HALLOWEEN (2007)
(Review)

I wish this were as simple as “Man, this sucks the original’s a$$!” or “Dude, this so kicks Carpenter in the nuts!” Either option would have meant a far less complicated review to write.

Right from the film’s opening though, which gives us an intimate account of life in the Myers home (stripper mom, deadbeat stepfather, slut sister), it’s clear that Rob Zombie’s reimagining of John Carpenter’s Halloween aims to be a different animal than its predecessor.
So harrowing is the environment, that we can clearly see anyone who was raised there would quite possibly go, at worst, fantastically insane, or at best, require decades of therapy; there’s certainly no fun in the dysfunction here.
With this section bleeding into Michael’s incarceration in Smith’s Grove and his psychiatric treatment under Samuel Loomis (this time out played by Malcolm McDowell), Zombie’s Halloween is as much about the tragedy of the Myers family and the relationship between Loomis and Michael, as it is about Michael’s eventual return to Haddonfield and his reunion with baby sister Laurie (this time out played by Scout Taylor-Compton from Wicked Little Things).

This is where Zombie’s version is quite possibly the strongest.
Though one could argue that this section demystifies the horror icon, the fact remains that this is territory Carpenter did not chart in his original, so this was clearly Zombie’s opportunity to deliver to the modern audience a vision that would not have the shadow of John Carpenter falling so heavily upon it.
And Zombie makes the most of it, crafting a riveting and frankly unsettling portrait of a psychopath in the making, a maniac who goes into a silent, fifteen year hibernation, and comes out the other end as the man who was Sabretooth, Tyler Mane.
Mane, of course, is a towering physical presence, so his Michael is a looming monolith of sinister intent. And though I initially felt irked at the early reveal of the Shatner Halloween mask, the payoff is rather effective, as is the mask fetish, which serves to hide his self-professed “ugliness.”

At around the same time as said payoff occurs, we are introduced to this Halloween’s Laurie, and it’s around this time that Zombie’s ride begins to sputter.
It’s not that Taylor-Compton is necessarily a bad actress, it’s just that this Laurie isn’t the Laurie that made such an impression nearly three decades ago. This is not Jamie Lee Curtis.
This Laurie has more of a sense of humour, this Laurie feels like less of a nerd, this Laurie feels less haunted.
And it’s not as simple as this Laurie doesn’t feel like Laurie either, but rather that this Laurie doesn’t seem as interesting as Curtis’ Laurie; this one seems a lot more ordinary.
And to be completely fair, it isn’t all Taylor-Compton’s fault, as, unlike Carpenter’s Halloween, which focused largely on that specific Halloween night, in Zombie’s redux, we have that pre-Haddonfield section that takes up a substantial portion of the film’s running time, so we don’t really get to spend all our time with Laurie and her friends.

On the plus side though, the performances by Kristina Klebe and Danielle Harris as Lynda and Annie, respectively, are better than the originals. (I’ve never made it a secret that I feel the one laughable element of Carpenter’s original is Nancy Loomis’ “performance” as Annie, so seeing Harris take on the role was honestly a high point of this version. It’s also a nice bit of casting, as Harris is a Halloween alum, having appeared as Michael’s niece Jaime in Halloweens 4 and 5.)
Ironically, as much as Taylor-Compton’s Laurie makes less of an impact than the original’s, Annie and Lynda here feel slightly more real than their earlier counterparts.
Regardless though, the characters just aren’t interesting or involving enough to warrant our attention or invested sympathy.

Another problem of the latter portion of Zombie’s take is that it’s certainly not as rife with tension as the original. It does, however, come alive when Laurie and Lindsey (Jenny Gregg Stewart, who can certainly scream up a storm) discover the bloody mess Michael’s left Annie and Paul (Max Van Ville; Big Momma’s House 2) in.
And when I say “come alive,” it does in a rather loud and shrill way, as everyone seems to start screaming their fool heads off at this point.

And though Zombie takes an interesting tack with Michael’s initial intent regarding Laurie, the film’s climax deteriorates into a lengthy, dragging sequence where Taylor-Compton is made to suffer for her paycheck, as Laurie’s mental and physical health are pummeled to a messy, quivering pulp.
Ultimately, it’s this Haddonfield section that left me terribly dissatisfied. Despite some potentially intriguing beats and the curious sense of pathos Zombie manages to invest his Michael with, the section that comprises “the night he came home” just doesn’t feel very solid.
Also, as much as I love Malcolm McDowell, the classic Loomis lines were just a whole lot weightier when Donald Pleasance was spouting them. (As much as this version allowing us to get to know Michael a little more was interesting for me, getting to know Dr. Loomis more wasn’t, as we see that not only is he a horrible writer, but he seemed rather all-too-willing to make a quick buck off his decade and a half with Michael.)

And while key riffs from Carpenter’s original score—including of course, the signature theme—are intact and used to good effect throughout the film, the blood and gore here is a veritable tsunami compared to the suspense over violence approach of the original. Additionally, the viciousness with which characters are dispatched, is only offset by the depiction of a great many of them as filthy, horny, potty-mouthed miscreants. (I think the nicest characters in Zombie’s Halloween are Laurie’s adoptive parents, played by genre faces Dee Wallace (as it was so famously put in Scream, “E.T.’s mom”) and Pat Skipper (Scully’s brother on The X-Files). Sadly enough though, being nice doesn’t really help them all that much anyway.)

In saying all of that, I believe I’m also saying that Carpenter’s version kicks Zombie’s in the nuts, though honestly, I really don’t think anyone expected otherwise.
Still, that doesn’t totally discount Zombie’s effort.
The intent was there, surely, to give us a Halloween that wasn’t necessarily a retread of the original, to explore different avenues left untravelled by Carpenter, to give us a Halloween that had more of a reason to exist than simply to make some easy money off a previously established brand name.
But somehow, somewhere along the way, in laying down the disquieting dollop of reality in the film’s first half, Zombie defused any inexplicability that may have informed the second half, the way it did so magnificently in the original.
What we have in the end is the uncomfortable and protracted destruction of a family, which takes just over two hours (in the unrated version) to reach its bloody, violent conclusion, far too long and excruciating a journey to make it worth the while.

Parting shot: There are, however, some bright spots: genre stalwarts Udo Kier, Brad Dourif, and the aforementioned Wallace make welcome appearances. This, however, made me both happy and sad; Kier and Dourif are given precious little to do, and Wallace… well… that just got me real upset…
There’s also an interesting appearance by Sybil Danning, who, amusingly enough, starred in a Howling movie (the second and horrible Howling II: …Your Sister Is A Werewolf), just like Wallace (the original and excellent The Howling).

Parting shot 2: Reviews of the original Halloween, Halloween II, and Wicked Little Things can be found in the Archive.

(Halloween OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com; images courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com.)

reVIEW (29)
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

It’s been a while since I was last on Elm Street, so when the chance came for a return visit, I took it without hesitation.
I first walked down it in 1984, via the magic of Betamax, knowing this was something new from the man who’d given me The Hills Have Eyes and Deadly Blessing, so I was stoked.
Wes Craven did not disappoint then, and here, now, 23 years later, A Nightmare On Elm Street to a large extent, still holds up as an exercise in scares and chills.

With this film, Craven introduced all of horror geekdom to Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), child murderer come back from the dead, to haunt the dreams of the children of Elm Street. Freddy, of course, would go on to join Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees to form the Slasher Trinity, all three graduating to Horror Icon status over the course of money-making sequel after money-making sequel.
In Craven’s original Nightmare, Freddy is a darker, more sinister bogeyman, and would gradually transform over the franchise’s length, into the wisecracking death-dealing jokester most know him as, whose puns and one-liners were probably more dangerous than his razor-blade fingers.
Here though, at the very beginning—and in keeping in tone with the film—Freddy isn’t very big on laughs, and this first Nightmare is all the better for it.

From the opening sequence of Freddy assembling his killer glove, through the Last Girl fake, all the way up to that final shot of poor, boozy Marge (Ronee Blakley) going—ha ha—through the front door, A Nightmare On Elm Street is an effectively creepy little number, with a number of scenes and images that permanently seared themselves into my fevered and impressionable horror geek brain. (That singular image of Amanda Wyss’ Tina standing in her bloodied body bag in the school hall still pops to mind whenever I encounter certain lines of Hamlet.)
And of course, given the subsequent career trajectory of one of the film’s young stars, A Nightmare On Elm Street is notable (particularly to the mainstream movie-going audience) as having these three words in its opening credits sequence: “Introducing Johnny Depp.”

As much as I love Craven’s first Nightmare though, I cannot deny it does have a number of warts, among them, some bad performances. Mr. “Introducing Johnny Depp,” in fact, as young Glen Lantz, is one of the few actors that manage to rise above bad in Nightmare. The rest of his young co-stars display questionable acting prowess.
And perhaps most alarmingly, the bad acting isn’t just confined to the youngsters, as even the aforementioned Blakley (who plays alky mother to Nightmare lead Heather Langenkamp) is a train wreck.
This might not have been so great a sin, except for the fact that the pivotal revelation of who Freddy Krueger really is and what the parents of Elm Street did to him so long ago, comes to us (and daughter Nancy) through the bleary “acting” of Blakley. This could have—and should have—been a great scene. Instead, it feels obligatory, more a plot necessity than the gut-wrenching moment of epiphany it must have been on paper.
There’s also the synth score which gets vaguely ridiculous in certain patches, and “Nightmare” by 213, which plays over the end titles is so bad, I’d managed to wipe it entirely from memory till just a few moments ago, when hearing it once more filled me with an entirely different kind of horror.

Still, in the final analysis, A Nightmare On Elm Street is a horror movie that works, that gets the job done, and leaves the audience with a lingering aftertaste of anxiety, which is so much more than can be said of many a horror film today.

Parting shot: The companion piece to this review—The Director’s Chair (3)—can be found in the Archive.

(A Nightmare On Elm Street DVD cover art courtesy of cduniverse.com.)

reVIEW (14)
HALLOWEEN II

If memory serves me right, aside from The Empire Strikes Back, Halloween II was one of the first sequels that I anticipated with relish (another being Friday the 13th Part II). And with the promise of a bigger budget than the original, well, this was bound to be cool, wasn’t it?

Taking a cue from James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein, Halloween II starts at the point where the original ends.
Beginning with the killer climax from the first film, we watch as Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) saves Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) from the relentless Michael Myers, emptying his revolver into the silent killer, then the sequel’s opening segues into some new bits (Michael falls into the front yard, instead of the back, as in the original). Loomis then discovers his quarry is still up and about, and has a neighbour call the police before running off into the night in hot pursuit.
That opening still gets me after more than two decades. Of course, much of the credit for that goes to John Carpenter’s masterfully directed Halloween climax, but it’s a crackerjack way to open up the second chapter of this franchise, by essentially making it a seamless whole with the first film.
Working from a script by Halloween co-writers Carpenter and Debra Hill, Rick Rosenthal takes the director’s chair this time out, as we follow Laurie (who is brought to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital) and Loomis (who continues to search the town’s streets for Michael) over the course of the night, till the dawn of the following day.

What is most conspicuous in this sequel is the absence of that air of dread and pervading sense of time and place (Halloween in small-town America) that so characterized Halloween. Instead, what we have here is a very conscious upping of the on-screen violence. Whereas the original was a practically bloodless outing, in Halloween II, we actually see blood spatter and pool on the floor. We even see scalpels and hypodermic needles contact victims’ bodies. Nothing compared to the Tom Savini killshots in such classic slasher fare as Friday the 13th, The Prowler, or The Burning, mind you, but compared to Halloween, this was a bloodbath!

Sadly though, much of the running time seems to be a bad excuse to show some on-screen kills. One has to wonder why Michael dilly-dallies after he gets to the hospital so he can off nurses and security guards and ambulance drivers, instead of just heading straight for Laurie’s room. I mean, the woman does spend practically the entire film in a hospital gown, doped up on sedatives. How difficult would it have been to just ice her within his first few minutes in the hospital? Instead, he takes his sweet-a$$ time, so that when he finally does get to her room, her spider-sense kicks in, and she’s ready for him. (One of those inexplicable moments in film where the protagonist just senses the baddie coming and acts accordingly. And note that this occurs just as she’s in some sort of coma-like state, apparently a bad reaction to her medication.)

Yes, the film does strive for some sort of realism (characters fall unconscious due to sedatives and concussions; Dr. Loomis is ordered to leave Haddonfield for fear of some public relations disaster), but none of this really helps the film’s dodgy pacing. It’s only when the film is about two-thirds over that Michael actually makes an attempt on Laurie’s life, and the narrative rediscovers itself. Before this point, Halloween II is basically standard slasher fare as the audience watches “characters” (a.k.a. dead meat walking) dropping like flies.
Meanwhile, the Empire reveal regarding Michael and Laurie’s connection is telegraphed a tad early in the proceedings courtesy of a blinding nightmare sequence, effectively blunting whatever shock value they were aiming for.
And all this leads up to a rather limp climax that comes nowhere near the one from the original. Not only do we discover Laurie is a crack shot as she puts a bullet in each of Michael’s eyes(!), but we also have to wonder why Michael, now blinded, just doesn’t lumber forward and stick a scalpel in his tormentors, instead of swinging his weapon about like a right drunken git.

What will largely get you to the end of this film is the need to know how the evening turns out; if Laurie once again manages to get out alive; if Loomis finally catches Michael. And this need to know how things turn out will largely be rooted in the time the first film took to let us know who these characters are.
That sense in Halloween, of being compelled to sit through the entire film because of the dread of what’s just around the corner, is never realized here. In trying to compete on a playing field that had changed significantly in the three years since Halloween, the sequel adopts a different tone, but in the process, ends up being just like most of the other slasher films that had emerged in the wake of Halloween’s success.
At times, Halloween II seems like a rip-off of a rip-off, as if it were trying to be a slasher film (killshots and all), but still somehow dialing down the gore because it was trying to emulate the suspense of the first Halloween (which really had nothing to do with on-screen gore).
Ironic, that Carpenter and company found themselves having to play by the rules of a burgeoning genre that they kick-started in the first place, a genre that was already going down a different road from the path Carpenter walked in Halloween in the first place.
Seeing an arrowhead burst out of Kevin Bacon’s neck and Betsy Palmer losing her head to a machete in slow-motion were cool, yes, but those kills—and others like them—were forging the paradigm that would hold all the way to the slasher genre’s first death (at the hands of sequelitis).

Of course, those are all sentiments of the me of today. The me of 1981, who first saw Halloween II, was a young gorehound who enjoyed the film, but wished they’d gotten Tom Savini to work his bloody magick.
It’s a testament to what Carpenter achieved in Halloween, and the bits of Halloween II that actually work, that the film still holds up to a viewing over a quarter of a century later. (Unlike, say, The Prowler, which I saw again a couple of years back, and realized with horror that a film I watched over and over again on Beta, was really just stretches of tedium and sophomoric acting between still excellent make-up effects by Tom Savini. Even then, the film geek in me was far stronger than the gorehound, as I never just fast-forwarded to the elaborate killshots, but insisted on watching the film in its entirety. Sure, I’d rewind and run through the effects shots a couple of times, to try to figure out how Savini pulled it off—at the time, I dreamed of being a special effects guy—but then I’d settle back and continue watching the damned thing, all the way through to the end credits.)

Despite its flaws, there is still enough of the original Halloween in the sequel’s DNA to make it an okay watch, even today. In hindsight though, it’s frustrating that it couldn’t stand up on a par with Carpenter’s original, or it could have been a great double-feature, watching both back-to-back.
Instead, doing that, you end up with a 3-hour film that has a brilliant first half, then kind of wobbles and unravels over its final half.
Still, on its own, Halloween II is certainly a sight better than many other slasher sequels, including some of the later Halloween installments. (It also has the best Halloween scene Nancy Loomis ever did: on an ambulance gurney, dead.)

Parting shot: Among the luckless hospital employees who are subjected to Michael’s unwanted attention are Ana Alicia, who would go on to primetime soap opera vixenhood on Falcon Crest, and Lance Guest, who would go on to play video games and fight in an interstellar war in The Last Starfighter.

Parting shot 2: Halloween II was Rick Rosenthal’s feature film debut. Since then, he’s worked mostly in television, directing episodes from a whole string of series, including The Practice, Wasteland, Strong Medicine, and Smallville.
Recently, he directed two episodes of the excellent-but-cancelled Reunion, as well as episodes of The Dresden Files, Angela’s Eyes, and Veronica Mars. He also helmed the pilot episode for the upcoming Flash Gordon series.
Amidst all his TV work (including the lamentable TV movie The Birds II: Land’s End, for which he took the credit “Alan Smithee”), Rosenthal returned to the Halloween franchise in 2002, for Halloween: Resurrection.

(Halloween II OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

Again, thanx to J&R Travel Agency, for arranging my return trip to Haddonfield.

IN THE INTERESTS OF ALL THINGS RECYCLABLE (2)
HALLOWEEN

The end of August brings us the Rob Zombie redux of John Carpenter’s classic Halloween. As the last time I’d seen it was some two decades ago, I thought it was high time I took a return trip to the streets of Haddonfield and see how old Mikey was doing…

“I met him 15 years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding, not even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong.
“I met this six-year old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and… the blackest eyes. The devil’s eyes.
“I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized that what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply evil.”
-- Dr. Sam Loomis

From the opening Touch of Evil-inspired shot, to its killer climax and that final shot of the Myers house, Halloween is still one of the best films John Carpenter has ever brought to the screen.
Shot in three weeks in 1978 for a miniscule budget of $300,000, the film would go on to become the most successful independent production of its time. It would cement Carpenter as one of the premiere horror directors of modern times, and become the foundation upon which Jamie Lee Curtis would build her career.
And, for better or worse, it would be the match that would light the proverbial powder keg that the slasher genre would turn out to be, one of the prime forces behind the grand 80’s horror boom. It would also be the inspiration for countless low-budget cheapies as well as many of today’s horror directors.

Unlike the subsequent Friday the 13th franchise, and the rest of its slasher offspring, from The Prowler to The Burning to Happy Birthday To Me, which were far more interested in fake blood and kill shots, Halloween was instead, a solid exercise in suspense.
In the film, Carpenter expertly captures the spirit of Halloween, with fake dead leaves and deserted streets, giving the audience the sense of furtive movement and noise, just around the next corner and beyond the next bush. And into this apparently idyllic suburban scenario, where bookish Laurie Strode (Curtis) spends her nights babysitting, he introduces the Shape, Michael Myers, freshly escaped from the loonybin, come home to Haddonfield to give Laurie the most unforgettable night of her young life.

What also sets Halloween apart from many of its ilk is that its brand of suspense is not of the taut constant-hide-and-stalk variety (as, say, in Alexandre Aja’s Haute Tension), but rather a pervading sense of dread and anticipation. Once Carpenter establishes that tone, it remains, a constant spectre shadowing the proceedings, giving even the chatty scenes between Laurie and her friends an unsettling undercurrent, a feat also achieved by Steven Spielberg in Jaws. Even in seemingly innocuous scenes of dialogue between characters, you never once forget that you’re in a suspense movie. Carpenter is able to replicate that previously mentioned feeling of things happening at the edges of our senses in the film’s very pacing, where we are given the impression of things just biding their time till they can pounce on us when our back is turned.

With his own brand of minimalist scoring, Carpenter orchestrates the on-screen action perfectly, ratcheting up the tension, and eliciting fine performances from Curtis (who would follow in her mother’s footsteps, Janet Leigh, and become one of horror’s immortal Scream Queens) and Donald Pleasence, who plays Dr. Loomis, the Ahab to Michael Myers’ Moby Dick.
And in Michael Myers, Carpenter created the first in a grand tradition of lumbering, seemingly unstoppable killers.

Even with its imperfections (the POV cheat in the opening sequence, so as to milk the sequence’s reveal for all its worth; the downright terrible performance by Nancy Loomis as Annie—even this woman’s death is ridiculous) Halloween still stands tall in the annals of horror cinema as a brilliant example of good storytelling on a severely limited budget.

“I watched him for 15 years, sitting in a room, staring at a wall. Not seeing the wall. Looking past the wall. Looking at this night. Inhumanly patient. Waiting for some secret, silent alarm to trigger him off.
“Death has come to your little town, sheriff.”
-- Dr. Sam Loomis

Since then
Following Halloween, Carpenter would enter the 80’s, where the director did most of his best work (The Thing, Starman, Prince of Darkness). Sadly though, after the excellent They Live, his film work began to deteriorate, beginning with the terribly flawed postmodern horror of In The Mouth of Madness.* His other 90’s work (Vampires, and the Village of the Damned remake) felt uninspired and seemed blatantly derivative of his better, past films. 2001’s Ghosts of Mars was no better.
His most recent work has been on TV’s Masters of Horror, where he directed Season 1’s “Cigarette Burns,” which seemed to be a return to the classic Carpenter this particular horror geek fell in love with. But he broke my heart all over again with Season 2’s awful “Pro-Life” (see review in Archive: April 2007).

Curtis meanwhile, entered the 80’s as the premiere Scream Queen of horror, appearing in Carpenter’s The Fog, and slasher entries Prom Night and Terror Train**, as well as Halloween II. She would then segue to Hollywood legitimacy through films like John Landis’ Trading Places. (Perfect may have been a miscalculation.) She would also prove she could make people laugh just as well as she could scream as part of the ensemble of the hilarious A Fish Called Wanda.
In the midst of all her other film work, Curtis would reprise the role of Laurie Strode two more times after Halloween II, in Halloween H20 and Halloween: Resurrection. (Incidentally, Curtis would appear on-screen with her mother—Janet’s Leigh’s last film role before her death in 2004—in Halloween H20.)
Keeping busy with her children’s books, Curtis is perhaps best known to today’s generation for her roles in Christmas with the Kranks and the Freaky Friday remake.

Looking forward
Rob Zombie’s Halloween reboot clearly enters the game with a lot of weight on its shoulders. And considering that nearly all of the recent remakes of 70’s horror have left me unsatisfied, I’m not really certain how to approach this one. (And although I thought Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses wasn’t exactly terrible, it didn’t really grab me as the work of a director I needed to keep my eyes on; thus, I’ve yet to see The Devil’s Rejects, which has its own share of fans.)
The thing is, no matter how skeptical I am of any given film, there’s always a part of me that’s open to being surprised, that part of my film geek DNA that strives to accept a film on its own terms, without the baggage it may have accumulated on its journey to the big screen. So in that respect, I’m giving Zombie some leeway, as is only fair.
I’d also like to be excited, actually, at the possibilities of what Zombie could bring to his remake, but I’m striving to temper that.
Zombie’s got a big enough mountain to climb as it is without me hyping myself up into a Halloween frenzy.

* I never got to see 1992’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man, so that may have been Carpenter’s last good film before the decline…

** In the current mad rush to remake everything from the 70’s horror catalogue, both Prom Night and Terror Train are getting the redux treatment.
Prom Night has Brittany Snow (the loony racist Ariel from Nip/Tuck), The Doom Generation’s Johnathon Schaech, and Jessalyn Gilsig (another Nip/Tuck alumna) in its cast, while the re-titled Train has American Beauty’s Thora Birch in the Jamie Lee Curtis role.

(Halloween OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

Thanx to J&R Travel Agency, for arranging my return trip to Haddonfield.