KYMM'S 365 DAY MOVIE CHALLENGE #38-#39: Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN (2007) & HALLOWEEN 2 (2009)

Halloween (2007)/Halloween II (2009)

“Evil is here. It’s walking amongst us.”

“Doc, it sounds to me like you’re talking about the Antichrist.”

“Well, perhaps I am!”

So, after Halloween 8, a.k.a. Halloween: Resurrection, where are they going to go from there? It’s a mystery!

Nobody knows what could possibly happen after the events of…OH MY GOD! IT’S A REMAKE!

This is going to be an utter disaster, and that is me putting the best spin possible on it.

Why do they ever remake perfect films? I mean, I know, it’s because they cynically know that the title will bring in people, and also they are hoping that some people think, “Why would I want to see the film from 1978? Hey, here’s the same film but now! It must be better!“ It is not better. It is never better. By the time they figure it out, they’ve already paid their money and the whole reason for the movie existing has fulfilled its purpose.

The best kind of remakes are the ones where they can either put a really big and different spin on the original, or if the original was a good idea that was not executed as well as it could’ve been. Here’s an example, my mother was in a movie called Bedtime Story, starring Marlon Brando and David Niven about a couple of con men. Nobody saw it, nobody liked it, it was utterly forgotten. Until! Some years later they remade it as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and now it was a good and funny movie that people liked, it was made into a musical, and it made tons of money for everybody involved. Now admittedly, that’s a lot more work than taking an existing property that’s already good and ruining it and also making a lot of money, so there you have it.

This is no shine against Rob Zombie in general, but he is not what you might call a subtle filmmaker. He has his style, he has his savoir-faire, but the only thing he is going to bring to the Halloween franchise is more blood, more explicit violence, and a good deal less of what made the original Halloween movie so great. But, for my sins, I must watch it. Also, his remake of the sequel. Why does God hate me?

Also, the eight previous Halloween movies ranged widely in quality, but in length they went from 1h 26m (Halloween H20: 20 Years Later) to 1h 38m (Halloween III: Season of the Witch), note how the second best is the shortest and the worst is the longest, but even the longest is an acceptable length to me, a person who feels 85m or less is what one wants in a non-epic extravaganza. All this to say, what is this unasked for, unwanted remake? 1h 50m. Is the extra length for extra awesome? I posit that it is not.

It starts with little (but not little enough, he’s more like twelve than six) Michael Myers’ terrible redneck parents fighting and swearing while the baby screams and the teenage daughter walks around all slutty and everybody says the worst things imaginable, and then he goes to school and is bullied and I guess we know where that extra twenty-five minutes came from.

O my God. Here is hippie Dr. Loomis, played by Malcolm McDowell, who must have had a big tax bill or something to have accepted this role. I already loathe this movie with every fiber of my being, and we are only six minutes in. So far, nobody has died, but it is definitely killing me.

Things nobody ever wanted: 20 minutes of Michael’s backstory. His terrible drunken step-father calls him anti-gay slurs, his mother is a stripper, and his sister won’t take him trick-or-treating, preferring to have sex with her boyfriend instead. While. He. Wears. The. Michael. Myers. Mask. So, of course he becomes an unstoppable serial killer. This film is loathsome.

The opening section, which, in the original film is less than seven minutes long and he just kills his sister, in this version lasts for twenty-six excruciating minutes, and Michael kills his bully, his step-father, the sister’s boyfriend, and, while the song Don’t Fear the Reaper plays, you know, in case anyone missed the point, the sister. But not the baby sister. He loves her. For now.

O my God, we haven’t gotten to the present day yet. We get a therapy session between Michael and Dr. Loomis. Every single thing so far in this movie has been the worst idea possible. The only good thing so far has been the actors, and I do not mean Malcolm McDowell, who frankly should be ashamed of himself, but Daeg Faerch, who is extremely good as the child Michael, no matter how bad the script surrounding him is.

At this point, I don’t think Laurie Strode is coming at all, and we are trapped in the part before the actual movie forever and ever and ever.

Danny Trejo plays a kind orderly who tells Michael to live in his head, because there are no walls there. So…that’s why he does it. It’s all Danny Trejo’s fault.

Thirty. Five. Minutes. And. Fifty. Five. Seconds. Instead of seven minutes. Is it five times as good? You know the answer to that.

Another ten minutes, and we still aren’t out of the hospital, though it’s fifteen years later.

At the 50 minute mark, there is Laurie Strode. I no longer care. This movie has destroyed my soul.

Okay, it’s too little, too late, but this film has given me a gift. Laurie’s friend Annie is played by, wait for it, Danielle Harris. Remember little Danielle? She played Laurie’s daughter, Jamie, in Halloweens 4 and 5, and really made them work, especially 5. And now here she is, all grown up and in the worst of all possible Halloween movies, but giving it a much needed spark. Welcome back, Danielle Harris! I thank you with all my heart for making me not hate the 54th minute of this movie nearly as much as I did the first 53 minutes.

Babysitters, various murders, discussions about the boogeyman, etc., and, at long last, the end.OK. I’m taking a step back and thinking about this. The thing that Rob Zombie did was that he decided not to do some sort of shot for shot remake, because why bother? (I’m looking at you, Psycho 1998) If you’re going to do a remake of of an older project, you have to do something new with it. And what he decided to do was to do it more from Michael Myers, his point of view. So we see all these things that we didn’t see in the original film, and that is what makes this movie its own movie. And probably, if it wasn’t Michael Myers but was instead Nicholas Nimmers or Jack Jason or Richard Ryerson, there’s a good chance that I would think this movie was at the very least, decent. But it’s almost impossible not to watch it totally comparing every second of it to the original and having it come up wanting over and over and over again. They got the name recognition of the Halloween franchise but that killed any chance of this movie being taken on its own merits.

So, possibly not the worst thing ever if you never saw Halloween 1978, but God help you if you have.“We’re done waiting. Only a river of blood can bring us back together. It’s up to you. It’s always been up to you, Michael.”

Halloween 10, aka Halloween II, The Seconding, starts, dear God, back in the asylum, and Michael’s mom, (Sheri Moon Zombie), is still alive, so we are being gifted with more Michael Myers backstory, lucky me, lucky me, I do the lucky me dance.But they recast lil Michael, which is as big a betrayal as when they recast lil Jamie in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. The only things that made Halloween 2007 not a complete abortion were Danielle Harris back again all grown up, and Daeg Faerch as Michael the child. I’m assuming he grew too much between the ages of twelve and fourteen, but I feel bad for that poor kid replacing him. Nothing like not only being in a bad movie, but everyone being mad that you are the wrong child. Michael Myers isn’t supposed to look like the youngest Hanson brother.

But here is the thing. Is this movie going to be the same as the original Halloween II, i.e. on the same night in the hospital? Because possibly, just possibly, it is breaks out in a new direction, it might be better. We will see, I suppose. Ten movies in, my optimism has waned. Fully.

Well, there was just that one scene, and now we are fifteen years later again, but Sheri Moon Zombie has second billing, so that probably isn’t the end of it. Laurie is walking down the street, covered in blood, so it’s clearly starting at the same point as previous Halloween II, and any hope for this not to be another massacre in the hospital just went out the window. Although I imagine this hospital won’t be quite so empty, as this movie has a higher budget and can afford a few extras.

This might not have been quite the movie to watch during dinner. I’m not that squeamish, either. Too late now.

Ha, I spoke too soon, this hospital is EVEN MORE SPARSELY populated than the previous film, consisting of exactly two nurses (one being Octavia Spencer) and two patients. Who is Michael going to find to kill for the next 90 minutes? I must say, I couldn’t care less.

Aha, a twist! And an interesting one. We are actually going in a different plot direction from the first second movie. Should I be hopeful? Probably not. But I can’t help myself.

The acting is strong, I’ll say that. Scout-Taylor Compton has gone on quite a journey as Laurie, she is a worthy successor to Jamie Lee Curtis in this film, and our Danielle Harris also gets to explore her range. If only it didn’t have to be a slasher film and instead be a little indie drama about trauma victims trying to recover, it would be vastly preferable, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to veer fully in that direction. Just enough to make the audience wish for what it could be.Margot Kidder too briefly plays Laurie’s shrink, Brad Dourif plays the sheriff, as in the previous film, these are solid actors. Give them some room, Rob Zombie. I have even come around on Malcolm McDowell, as his Loomis has veered very far from Pleasence’s Loomis, though he still plays the worst psychiatrist in the world, only a different kind of worst. Am I getting soft? Am I over tired? I mean…I don’t hate the movie, it seems. Yet.

It’s gotten supernatural, in an interesting way, but the killings are too much, and in their too-much-ness, I’m just bored. I like the indie drama with the supernatural twist. I wonder what this movie would be like without the murders? A lot shorter, that’s for sure.

And now…Weird Al Yankovich! Nothing surprises me anymore.

Okay, here’s the thing. Rob Zombie did literally exactly what I was asking for with this movie, in that, but for a small section, it is entirely different than Halloween II: The Firstening. Dr. Loomis is a fame whore jackass who is profiteering off the corpses of murdered teens and yelling at his publicist; Michael Myers is goaded on to more and more murder by the evil ghost of his dead mother and younger self; Laurie, in finding out that she is Michael’s sister, goes from being a depressed goth teen with night terrors and PTSD, to a drunken party girl trying to deaden the pain; and, and this is the big and, Halloween II wasn’t all that great to start with, so nobody is going to wail about their sacred text being defiled.

So why don’t I love it? It turns out that the thing that I really dislike about these Rob Zombie films is how ugly-natured people are. Everybody seems to think the worst things possible and then say it all out loud, like the coroners talking approvingly about necrophilia, and the whole thing just leaves a bad taste in your mouth even before the old ultra-violence. I don’t want to see a slasher film about a serial killer when the majority of the non-serial killers have souls as black and ugly as his.

Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog