Review #92: Halloween (2007)

This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #9- Halloween (the Rob Zombie one)

I have very mixed feelings about this movie.

On one hand, it's not BAD. It's a pretty stock-standard modern reboot of the original. But it's not GOOD. It tells the same story (with a couple noteworthy changes), which is good, but if fluffs it up with all sorts of filler that I really don't think makes it better, which is bad. So spoilers for my review, but I think I give this one like a 5/10.

One of the big changes is that this movie is much more about Michael Myers than it is about Laurie Strode- or, at least, the first half of the movie is. I kid you not when I tell you it takes 40 minutes to get to modern day, and nearly an hour- 54 minutes I think- before Laurie is introduced as a teenager. 54 minutes! And the reason is because they really want to build up who Michael is, where he came from, how he became who he is. Except... I seriously have no clue what I'm supposed to feel about him. He comes from a broken home, so I feel bad for him. But he murders small animals for fun, so I hate him. But basically everyone he kills did something mean to him, so I feel bad for him. But he murders them, so I hate him.

Whenever a horror series gets a reboot or a prequel the tendency is to explain EVERYTHING (Whoa, we get to learn where Michael got his mask, and why he wears masks at all! Whoa, we get to learn where he got his knife! Whoa, we get to explain where he got his... uh, boiler suit?) and that usually includes making us empathize with them. But this always seems to go against what made the original movies good, because- get this- we aren't supposed to be rooting for the killer. (At least, we weren't before 1998-2002.) But since this is a long-running franchise, of course we're going to root for the only recurring character- so as a result, they make every single non-killer character THE WORST PERSON IMAGINABLE. Seriously, I hated every single character in this film, and I guarantee it was intentional (so that you can cheer when Michael inevitably kills them). Remember how this series started out with you afraid of the villain? Yeah, not anymore!

Another change is they made the whole "Laurie is Michael's sister" thing canon right from the get-go, which is just as pointless in this one as it is in all the rest. They also explain why Laurie ended up getting adopted down the street from her previous home- basically, it was sheer dumb luck as a result of the sheriff hiding the fact that she was Michael's sister as an attempt to not make a big deal out of her mother's suicide- but then that raises the question of not only how Michael knew she was his sister (because I'm sorry, however much family resemblance there may be, nobody is going to take one glance at a teenager and immediately recognize her as that baby you have no reason to think is even still alive) but also the question of WHY THE F%&# LOOMIS ASSUMED MICHAEL WOULD BE AFTER HER. Seriously, Michael escapes and Loomis immediately assumes, "Obviously he's going to Haddonfield to find his sister" despite having no reason whatsoever to assume his sister is alive, let alone in Haddonfield. But Loomis is still just there to call Michael "pure evil" again and again, so fine, whatever, it happens.

And one last change: They shifted Michael's obsession from Judith (his sister, whose grave he sort of recreated in the original) to his mother. I guess this is... fine, it neither adds to nor detracts from the film.

Because this is a modern film of course everything has to be "BIGGER" and "MORE". Michael kills more people as a child in this film than he did as an adult in the original film. He's punching through walls, he's able to lift half a ton, the back half of the movie is just screaming nonstop, and HOLY CRAP this movie is horny. (And not even in a titillating way.) Like, I know that Laurie's friends in the original were just trying to get their rocks off the whole time, and I know that horror and sexuality is inexorably linked in media, but in this film, horniness is used as a lazy shorthand for basically all dialogue. It's like the writers said, "Hey, we need some dialogue for this scene. Let's make this character say how horny they are. Okay, now let's make them say how horny someone else is. Okay, now let's have them make a disparaging comment about someone else's sexual orientation. Rinse and repeat, we've got a movie!" It's seriously like 80% of the dialogue in here.

All in all this movie just kind of... exists. I'm sure it got made just because Rob Zombie loved the franchise so much, so I can't fault him for that, I just wish it had been something different. Stop making us feel bad for slasher villains!

Overall Rating: 4/10 Papier Mache masks (I know I said I was gonna give it 5/10, but the movie heavily implies harm to pet rats, which bumps it down a full rating in my book. Them's the rules.)

My Wish For All Films: If no more films ever had a scene where a character was sitting on the toilet, I would be so happy.