(Note: The following review is based on the Director's Cut of the film)
It's hard to imagine an easier way to earn the ire of legions of horror fans in this day and age than to announce a brand-new remake of a beloved classic. From the moment of its announcement you can all but guarantee hordes of faithful fans who have stuck by their given franchise through the worst of the sequel-happy 80s descending upon the IMDB message boards en masse raging about the travesty is being wrought upon their once-proud series, as if the act of remaking a film somehow causes the source material to stop existing.
It took a long time and a lot of raging of my own to realise how silly the whole affair was. It's true that horror remakes are almost invariably cynical exercises in brand recognition not worth the time it takes to watch them. The same could also be said for a very great many horror sequels, with the added offence of being a part of the same continuity as the original and generally doing terrible things to the mythology in a way that retroactively taints their predecessors. No, most of these remakes have no damn cause to exist; but they do and there's no real use nor reason in fighting them.
In retrospect it probably should have come as no surprise when Rob Zombie announced his intentions to remake John Carpenter's 1978 seminal slasher Halloween. Both of his projects up to that point had been remakes after a fashion - the borderline-unwatchable House of 1000 Corpses owed more than a little to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the shockingly excellent follow-up The Devil's Rejects was at its heart a riff on Bonnie and Clyde imbued with the blood of countless 70s exploitation flicks. So it was that Zombie, armed with Carpenter's blessing and the advice to make the project his own, set out to bring us a brand-new version of the timeless original.
Except he didn't. It becomes abundantly clear only moments into this new Halloween that Zombie really has made the material his own. Indeed, there's a lot that tells us from the opening moments that we're watching a Rob Zombie film and very little that suggests a relationship to Carpenter's work.
After a title card informing us that it's October 31 in Haddonfield, IL (the year, by my calculation from the film's other title cards, is 1992), we join events already in progress at what we'll soon learn is the Myers household, where hardworking Deborah Myers (Sheri Moon Zombie, who has again come forward in ability by leaps and bounds since her last Zombie project) is struggling to manage the demands of both a teenaged and infant daughter, as well as the more juvenile yet Ronnie (William Forsythe), her trailer trash live-in boyfriend. It's hardly surprising that she is out of energy by the time her son Michael (Daeg Ferch) emerges from the bathroom (we know, as she does not, that he was in there disposing of a murdered pet rat).
Off young Michael goes to school, where he is bullied mercilessly about his mother's occupation as a stripper by resident school bully Wesley (Daryl Sabara). The ensuing fight sees Deborah hauled into the school to discuss Michael's increasingly violent tendencies with the principal and psychologist Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), while Michael himself sneaks out to tail Wesley before beating him to death with a tree branch out in the woods in an incredibly vicious scene that is marred by what is thankfully the only poorly-judged slow-motion shot of the film.
Thus is the tone set for much of the next hour as Michael acts out his violent impulses on his family and is incarcerated in Smith's Grove asylum under the treatment of Dr. Loomis, all filmed with a lot of queasy closeups and grainy cinematography intercut with faked news and archival footage (one touch I liked was the noticably shittier sound quality in the scenes where Loomis is seen recording his conversations with Michael) combined with just enough carefuly crafted longer shots that you couldn't quite call it 'documentary style'.
It's fair, I think, to call this Zombie's best work to that point, treading well-worn narrative ground with great panache and an unnerring craftsman's eye. Watching Michael's journey from teenage fuck-up to passionless killer is genuinely convincing and incredibly unnerving for it, and watching the toll it takes on his mother gives the film its most human and emotionally-charged arc. All good things must come to an end though, and Halloween hits a stumble it never quite recovers from at almost exactly the halfway mark of its 117 minutes.
The action jumps forward a number of years to 2007, when Michael breaks out of Smith's Grove due to events that, in the director's cut at least, are almost unspeakably vile. He's only got one destination in mind, and it's not long before he's commandeered a vehicle and is headed straight for Haddonfield. It's only now that we meet Laurie Strode, the character Jamie Lee Curtis played in the original Halloween and the one that film was chiefly concerned with, and the new Halloween starts actually retelling the events of its namesake.
Unfortunately, because we're already an hour into the film at this point, something had to go to keep it a reasonable length and the axe fell on Laurie. Not content with butchering her role, she's then placed in the hands of the wretched Scout Taylor-Compton, who has absolutely nothing in her repetoire beyond being shrill and and obnoxious. It's a performance that makes even the few scenes spent introducing her and the two friends she spends her time trading crudities with (credit where it's due - Zombie deserves kudos for giving us a Final Girl who is a far cry from pure and virginal) hard to watch.
There are two major flaws that cripple the retread half of Halloween. The first is that it's too often content to outright copy John Carpenter, only not as well. It's worth noting that the filmmaking in this half of the film is far more anonymous, although 'anonymous' in a Rob Zombie vehicle is a highly relative term. The second is that it's absolutely not reconcilable with the first half in any meaningful way. Michael Myers as we see him in the second half is a largely characterless brute (played by the frighteningly large Tyler Mane) who shows no real echo of the Michael Myers we've just spent an hour with. The only link between the two halves, then, is Loomis, who is portrayed as an occasionally well-intentioned dick with a flair for melodrama that would make the late, great Donald Pleasance blush.
There are some small pleasures. Danielle Harris (in her third appearance in a Halloween film) is by a wide margin the most interesting of the girls as Annie Brackett, matched by Brad Douriff as her father, the town sherriff. The kills, unlike most you'd see in a slasher movie, are distinctly unpleasant and not-at-all interested in audience satisfaction - the film is never terribly gory, but the deaths are every one of them brutal, held aloft on (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the director's background) terrific, eye-watering sound design that makes you feel every damn hit. The terrible plot revelation that ruined the original franchise is far more organically a part of this version, and if it had come forty minutes earlier as a continuation of what we'd already seen and not been shelved in favour of bland Dead Teenager boilerplate, it might have been enough to save this wreck. It certainly adds to the impact of the film's shocker ending, twenty seconds that tries to tie the two disparate halves together with only partial success, but serves in its own right as a pretty indellible image to leave the film with.
Halloween '07 is a font of so much wasted potential it'd just about make you weep, but it hits almost as much as it misses. Between the near-perfect first hour and a handful of moments of demented inspiration hidden amongst the dreary last act, there's more than enough good in the film to chalk it up as an interesting failure. And in the annals of horror remakes, 'interesting failure' is tantamount to 'a damn masterpiece'. I'm glad the thing exists, and that's something it has in common with very few modern horror remakes.
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