
Ask enough people why they disliked Zombie's film and you'll soon reach a popular concensus: it turned Michael Myers, the unkillable boogeyman, into a simple serial killer. I don't think that's the problem. Afterall, the Michael Myers that stalked Haddonfield in the Carpenter original was just a serial killer. The later films turned him into a quasi-supernatural, unstoppable killing machine. That's not the real problem here. The real problem - naturally one that the fanboys turned a blind eye to - is that Myers is made into the absolute focal point of the film. Zombie's film starts out with Myers as a young boy, bullied in school, saddled with an abusive step-father, mistreated by an older sister. He has taken to killing animals - proof that Zombie had taken Serial Killing 101 at some point? - and is slowly reaching the point of breaking. When he is harassed by two bullies in the bathroom about his mother, a stripper at some local dive, he finally breaks. Later on, he beats one of them to death with a very big stick - another misstep on Zombie's part as the killing does absolutely nothing for the film except turn this little kid from an unlikely killer to one of the more "Natural Born" variety. After a particularly disappointing Halloween evening - he really wanted to go trick or treating with his sister apparently - he cuts his step-father's throat, beats his sister's boyfriend to death with a baseball bat and finally cuts poor Judith to ribbons - while wearing the trademark white mask no less, making him look like an over-sized Michael Myers bobblehead.
The scenes that follow, of Myers and Loomis in the mental hospital, are interesting in that they present both of these characters in a completely different light than in Carpenter's film. Myers is a calm, friendly child, not a catatonic. Loomis is warm and caring, not a man who is at all convinced that the child that sits in front of him is "pure evil". Many years later, when Myers is a full-grown man - and I mean full-grown... this sucker's huge - Loomis realizes that he can't spend his life tied to a sinking ship. When he tells Myers that he won't be back to see him, Zombie's film slips into the realm of unintentional comedy. This is a break-up scene. All it needed was a "it's not you, it's me" kind of moment. This Loomis isn't only determined to keep Myers locked up, he's heartbroken he couldn't help him enough. Strange as it sounds, even with this silly closing moment between Doctor and patient, the first half of the film is much better than the slasher film that follows. It's easy to see that the first half contains the material Zombie felt deserved care.
In short order, Myers gets out - depending on which version of the film you see, it's either during an action star-style takedown of a handful of prison guards or after a particularly tasteless and unnecessary rape scene - and make his way home to find his little sister. In an interview in Rue Morgue Magazine, Zombie gave a short list of things that don't make sense in Carpenter's film. One of the points he mentioned was Myers driving a car to Haddonfield. In an attempt to be more realistic, Zombie has him walk over 100 miles in a short period of time while giving him the time to stab a man to death at a truck stop for his clothes. Hmm, more realistic was his goal? The issue of the mask is also taken care of - Myers stashed it after committing his murders - but, strangely enough, Zombie doesn't even make an attempt to answer the question of how he recognizes his sister after fifteen years.
The last half of the film is essentially Carpenter's film told at breakneck speed. To say it loses some of the tension of the original is putting it lightly. In some ways, the end game of Zombie's film plays out more like THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE than HALLOWEEN. If you're saying to yourself "please kill the bitch so she can stop fucking screaming!", you know the film is doing something wrong. Had it ended with Loomis shooting Myers in the empty swimming pool, it would have been much better. Instead, Zombie drags his film out well beyond its breaking point, giving us ten more minutes of cat-and-mouse and five solid minutes of a masked maniac shoving a board into the ceiling. When Laurie and Michael take a tumble off the balcony, I sat there hoping Zombie wasn't getting ready for another chase scene through the streets of Haddonfield.
Another sticking point for those of us who don't appreciate Zombie's films is his incessant need to populate his films with the same group of actors repeatedly. While the major players in his previous two films are kept to relatively small roles, their inclusion is something of a distraction at times - unless you're playing a Rob Zombie drinking game. He also needs - desperately needs - to break his screenwriting habits. Zombie can, when he wants, direct some pretty amazing sequences. It's his screenwriting that kills him everytime. In Zombie's world, everyone is a redneck, everyone uses "fuck" in every other sentence, and proper narrative momentum doesn't apply. This film works in fits and starts, with no time for things to simply develope. Zombie forces his hand time and time again and it really works against him. One day, Rob Zombie will make a great film. But in order for that to happen, he needs to look beyond his first batch of films. There is promise of better things in HALLOWEEN.
It's strange to think that the first three most important films in the slasher film cycle - BLACK CHRISTMAS, HALLOWEEN, and, soon, FRIDAY THE 13TH - have all been remade. While BLACK CHRISTMAS has not - not yet anyway - been franchised, the other two films have been a staple of the horror genre for well over 30 years. That says something about the longevity of these films and their popularity. But the notion of remaking FRIDAY and HALLOWEEN also shows how played out those franchises have become. Nothing new could be done with them. It's simply time to start all over. Whether or not the FRIDAY THE 13TH remake succeeds will be apparent early next year but the tally is in on Zombie's remake.
It doesn't.
All it really does is re-enforce how well-made and superior John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN was and still is to virtually every American horror movie since the end of the Seventies. It also promises audiences more and more sequels. That is its blessing and that is its curse. A friend of mine sat at the bar trying to sum up his feelings on Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN and could only come up with this: "it was what it was".
Sounds about right to me.
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