Movies That Suck/Franchises: Halloween. Halloween (2007)

I'm not exactly sure when I learned that, instead of the proposed Halloween 9, a remake of the original was going to be the next installment of the franchise. During the last section of the documentary Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, they showed a glimpse of a newspaper article whose headline was "Rob Zombie resurrecting Michael Myers" or something to that effect, although I don't think they mentioned that it was a remake and for that matter, even though I did watch that doc when it was aired on Showtime in the fall of 2006, that shot didn't register with me. However, around that time was when I discovered Wikipedia and when I looked up their articles on the Halloween franchise as a whole as well as on the character of Michael Myers, I read that Rob Zombie was doing a remake. To say that I was shocked is an understatement. For me, remaking John Carpenter's Halloween was along the lines of remaking Jaws or Star Wars; it just felt inconceivable. Obviously, I was a big fan of the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (and still am) but that one made more sense to me seeing as how, while it was certainly a recognized title, it wasn't as mainstream as Halloween. Up to that point, it seemed like the only movies that were ever remade were films that were made from the 30's to the 60's, little known films like Black Christmas (although I didn't even know at the time that had even been remade), or films that, while known, weren't popular mainstream franchises, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I could not wrap my head around the idea of both Halloween and Michael Myers being completely reinvented. But, here I was reading about it, so it was obviously happening and once became aware of it, I realized that there were no boundaries, that anything was fair game to be remade. Even though I still had a bit of a hard time believing that a movie like Friday the 13th, which had so many sequels, would be remade, I now realized that it probably would happen in all likelihood and the same went for A Nightmare on Elm Street; and both of those remakes, as well as many, many others have, of course, come to pass, so I was right.

Going back to the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as much as I still enjoy that film, when I look back on it in retrospect, I can see that the enormous success of that film spelt the end of the continuation of all of the big horror franchises. There had been remakes before that one, obviously, but no one had yet remade a film that was purely a product of the 1970's horror cycle that eventually led to the creation of the slasher movie, especially one that, while not exactly mainstream, was still well known and when it became such a hit, the studios saw dollar signs and decided that remakes were the way to go. And it happened almost instantaneously. The year before that film, we had what ended up being the last of the original Halloween series, Halloween: Resurrection, and a couple of months before that trendsetter, we had Freddy vs. Jason, which would be the send-off for the original Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street movies (although it was surprising because, since that film was such an enormous hit as well, everyone was fully expecting to get a sequel to it). The only series that wasn't revamped was Child's Play, which had Seed of Chucky the following year and eventually led to Curse of Chucky in 2013, although there have been constant rumors of a remake of that as well but who knows if that one will ever happen (well, there's Hellraiser too but that series has been straight to DVD for the latter part of its run so it's far out of the mainstream public's eye)? Besides the success of the trend, I think another contributing factor to the Halloween series' being rebooted was the death of Moustapha Akkad in 2005. While that guy made a lot of decisions that I don't agree with and some which I, frankly, think were stupid, he had been the series' overseer since its very beginning and had, for better or worse, done everything in his power to keep both it and Michael Myers alive and once he was gone, I think everyone else decided that they didn't know how to continue with the proposed plans of Halloween 9 without him and so, decided that it would be best to reboot the series instead (or, if you want to be pessimistic, Akkad was the only one that could have stopped them from remaking the original film and his death gave them free reign to do so but I'm trying to be less gloomy than that). So, whatever else you can say about it, this remake was truly a product of the time in which it was produced.

Alright, enough beating around the bush. It's time for me to give my initial opinion on the film upon seeing it for the first time and what my opinion of it is now as I'm writing this. Truth be told, I didn't really read up on the film in the time leading up to its release. For one, that was when I was going through some rather extreme personal stuff so I had other things on my mind and for another, I really just wasn't that interested. It was nice to get another Halloween movie after five years, even if it was a remake, but at the same time, it wasn't like I was thinking, "I must see this opening day!" I was more than willing to just wait for DVD. Plus, I had gotten over the initial shock of Halloween being remade and I just looked at this film as another entry in the franchise. So, I was pretty blasé in the months leading up to it. The images I saw of Michael Myers looked cool and everything but that was all I saw of the film. And I had never even seen Rob Zombie's previous films at that point so I didn't have any preconceived notions of what he would do with the movie either. When it was finally released in August of 2007 (I still think that's a dumb idea, though), I saw the trailers and TV spots and they looked interesting but they still didn't make me determined to see the movie as soon as I could. Its theatrical release passed me by without incident and it wouldn't be until that December when I got the DVD as a Christmas present when I would finally see the film for myself. Going into the film, I had seen a fair number of negative reviews (they were practically the only reviews I could find) but, as I always do, I didn't let those influence me and went into the movie preparing to judge it for myself.

So what was my judgment of the film upon that first viewing? It was, "My God... if I had seen this in a theater, I would have beaten the living crap out of anybody who was near me just so I could hit something." I was furious the first time I saw this movie. I was enraged, disgusted, and, frankly, offended about what Rob Zombie had done to this franchise that I loved. Yeah, there had been some dire entries beforehand but this felt like a hideous mockery of the series rather than another entry into it. That's the key factor here: above everything else, it didn't feel at all like Halloween. It felt like every other loathsome, overly brutal, foul-mouthed horror film that was coming out at the time. None of the class that the presence of Donald Pleasence or Jamie Lee Curtis had brought to the series was there. None of the style that John Carpenter and most of the other directors that followed in his wake had given the series was there. None of the spooky atmosphere that had been an indelible part of the series during its greatest moments was there. Just nothing felt genuine to me when it came to this movie. It took me a while to get control of myself and calm down from how livid I was about this movie. And I did give the movie another chance several months later... and it was still the same miserable viewing experience that I'd had before. Eventually, I got rid of that DVD because I knew I'd never watch it again and that it was only taking up space. Believe it or not, I actually bought the three-disc edition of the film that came out the following year because I was interested in the documentary but it proved to not be the kind of doc that I was interested in and so the film once again left my life, this time for good. (And in case you're wondering, I watched the movie again online when it came time for this review.) It was around this time when I realized that I wasn't the only one who was not a fan of this movie at all. I saw many, many more reviews that absolutely trashed the film and pointed out all its faults, most of which I agreed with, chief among them Deadpit.com, whose message board I became a member of and whose Deadpit on the Road video for the film back in 2007 has since become the stuff of YouTube legend. In addition, his extensive, four-part rant on the film was also the first video of Ramboraph's, a user whom I now watch and talk to frequently, that I saw back in 2008 on YouTube. I guess some good came out of my hatred for this movie since it paved the way for my meeting some really good people on the internet but it was still a movie that I hated with every fiber of my being.

There was also one person on YouTube who not only made me hate this movie even more than I already did but for a while, caused me to go against one of my most important personal criteria and despise anybody who liked it as well. This asshole named Jawooosh (I don't care if I name names, this guy needs to be called out on what a jerkass he is), who is one of the most loathsome, hateful people I have ever had the displeasure of coming across, went on this multiple video rant about people who don't like the film, saying that he hates anyone who says that it's a piece of shit and said, "You're all a bunch of stupid pathetic assholes who don't know a goddamn thing about horror!" And it's not just this one video either. Everything that he's ever done is full of vile contempt for anyone who watches his stuff, even his own followers and fans (whom he has quite a few of, although I don't understand at all why), where he says he wants people to think for themselves but it seems more like he thinks anyone who doesn't subscribe to his way of thinking is an idiot (and even if you did, he'd still find some way to bitch you out about it). The point where I decided that he could go fuck himself as far as I was concerned was in his Cloverfield review when he just came out and said that Godzilla sucks, that that's the simple truth, and when someone in his comments tried to take him to task for it, he raked the guy across the coals, saying, "All you stupid fans of Godzilla need to be dragged behind the shed and shot!" That, along with everything else, infuriated me so much (I actually got a headache, I was so mad) that I turned against anybody who liked Rob Zombie's Halloween, feeling that anybody who liked that movie was just an asshole. And I held onto that feeling for a while until I realized that I was acting exactly like Jawooosh and I then decided that I wasn't going to let this hateful, bitter, mad at the world douchebag influence me and make me compromise my principles. So, above everything else that I say from here on out, as always, I'm not going to judge you at all if you like this movie. It just doesn't appeal to me personally. And if you get curious and decided to watch Jawooosh's videos for yourself, be my guest but just be warned that you will be angry as all get-out if you do.

Before we finally get into the nitty-gritty of the review, I want to say that this isn't going to be as angry as I originally thought it would be. From the moment I decided to do these Halloween reviews, I knew that I would have to watch this film again, which made it the third time I ever watched it all the way through, and I was not looking forward to it at all. But, when I did so, the rage and anger that used to accompany my thinking about this movie, let alone watching it, never happened. Now, that does not mean at all that my opinion on the movie changed because it didn't; as you can see from the review's very title, I still don't like this movie and I will probably never ever watch it again but at the same time, I couldn't really get so screaming angry at it again because I knew what was coming. In addition, I think that over the years where I was ranting about the movie, I exhausted all of the pent-up anger I had about it to the point where there's no point to it anymore. But again, even though this probably won't be a screaming, angry rant, just be warned that any fans of the movie who are reading this will not agree with my opinions at all and might not be too happy with my final sum up of the movie, which is that it's still awful.

Up until I saw this film, I didn't have a personal opinion on Rob Zombie. I certainly knew of him and that he was a rocker turned movie director (which I found pretty unusual) but that was as far as it went. I never listened to his music, mainly because I'm not at all a fan of that type of loud rock/metal music where the person is screaming instead of actually singing, save for his song Living Dead Girl and the only reason I even heard that was because it was on the soundtrack for Bride of Chucky, and up to that point, I hadn't seen his previous films. At the time of this writing, I still haven't seen House of 1,000 Corpses and I only saw The Devil's Rejects a couple of years after I saw his first Halloween. If he hadn't directed this film, it's possible that I would have never seen any movie that he had made. But in any case, this film was certainly not that flattering of an introduction to Zombie's movies and the interviews I saw with him where he not only talked about the film but also gave his thoughts on the Halloween franchise as a whole, as well as a number other subjects, didn't help either. He's never come across as a very likable person tome for one thing. He always seems very arrogant, snobbish, and thinks that he's anyone or anything that he's talking about. It also seems to me that he doesn't realize or even care that his road to becoming a film director was comparatively easy when compared to so many others. The only reason he ever got to do anything film-related in the first place was due to his music career and while he certainly does have some visual talent and he did struggle quite a bit to get House of 1,000 Corpses made and then distributed, it's not like he was someone who was absolutely starving and busted his butt to get his film career going; it was actually relatively easy due to his popularity as a rock star. And I appreciate that the guy is a life-long fan of horror films but still, that doesn't mean that I should automatically adore everything that he's ever done. In fact, I've found that filmmakers who are, in reality, just fanboys with a camera aren't able to do much of anything except come up with fairly unoriginal concepts for their movies and fill them with homages of what they love, something that Zombie certainly does quite a bit as we'll get into.

Zombie, in my opinion, is also not the most trustworthy person that I've ever seen. I know it's Hollywood, so it's not that much of a shock but still, it feels like you can't take anything that this guy says seriously. For one, in the mid-2000's, Zombie went on this tirade about all of the remakes that were being produced, especially criticizing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which he claimed to have been offered and turned down because he didn't see the point in remaking movies that were great to begin with, and yet he turns around and does a remake of one of the most beloved horror films that's ever been made (I'm willing to bet that he actually wanted to remake The Texas Chainsaw Massacre himself and was just mad that someone else had beaten him to it). That's not a good way to endear yourself to the fandom and the horror community, dude. In addition, when he did interviews about the movie in the time leading up to its release, he completely contradicted himself as to what the film's story was going to be. In one interview that was conducted at Comic Con in 2007, just a few months before the release, Zombie point blank says that he's not going to explain why Michael Myers is evil and then in another one, he talks about how he wanted to be sure that everything that Michael does in the film had a reason and that it wasn't just a bunch of mindless killings. That's a complete 180. He's also talked about how he doesn't like when people shove a bunch of cameos into movies and yet half of the casts in his movies are made up of familiar genre faces whose only reason for being there is so you can say, "Hey, I haven't seen him or her in a while!" When he tells the story of when he informed John Carpenter that he'd agree to do the film, he flip flops from making it sound like Carpenter supported him and told him to make it his own to Carpenter not sounding all that thrilled with it. And finally, after the film was released, Zombie said in interview after interview that he was absolutely not going to do a sequel... but he did do a sequel. Now, there could be a number of reasons as to why he ultimately did a follow-up and I know that people change their minds but all of this stuff makes me think that whenever Rob Zombie talks, he's mainly just pulling stuff out of his butt and a good chunk of what he's saying is a bunch of bull.

Ultimately, though, what really sticks to me about Rob Zombie is his attitude towards the original Halloween and the series at large. Zombie has said many times that he's a big fan of John Carpenter's 1978 original and I know that he and Carpenter, at least at one time, were friends since Zombie did music for Escape from L.A. (I don't know if they're friends anymore, though) but in one interview after another, Zombie has talked about flaws that he feels the original film contains and that he could improve upon, which are some of the silliest, most nitpicky stuff I've ever heard, like how Michael Myers happened to kill someone who happened to have the cleanest overalls imaginable, or that Michael shouldn't know how to drive (but then, how would he get to Haddonfield, which is 100 miles away from Smith's Grove, in time for Halloween, which he does in this film?), or that the character of Dr. Loomis would pop in and out whenever they needed someone to say something dramatic and that he seemed crazy and drunk. I'm well aware that I've nitpicked in my reviews before but when I see Zombie complaining about that kind of stuff, my reaction is, "Who cares? Is it really important that Michael's overalls be dirty or that he doesn't know how to drive for you to enjoy the movie?" That kind of nitpicking just makes me roll my eyes and wonder if these people are able to enjoy anything period. And by the way, there's plenty of holes that I can, and will, poke into this film touché. But his vocal hatred towards all of the other films in the franchise is just unbelievable. I'm well aware that while the original film is generally regarded as the classic that it is, most of the other films are typically clumped together as being nothing but inferior pieces of garbage and if that's your opinion, then fine. All I ask is for you to not insult or belittle people who like stuff that you don't and vice versa and I've heard that that's indeed something that Zombie has done in the past. I must admit that I've never read those interviews where he's said that so I can't give any details but I've heard that they did occur and that right before the film was released when he was being grilled about the series, he got really defensive about it and acted like a jerk to fans of the series. That's unacceptable to me and makes him like look nothing more than a big douchebag. See, this is the kind of stuff that I'm talking about whenever I say that I'm just unable to respect Rob Zombie. If you're a fan, so be it, but, even though I do think that The Devil's Rejects is a good film, it's doubtful that I'll ever become a hardcore fan of his.

Before we get into the real meat of the review, I'd like to say that when I went into this movie, I wasn't expecting a carbon copy of the original and I didn't want it either. No one wants to see a scene-by-Xerox of a movie that is perfectly fine because that would be completely pointless (I'm looking at you, Gus Van Sant) so, even though it was a vision that didn't appeal to me personally, I do give Rob Zombie credit for trying to do something completely different and make the movie his own... for the first two-thirds of it anyway. Once Michael Myers breaks out of Smith's Grove and heads to Haddonfield, the last hour is virtually an abbreviated retelling of the original movie, even recreating some scenarios and lines from it, and it's definitely the lowest point of the movie, even for most fans of it. Now, to be fair, I've heard rumors that Zombie was originally planning for his film to end after Michael escapes from Smith's Grove but the studio forced him to have the typical stalk and slash situations with Michael so his hands were tied. Even if that's true, though, couldn't he have done it in a different way rather than simply make a Rob Zombie footnote version of John Carpenter's original? You made the first hour of the movie a complete different film so why not keep that vibe going? Maybe the Weinsteins forced him to make it as close to the original possible, so who knows?

And while we're on the subject of Zombie's different take on Halloween, I have to ask what his fascination is with having the majority of the characters in his movies be foul-mouthed, white trash pieces of crap whom you don't give one iota of a crap about. For one thing, the guy grew up in Massachusetts and went to college in New York, so how is it that he always has white trash people you'd expect to find in the deep south in his movies? I know that his parents worked for a carnival so maybe he traveled around a lot and saw a bunch of stuff, which would explain his one statement that "you write from experience," but it still strikes me as unusual and is it me or do these people feel out of place for inhabitants of a town that's supposed to be in Illinois? I know that Illinois borders Kentucky and that are rednecks there but these feel like people you'd expect to find in Alabama or somewhere, not in an area that's practically Middle America. Maybe since I've never been to Illinois myself, it's possible that I'm speaking out of turn and I'm too wrapped up in the original to get it but it doesn't feel authentic to me. Also, when Zombie employed this white trash stuff in his first couple of films, especially in The Devil's Rejects, it worked and felt new and fresh but when he did it again for this movie, it makes you wonder if Zombie is just a one-trick pony and that's all he knows how to create. I haven't seen The Lords of Salem at this time, granted, so maybe he did change it up and, again to be fair, he did attempt to go with a bit of a more upper class approach during the latter part of Halloween but in the sequel that he did, he went right back to having more white trash, redneck stuff... in a way, even more so than in here, which we'll get to. As a result, I've really started to question just how creative Zombie is if this is all he can come up with in movie after movie. And as I said, the majority of the characters in his films are virtually impossible to care for because they're so disgusting and unlikable. Going back to The Devil's Rejects, that dynamic where your main characters are sadistic serial killers and the person who's supposed to be the hero because he's hunting them down is, in reality, just as psychotic as they are worked well for that movie. Here, I don't care about a good chunk of the people that Michael Myers is stalking and killing because they have it coming. I actually find it ironic that Zombie himself once commented that the reason a lot of the Halloween sequels didn't work was because you had "faceless victims and a faceless killer" whereas you cared about the characters in the original. I agree with that statement but I find it ironic in retrospect since Zombie doesn't seem to know how to make characters you can get into. Granted, some of the scenes are so brutal and horrific that a little bit of compassion does slip in but in the end, after these people have been killed, it's no skin off my nose. Maybe Zombie's intent was to make Michael the most sympathetic character in the movie and if so, he definitely succeeded but to me, it's not good filmmaking when you make me spend so much time with characters that are so unlikable and annoy the hell out of me.

Finally, yes, this is something that Zombie simply does, but the amount of profanity in this movie is ridiculous and a lot of it is so over-the-top in how vulgar it is that it's impossible to take seriously. Zombie has always defended that, saying that's the stuff that he heard when he was a kid and that people do curse that much in real life. One, I'm glad that I don't grow up where he did and two, no they don't! I may live in the Bible belt but I've been to plenty of other places and while I've heard some profanity here and there, I've never heard, "I'm going to skull-fuck you!" or "Sit on my pole," and the like. The people I went to high school with were pretty foul-mouthed as well but nothing like this. If there are places where people talk like that, I hope I never end up there. Bottom line, Zombie's filmmaking style just doesn't appeal to my personal tastes and is so far from what Halloween was that I find it ironic when he once said that he felt the sequels took it further and further from what he liked about the original. So, this is what the original meant to you? Rather skewed point of view you have on things, don't you think, Mr. Zombie?

For the first time in these reviews, the character that we're going to touch on first is Michael Myers himself since he truly is the main focus of the film. Despite his statements to the contrary in several interviews, Rob Zombie's intent for this movie was apparently to go into Michael's backstory, explaining what happened, and so on (he even said on Jimmy Kimmel Live when he announced that he was going to do the movie that the first half of the film would be so). As we've gone into many times before in these reviews, I've always agreed with the consensus that Michael Myers isn't as effective when you put a spotlight on him. It's much creepier when you don't know why he's killing people or why he himself can't die and also when he's less of a character and more of an evil force that uses the darkness of Halloween night as a means to hide and stalk his victims. But that said, I couldn't get mad at Zombie for doing so with his movie since they had already attempted to give an explanation in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, an explanation that got so convoluted that they retconned it completely in the film made afterward and since, as shown by said retcon, the series as a whole never followed one straight continuity anyway, I would be able to live with this decision by Zombie and not feel like it cheapened or lessened the impact of the Halloween movies that I loved before. Still, I can't say that I was all that impressed with Zombie's take on Michael's character because it was so typical: he grew up in a crappy household, he got bullied at school, and he became very sadistic and began torturing and killing animals. That's the most clichéd explanation for why somebody would become a psychotic killer. Couldn't you have come up with something a little more creative? In one of his statements, Zombie said that somebody like Michael, no matter what kind of family or environment they grew up in, would have simply been born that way. Well, if that's the case, how about go the opposite of this route? Wouldn't it have been more effective to show Michael growing up in the same white bread, upper-middle class family that he was apparently from in the original film and that, despite his being fairly well off, having a loving family and such, he still had this thing inside him that compelled him to kill? Why have him be in an abusive, white trash family and have him be bullied at school? When you do that, it's not hard to understand why Michael started killing everybody. If you'd gone with that other scenario, you would have still been able to explore his backstory but at the same time, it would have been more powerful and inexplicable to see him begin killing people. Zombie also said that he wanted to make Michael scary again but it doesn't work when you make us empathize with him and understand why he's killing everyone he comes across. It's a huge missed opportunity in my opinion and as we'll see, Zombie, who couldn't seem to make up his mind as to what type of movie he was making, didn't even stick to his "realistic" take on Michael.

I can remember that when I got my first look at Daeg Faerch as the young Michael Myers in the trailers and TV spots, I was rather taken aback. I thought it was a girl at first! Seriously, he looked like Drew Barrymore when she was a little kid. So, even before I even saw the movie, I thought that his casting was a rather odd choice. My joking aside, though, Faerch is actually one of the things about this movie that I truly do like and I know that others who aren't too fond of the movie either feel that way as well. He's really able to come across as a very troubled kid and that death stare that he gives off at several points is pretty intimidating despite his age. When he lifts his clown mask up and coldly looks down at that bully after he's hideously bludgeoned him with a branch, it's quite chilling and you can feel his rage whenever he's dealing with his asshole stepfather or when he has that confrontation with the bullies in the restroom at school and goes as far as to curse out the principal. You also learn that Michael's mom has been called down to the school many times before so this explosion of homicidal rage has been building inside him for a long time. I also like that you see Michael's normal side as well when it comes to how close he is with his mother and that he truly loves and watches over his baby sister, whom he affectionately calls "Boo," which makes one realize that he could have been a rather sweet kid if he'd just grown up in a better environment. Finally, I think Faerch plays Michael's descent into complete psychosis after the murders very well, starting with how, despite acting like a normal kid afterward for the most part, he doesn't remember actually committing the crime and leading into his obsession with making pullover masks and preferring to keep his face hidden behind them. The scene in the unrated version where he's frantically screaming and asking Dr. Loomis to let him go home is pretty disturbing and Michael does seem to be losing all sense of reality and sanity at that point. And finally, we have the latter part of this middle section of the film where Michael stops talking altogether, becoming virtually catatonic, and when he kills the nurse that's left to look after him as Loomis shows his mother out, it feels like the kid he once was is completely gone when they rip his mask off and he lunges at his mother, all the while looking and acting like an enraged animal. Above anything else that I say about the film, I can't deny the good job that Faerch did during this first part of the film.

Despite all my praising of the young Michael Myers, though, I do have a few issues with it. One, even though Daeg Faerch played what Rob Zombie was going for well, I still think it would have been much more effective if they'd had Michael be in a loving, fairly well off upper middle class family and yet, despite that, he still has something in him that drives him to kill. I'm not going to harp on that anymore but, again, it's just my opinion that that would have been better. Second, since this was what Zombie was trying to do, I wish there had been more of a clear cut reason as to why Michael just gets fed up and decides to massacre everyone in his household who's made his life miserable. I know that his killing that bully was triggered by that jerk insulting his mother but I would have liked a little more of a reason as to why he suddenly decides to duct-tape his stepfather to the chair and slash his throat as well murder both his sister and her boyfriend. I guess it's because of the crap the guy said to him as well as his sister blowing off taking him trick-or-treating but if so, they should have made it more clear. Instead, we get shots of him sitting outside of his house in-between shots of his mother stripping to Love Hurts (oh, I'll get to that later) and after that, he's sitting at the table, eating and flipping some candy-corn and decides, "Okay, I'm going to kill them." It felt rather random. Some might say, "Well, it wasn't explained. Isn't that what you wanted?" and while I'd normally say yes, it doesn't make sense when Zombie has made it clear that his mission is to explain everything about Michael. And finally, as Michael is being examined by Loomis at Smith's Grove over a period of many months, it feels as though we're building to Michael being diagnosed as having some sort of severe mental illness or psychosis which, even though I don't like it, is expected since Zombie said that this was what he was going to do... and then, that suddenly goes out the window and we start getting into the pure evil, boogeyman concept from the original. This is what I mean. It feels like Zombie can't just pick a freaking characterization of Michael and stick to it. He starts it off with it coming across like Michael is nothing less than a pure psychopath who was created because of the horrible environment that he grew up in and then, after he's completely absorbed by his psychosis when he kills that nurse, we inexplicably start with the pure evil stuff. Okay, you can't have it both ways. It doesn't gel. And that's a big problem with this film: the characterization and concept of Michael isn't consistent.

I find it really funny that Rob Zombie got so hung up on Michael Myers being able to drive in the original movie given how he'd spent a good chunk of his life in a mental asylum but he felt that it was okay for him to grow from fairly average-sized kid into a big hulking monster who stands almost seven feet tall. I've heard that nowadays, Daeg Faerch himself is quite tall but how in the name of God could somebody grow up to be so freaking big in a mental asylum where you're probably not allowed to do much if you're as big of a threat as he is? Was somebody slipping him steroids because I doubt he'd get that big on the food in there! This is what I meant when I said that Zombie appears to out and out abandon his original concept to make Michael as realistic of a character as possible. He's said that he chose a big person like Tyler Mane to play the adult Michael because, since Faerg was a fairly big kid himself, he'd grow up to be a huge guy. I guess Zombie was kind of right given Faerg's current physical size but it's still overkill for him to grow into somebody so huge. What's more, he can break chains, as demonstrated during his escape in the theatrical cut, is able to smash through walls and doors, and so on. That's hardly believable given how all he did in his room was make paper mache masks. How did he get so strong? Did he have weights stashed in there? And while we're on the subject of his size and strength, I'd like to mention something else that kills me. Despite his size and his look for that matter, Michael gets a lot of crap from the idiots he comes across. Whether it's that stupid orderly who insults him left and right and even threatens him just for looking at him or when he's face to face with Big Joe Grizzly, who tells him he'll cut his mask, Michael takes a ridiculous amount of verbal abuse from these morons. Why would you give crap to someone like that? Does he not look like someone who could tear your head off without even breaking a sweat? That orderly in particular should know better seeing as how he's surely cognizant of the fact that Michael brutally murdered four people when he was ten. I just know that if I ran into someone who looked like that, I'd be shaking in my shoes and very calmly walk off in the other direction. Going back to Rob Zombie himself, he once said that he equated Michael's presence in the asylum to that of the Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, who was very big but was virtually ignored by everyone else there. Yeah, well, I don't remember what the Chief was there for but I'm sure it wasn't for killing four people when he was a kid. And he also wasn't an intimidating-looking guy with long stringy hair who always wears creepy masks either.

Besides his strength, when he gets to Haddonfield and begins stalking Laurie Strode and her friends, he does a little bit of the trademark stuff from the original movie, like appear out of nowhere when you least expect it and hide in dark places. Putting aside the fact that this once again flies in the face of Zombie's "realistic" take, it's hard to believe that someone that big would be able to do that and stalk someone without being noticed. In the first two films, Michael was average height and therefore, it was believable that he'd be able to wander the streets on Halloween night without drawing attention to himself. He fit in. A guy who's almost seven-feet tall and dressed like that, though, would have some trouble being inconspicuous. For instance, I don't at all buy this one part where Michael follows Laurie, in broad daylight no less, and even though she gets the feeling that she's being followed, she never sees him. And the part where he suddenly appears behind a door after it's been opened, even though there's no way he could have gotten there or been hiding there the whole time without being seen, is even more ludicrous. Plus, as happened in some of the later sequels, he feels more like Jason Voorhees in the brutal and sadistic ways that he kills people here, usually after bursting in like an angry bull. I've said this so many times that it feels like I'm beating a dead horse but, once again, it does not feel like Michael Myers when he kills people that way. But the coup de grace is that Michael, as before, gets shot three times with a .357 Magnum and gets right back, not to mention that this movie ends with Laurie shooting him point blank in the face and he's still alive for a sequel. Right then is when Zombie just said screw it with making Michael a realistic psychopath this time around, now we've inexplicably gone back to the unstoppable force of evil concept that doesn't match at all with what we saw at the beginning of the movie. Maybe it was due studio interference as I've heard a few times but whatever the case and while Mane does do an acceptable job with what he's given to do, the conception of Michael Myers in this film is not at all consistent.

As much as I don't care for his characterization in this film, I do think that Michael Myers looks really cool. Not only did they not mess much with the overall look (the coveralls, the mask, and the butcher knife), the mask is without a doubt the best one since the original. It looks awesome when it's first introduced and is brand new and clean as a whistle and later in the film when it's weathered and a bit rotted, it adds just that little bit more to it. In fact, out of all of the other movies, this mask is the one that comes the closest to looking like the one used in the first two movies. Why was that so hard to do before? Why did it take them until a movie that I don't particularly like to finally get the mask right? Life sucks sometimes, doesn't it? In any case, not only do I like the main Michael Myers mask but I think the other masks that he wears throughout it are pretty cool too. I think the clown mask that he wears as a little kid is kind of creepy and the same goes for some of the masks that he wears when he's in Smith's Grove, in particular that mask that he wears in the scene in the unrated version when he's screaming to be let out, the clown-like mask that he wears when he has his final session with Dr. Loomis as an adult, and the pumpkin mask, which I agree with everyone else is the best mask in the film outside of the main one. Besides the mask, I think that Michael's look when he's in the asylum as an adult is pretty intimidating, with the dirty robe, flip-flops, and the long hair that obscures his face to where you can kind of see it but not quite whenever he's not wearing a mask. He looks pretty creepy... which is why I feel that everyone who runs into him should treat him as such. I may not like how he's portrayed here but I can't at all fault Michael's look and his various masks, especially the main one.

This isn't scary!

Going back to the main mask, as much as I love its look, I'm afraid that Rob Zombie still does some dumb stuff with it that I don't like at all. One is its introduction. Zombie has said that, for some ungodly reason, he had a problem with Michael stealing it from a hardware store in the original movie, asking what would he have done if they didn't have that mask and why he went for that mask in particular. So, what's his solution? He introduces the mask by having Judith's boyfriend suddenly pull it out of a paper bag while they're having sex, put it on, and tell her that he wants to do it with the mask on. I remember that being one of the things that really infuriated me when I first saw the movie. I couldn't that Zombie took something as awesome and iconic as Michael Myers' mask and have it be introduced as a makeshift sex toy. That is so undignified and feels like a major slap in the face to something that, for good reason, has been an unmistakable and identifiable part of the horror genre for decades. Oh, man, I hate that! It's not helped by the young Michael, after killing Judith's boyfriend, finding the mask and actually putting it on before he attacks her. Why not keep the clown mask that he'd been wearing up to that point? That looked legitimately creepy. The sight of a kid wearing a Michael Myers mask that's meant for an adult is silly and hurts what is otherwise a fairly effective murder scene. Finally, you have the part where Michael finds the mask after coming back to his old house as an adult. This is another thing that comes out nowhere. Michael sneaks into his old house and knows exactly where to break some of the boards in the floor to find not only a butcher knife but the mask as well. What was that thing doing underneath the floor in the first place? Did he hide it there? I guess not since he seems a little surprised to find it there. How did it end up there, then? The last you see of it before then, Michael simply takes it off when he tells his baby sister, "Happy Halloween" after killing Judith. Given that, I think it would have been hard to deduce that he wore it during the murder and even then, they'd probably take it away as evidence. And what was a knife doing down there for that matter? That can't be the same knife that he used before, again due to the evidence angle. So, where did it come from? See, Mr. Zombie, I can nitpick your movie to pieces too, so you're no better at this than John Carpenter was when he made the original (not even close, actually).

Another aspect of this film that polarizes a lot of people is Malcolm McDowell stepping into the role of Dr. Loomis. Some feel that he was perfect casting, others despise him. As for me... eh, he's good in the portrayal of Loomis that they were going for but, as a Halloween purist, the only Loomis in my eyes is Donald Pleasence and that's how it will always be. McDowell is a good actor but Pleasence was just infinitely more than he'll ever be in my opinion. Still, I think McDowell was acceptable in playing Loomis the way he did. Here, rather than seeing Michael as a force of evil that must be destroyed no matter the cost, Loomis actually wants to help him and the two of them even develop a time of bond. I thought the interplay between the two of them was quite well done, like when Michael innocently asks Loomis why he talks funny and I really like the part in the unrated version when Michael loses it, pleads to be allowed to go home, and Loomis explains to him as best as he can why he can't do that and comforts Michael when the kid begins crying. But, unfortunately, no matter what he does, he just can't reach Michael, especially when he slips deeper into psychosis and begins wearing masks and talking less and less. This culminates in the expression on Loomis' face when Michael is in an uncontrollable rage after killing the nurse and goes so far as to lunge at his own mother. Loomis cannot believe what he's seeing and you can tell that he's starting to realize right then that Michael is quite beyond any help that he can give him. Fifteen years later, Michael hasn't said a single word and just sits in his chair while Loomis talks to him, finally prompting Loomis to realize that if he hasn't gotten through to Michael at this point, he's never going to and so, he decides to resign as his doctor. I like when he tells Michael, "In a way, you've become my best friend... which shows how fucked up my life is." After he leaves, Loomis cashes in on Michael's story by writing a book about him, which probably wasn't the most ethical thing to do given the circumstances but he saw an opportunity to make some money off of it and he took it. May not have been advisable but given what Loomis becomes in the next film, I'm perfectly fine with how his cashing in is portrayed here. And despite his success, when he's told that Michael escaped from the asylum, he does become sincerely concerned and goes after Michael to try to stop him before he kills again, in particular to save his sister from him. Loomis could have said, "It's not my problem anymore," but he didn't. You have to give him that. Granted, in the unrated version, he does pass blame on the administrators of the facility, telling them that he was Michael's doctor and all they had to do was keep him locked up for the rest of his life, and is a bit arrogant when someone criticizes the book that he wrote, saying that it was a masterpiece, but he still attempts to warn the sheriff about Michael's being in town and how dangerous he is. When he learns that Michael has found his sister, he quickly rushes to where they are and when reasoning with Michael doesn't help, Loomis is forced to shoot him. As he comforts Laurie after doing so, you can tell that he didn't want to do that and when Michael suddenly reappears and grabs Laurie again, Loomis again tries to reason with him to let her go, almost getting himself killed in the process. And after Michael seriously injures him, he still uses what little strength he has left to stop him from going after Laurie... it doesn't work but he tried. In conclusion, as much as I will always prefer Pleasence, I don't think McDowell was all that bad in this characterization of Loomis.

Sheri Moon Zombie cannot act! Plain and simple. This is going to be really mean but why does Rob Zombie have to put his wife in every damn movie that he makes? Yeah, she's good to look at and Zombie always make sure to show off his wife's bod in every movie he puts her in, which gives off some disturbing vibes about their relationship (I guess it's not as bad as Dario Argento having his daughter get naked in practically every film he does with her), but that's as far as it goes. She's a terrible actor and not only that but after watching and hearing interviews with her, I don't think she's that smart either. She comes across as a real dingbat who knew nothing about movies, especially horror movies, and only started appearing in them because she married Rob Zombie (I don't care if that's harsh, that's how I honestly feel). Now, I'll be fair, Mrs. Zombie does look like she's trying in this film. She tries to come across as a mother whose dealing with her white trash family that includes a bitchy daughter and a real jerk-wad of a boyfriend as best as she can and care for her troubled son and baby daughter as well as absolutely horrified and devastated when she comes home and discovers what Michael has done but it never comes across as genuine to me. It looks like acting. Zombie should have tried to find someone infinitely more suited for this role instead of once again shoving his wife. But, I will say that the best she does is when Michael completely loses it after killing the nurse and is so crazed that he lunges at her. She does look like someone who realizes that the boy she loved and raised no longer exists, so I'll give her some points for that. But that's all I can. Plus, not only do I not think Mrs. Zombie is a very good actor but there are a couple of things in this movie that make me not like Deborah Myers as a character all that much. When the principal and Dr. Loomis show her the mangled cat that they found in Michael's backpack, she just blows it off by saying, "So he found a dead cat," and when they show her the pictures of Michael's "surgery" on various animal carcasses, she says, "Michael loves animals. He would never do this." Lady, if he loved animals so much, he wouldn't have this sick stuff in his backpack! Are you that dense? But that's nothing compared to the feeling that Michael, even after he brutally murders his sister, is the only member of her family that she gives a crap about. Yeah, she's screaming in despair when the paramedics wheel Judith's body out on the gurney but when she's having those intimate moments with Michael when he's in the asylum, it's like he's the only one that matters to her, telling him that she misses having at home and the like. I know he's her son but did she forget that he killed her daughter? Shouldn't she be a little more conflicted about her feelings toward Michael? And when Michael completely loses it, Deborah is in so much despair that she blows her brains out right while her baby daughter is in the same room... her baby daughter! Yeah, she's sad but you'd think she'd find the strength to go on for her baby. But nope, she's like, "Sorry, Boo. Michael's the only one I care about. You'll have to take care of yourself." I know this stuff happens in real life but it doesn't help in my sympathizing with a character in a film because it makes them look selfish. Plus, again, I didn't buy Mrs. Zombie's acting in that scene either. I thought it looked fake. Ugh, I just hate both this character and this actor.

When you look at the crap that Michael had to deal with at home, it's not too hard understand why he eventually snapped and killed everyone save for his beloved baby sister. His stepfather, Ronnie White (William Forsythe, who's admitted in interviews that he didn't take this seriously and did it because it was stupid fun), is as big of a douchebag as you can get. He's a foul-mouthed, verbally abusive bully who constantly curses out Deborah (why doesn't she just get rid of him?), mercilessly picks on and makes fun of Michael, and actually makes some sexual comments about Deborah's teenage daughter, saying she's got a "nice little dumper." He's such an asshole that he even goes as far as petty bullying, like grabbing the cereal box and pulling it out of Judith's reach just to be a jerk and flicks stuff at Michael, mocks him for killing animals (why would Deborah let him know about that?), and makes fun of how he talks. Bottom line, Ronny is a loathsome human being and deserves getting his throat slashed. Michael's sister Judith (Hanna Hall) isn't much better. Like Ronnie, she picks on Michael every chance she gets, insinuating that he killed his pet rat Elvis by "stroking" him to death, refuses to take him trick-or-treating and tells him to go by himself so she can go have sex with her boyfriend (who looks like a major dork with that wig he's forced to wear), and is just an overall bitch to him. She's not that nice to her mother either, like when she tells her that she refuses to eat eggs because they're chicken abortions and when Deborah says that they're not, she comments, "You know what an abortion is." God, what an unlikable skank. I think now I'm starting to understand why Deborah was able to get over her murder. And what gets me is that when she and her boyfriend are having sex, she actually tries to have a moment where she tells him that Ronnie isn't her father and, in a childlike voice, tells him that her dad's in heaven... all while she's sitting up and showing her breasts. It's kind of hard to get into what she's saying in that instance. In any case, she makes a big mistake by cursing Michael out and smacking him a couple of times when she catches him standing over her bed with the mask on, which prompts him to brutally stab her to death. In the original, while I didn't know much about Judith, I felt bad when she was inexplicably stabbed to death. Here, she's so unlikable that I don't care for one minute about what Michael does to her.

While we're going through the cast here, let's talk about the myriad of cameos and small roles that Rob Zombie feels the need to give to people who are familiar faces of the genre in one way or another. While it's interesting to see some people that you know from past films here and there and it is cool that Zombie is getting them work by putting them in movies that a lot of people see, it gets distracting when you see one familiar horror actor after another pop up. It gets to a point where you're just playing Spot the Celebrity and looking out for who'll show up next rather than paying attention to the story, which is not good at all. Some of these people are only present in one version of the film but we'll go through them all. The late Richard Lynch shows up as the principal of Michael's school; Sybil Danning plays a bitchy nurse who's stupid enough to first insult this kid who she should know has killed four people and then completely turn her back on him; Danny Trejo has one of the better ones as an orderly named Ismael Cruz who's actually a decent guy and is good to Michael, telling him to not let the walls of asylum get to him and that if he gets used to living completely in his mind, he'll be unstoppable (so, you could sort of blame him for what eventually happens); Lew Temple is that stupid orderly who not only has the gall to insult and threaten Michael but in the unrated cut, is the very reason why Michael escapes (which is a very retarded reason that I'll go into shortly); Bill Moseley appears in the theatrical version as one of the guards whom Michael kills when he escapes while being transported, Ken Foree is Big Joe Grizzly, the loudmouth truck driver whom Michael kills while he's taking a crap (and looking at porn, no less); Clint Howard is the doctor who calls Loomis to tell him that Michael escaped and, I'll admit, he has a line that I like when he tells Loomis, "Christ, you can barely tell if he's breathing half the time,"; Udo Kier is one of the administrators at Smith's Grove and I think he only appears in the unrated version; Sid Haig is the caretaker of the cemetery that Loomis visits upon arriving in Haddonfield; and, most inexplicably, is freaking Mickey Dolenz as a guy who sells Dr. Loomis his gun. Also, Adrienne Barbeau was in a scene that didn't make it in any version and Tom Towles from the 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead is in the scene where Michael escapes in the theatrical version. There are more familiar genre faces in other roles during the latter part of the film and I'll go a little bit more into them since they're meatier but these are the endless parade of people who pop up in one or two scenes throughout the film and looking back on all of them, it's amazing how far overboard Zombie went with trying to jam all these people into one movie. I'm actually surprised that he didn't put PJ Soles in here as well, given how she popped up in The Devil's Rejects. I'm sure there are others whom I just don't recognize but even the people that I just named constitute as overkill.

The first time I saw this movie, I really, really hated Scout Taylor-Compton as Laurie Strode. I thought her portrayal was an insult to the character that Jamie Lee Curtis created. I thought she was annoying, bubble-headed, and more than a little bitchy and disrespectful, even towards her parents whom she says a bunch of inappropriate sexual stuff in front and even shoves her finger in and out of a bagel to her mother. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I know that nowadays, it's not believable for the "good girl" to be a quiet, repressed virgin but that made my jaw drop. After watching the film again, I would say I'm now more mixed about Compton's portrayal of Laurie. For me, she swings back and forth between being very irritating with her high energy to be rather sweet, like when she tells Annie that she doesn't like lying and thinking that a couple of the trick-or-treaters that come to their door are cute. I also used to think she looked like she couldn't stand Tommy Doyle (whom, to be fair, is a little annoying here and the same goes Lindsey Wallace this time around as well) but after watching it again, it looks more like she just loves to tease him and does generally like him but just wishes that he would let her have some time to herself every now and then. A problem that I have is that Laurie's screaming and crying during the final quarter of the film gets really irritating. Yeah, there's a killer after her but still, when all you do is scream constantly while he's chasing you, it gets irritating and makes me wonder why he's even still pursuing you. Incidentally, I find it odd that, given how much Rob Zombie bashes on the sequels, he used the plot point of Laurie being Michael's second sister in this film. Maybe he thought he could do it better by actually establishing that he had more than one but you really take the edge off of Michael's character when you have him chasing after Laurie to protect her rather than kill her and even then, after she rejects him it seems like he's decided to kill her instead so that whole thing was pointless. Speaking of which, I will say that Laurie does fight back against Michael a few times by stabbing him in the shoulder as well as shooting him point blank in the face at the end, which is much more than what she would do in the next film, and she does still do what he she can to protect Tommy and Lindsey but all of her screaming and crying during the chase scenes doesn't help as well as the fact that, unlike Jamie Lee Curtis, whom I liked completely, I was much more mixed on this version of Laurie. Ultimately, like Dr. Loomis, I like her portrayal more in this film than in the next one but it's still far from perfect.

Despite my mixed feelings about Laurie, I'd take her over this film's versions of Annie Brackett and Lynda any day. Everybody was really excited when Danielle Harris returned to the Halloween series here as Annie but it doesn't matter to me because she's really, really annoying here. Annie in the original was a bit of a sarcastic smart aleck who dropped her babysitting duties when the opportunity to go have sex with Paul came up but I still liked her. Harris, on the other hand, is irritating. I don't remember the sarcasm, I just remember her being rather sex-crazed and talking Laurie into babysitting Lindsey Wallace so she can be with Paul (whom you actually see this time and just think, if they'd gone this route originally, it would have been Nancy Loomis banging John Carpenter!) And she's particularly annoying when she tells Laurie that she talked to someone about Ben Tramer and tells Laurie that she needs a boyfriend, proceeding to the two of them pretending to have sex and making orgasm noises. I was hoping somebody would shoot me during that part. Everybody was also really excited when Danielle Harris announced that she was going to show her breasts in this movie but I'd seen so many breasts by this point that I was very blasé. Plus, her pair didn't really impress me and it was another obnoxious sex scene, which we'd also had a bunch of by that point. I didn't give a crap that she didn't get killed either because I didn't really like her. Going back to the issue of sexiness, I thought Kristina Klebe as Lynda was a lot hotter than Danielle Harris but at the same time, I think I disliked her character even more than Annie. She's without a doubt the most foul-mouthed of the three girls, talks crap about a teacher who got her kicked off the cheerleading squad, called her a dried up bitch and commenting, "That C-U-N-T needs to get laid!" and acts like a total whore all the time, like when she stupidly mocks Michael when they see him staring at them from across the street (again, why would you give crap to someone who looks like that?!), asking him if he wants a taste of the young stuff, and when Annie meets up with her dad, the sheriff, Lynda says to Laurie, "You think he was flirting with me?" The kicker about that is Lynda later calls Laurie and asks her if she thinks she's a slut given a comment that Annie made about her cheerleading incident earlier. Yeah, why would anyone think that you're a slut? And right after that is when she does the, "See anything you like?" line when she thinks Paul is standing in the doorway dressed up as a ghost. PJ Soles should sue Rob Zombie for defamation of character for writing Lynda that way. Hearing this girl say, "Totally" so much makes me die a little inside.

Rounding out the rest of the cast, you have Brad Dourif as Sheriff Brackett and he's one of the few cast members in this movie that really shine. It helps that I'm a fan of him anyway and plus, not only is he actually playing a good guy for once but he lives in both this movie and the next one! He may not have much of a role in this one but it's nice seeing him and he comes across as a nice guy who does what he can to keep order in Haddonfield. He doesn't really care for Dr. Loomis, though, feeling that the fortune that he's made off of the book that he wrote about Michael Myers is blood money, which is an understandable way to feel, and he has a hard time believing him when he says that Michael had come back to Haddonfield. But, when he attempts to call the Strodes and doesn't get an answer, he knows that something's wrong, particularly since he reveals to Loomis that he inadvertently led to Laurie being adopted by the Strodes after her mother committed suicide and therefore, knows that he may have put them in Michael's sights since she's his sister. Again, he ultimately doesn't do much in the film but Dourif always have a great presence to him and it's nice seeing him. Finally, you have Dee Wallace and Pat Skipper as Mr. and Mrs. Strode, both of whom come across as very good parents to Laurie, especially Mrs. Strode. Even though Laurie tends to annoy her with her sexual jokes like the bagel thing and such, she ultimately does care for Laurie quite a bit and has really good, warm memories about her when she was younger. I also like how, even though she doesn't stand a chance against him, she tries to stop Michael from going after Laurie, screaming, "You leave my baby alone!" Plus, it's Dee Wallace, who is just the quintessential movie mom, which helps a lot. While I don't have much to say Mr. Strode since he doesn't do much of anything, you can tell that he's a nice, decent, loving father as well so there's that.

When you watch his movies, it's clear that Rob Zombie has a distinctive style to his filmmaking, which is to be very gritty as well as ultra-realistic and violent. Basically the types of films that he likes to make are exploitation movies, with all of the white trash characters that he comes up with, the trashy, run-down environments that they live in, the sadistic kills, and the gratuitous nudity. It's his way of making movies and I say good on him since he was able to come up with his own filmmaking voice but I don't think that style works when applied to Halloween. As much as I do credit Zombie with trying to make the film his own, John Carpenter's original was never an exploitation film. It easily could have become one but instead, Carpenter decided to make it a classy, sophisticated, suspenseful thriller with very little bloodshed and just a bit of nudity. The same goes for the majority of the sequels as well. While some of them did get pretty gory, the franchise never became exploitive to me. Maybe it became a typical slasher series in many ways but it never became a brutal, sadistic exploitation one. And the series was never about gritty realism either. It was all about a creepy atmosphere and the fact that these people are having to deal with a killer who is much more than just a typical knife-wielding psychopath and appears to be able to become part of the night of Halloween. Even the most unsuccessful, tired entries tried to keep some semblance of that mentality in my opinion. Zombie, however, threw that out the window and tried to make it like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Last House on the Left (two films that I think he would have been much more qualified to remake), which it never was. This film never reaches the mythical status that the original and a majority of the sequels did and it never gives off an atmosphere or much of the Halloween vibe. In fact, it feels like the movie is set on Halloween just because that's the title. I don't think it takes advantage of the feeling that time of year gives off and it's just going through the motions by having dead leaves blowing in from off-camera, people dressed up in costumes, decorations, and jack-o-lanterns. If you like Zombie's approach, then that's cool and I could just be getting old but this film doesn't give me what I want from a Halloween movie.

Rob Zombie is good with visuals and giving his films an interesting look, like The Devil's Rejects and although I've haven't seen it at this time, I've heard that The Lords of Salem looks amazing. He's able to do that better than most directors who've only done music videos before going into films, which he did do. However, I don't think he did very well with the actual look of Halloween. I just cannot stand the way that color-timing and coding technology makes films look. It makes them look synthetic and unappealing and that's what I think about this film. The daytime scenes have this ugly, yellow tint to them and the nighttime looks kind of green at some points and brown in others. I can see a little bit of blue during these scenes as well but not much and during some parts, the images have that washed-out look that you get when you turn the brightness on your TV up too high, especially when there's a lot of darkness. I really miss the style that the other Halloween films had, with the creative nighttime lighting, the employment of the blue moonlight effect, and the slow, methodical uses of the camera. Speaking of which, there's far too much shaky cam in this film whenever Michael Myers attacks someone and during the climactic chase sequences at the end. That's another annoyance that I have with movies nowadays, especially horror and action movies. They seem to think that shaking the camera like crazy during action scenes and employing fast editing makes what's going on more exciting but in fact, it's irritating and makes it hard to understand what's going on. And this film gets really annoying with those issues, sucking out any excitement and thrills that most of the action setpieces had to begin with (which isn't much for the most part). He also uses way too much slow-motion and instances of silence, except for the music, to try to enhance the drama and suspense of some scenes, like when Michael creeps up on Judith's boyfriend or when he kills that nurse and everyone runs into the cafeteria to try to get him under control. That can work but when you use it too many times, it loses its impact very quickly. Plus, the way he employs it here, it feels more melodramatic and silly than it does urgent. To sum up, I don't think the film is appealing to the eye due to its visual style being very flat and uncreative and the shaky camerawork and instances of rapid and overdone editing don't help either.

The production design of the film actually changes from one act to another. The first quarter dealing with the young Michael Myers has the traditional Rob Zombie gritty, white trash look, with the Myers house being a bit rundown and unkempt, lots of junk in the front yard, and the interiors having a lived-in look and feel. The same goes for Michael's school. Even though we don't see much of it, just the restroom, some hallways, and the principal's office, it has that same rundown, kind of trashy look to it and it goes without saying that the strip club that Deborah Myers works at has a very sleazy look and feel. But then, when we switch to the Smith's Grove portion of the film, we get a more cold and clinical feel with the hallways and sitting rooms being almost completely white and gray. Even the camerawork during this section has that feeling, with lots of slow pans and zooms that's akin to what you would see in a Kubrick film (Zombie has said that was a conscious decision). And the music that you hear playing in the background is that typical classical music that they feel the need to play in places such as mental hospitals, like how Nurse Ratchet forced the patients to listen to it in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and adds to the depressing feeling of the place. I do like the look of Michael's room, with the green color to the walls and all the masks that he's made over the years hanging from them. I think it's quite a clever, cool look for a mental patient's room. And once Michael breaks out and returns to Haddonfield, aside from the filthy gas station restroom (like there's ever a clean one) where he kills Big Joe Grizzly, we get back to a look that's more akin to the original Halloween, with the tree laden streets and the houses that belong to upstanding, upper middle class families, which makes me wonder if the Myers family lived in the seedy part of town. I think the high school here looks just a bit more presentable than the school at the beginning of the film too, although the gun shop where Dr. Loomis purchases his .357 Magnum and the hamburger place where he meets up with Sheriff Brackett has more of the redneck look that Zombie usually goes for. The cemetery that Loomis visits looks okay, basically like the cemetery in the original, although the dead coyote on the stake that he and the caretaker find near Judith's desecrated grave is the one thing that's different here. And while the old, abandoned Myers house isn't made to look nearly as creepy as it was in the original, it serves its purpose and has some interesting rooms that you see throughout the climax like the cellar where Michael takes Laurie and the attic where the last bit of the film involves a cat and mouse game between the two of them. I don't know why Lynda and Bob thought that this would be a good place to have sex, though, but I guess to each their own. Overall, the art direction isn't bad at all and some of it is actually quite decent but as I've said, I don't get the traditional sense of atmosphere that a Halloween film should give off and I don't think it uses Halloween itself and the autumn that well either.

As I said back at the beginning of the review, while Zombie did his own thing with the movie for the first two-thirds of it, the latter half of the movie where Michael returns to Haddonfield and begins stalking Laurie and her friends becomes little more than an abbreviated version of the original film. Now that I think about it, even before Michael escapes, you have his take on Loomis' speech about Michael's evil when he's speaking at a lecture, only not written or delivered nearly as well. In any case, Zombie repeats way too many of the same scenarios and lines from the original during this latter section of the movie for my taste and even follows the same fundamental plot as well. Zombie tries to put his own spin on these aspects to differentiate them but it doesn't help much. Ultimately the question is why would I want to watch a truncated version of John Carpenter's classic film when I can just watch said classic film where this stuff was done infinitely better? Anyway, you have recreations of the following scenes and scenarios: Laurie, while walking to school with Tommy Doyle, drops something off at the old Myers house, unaware that Michael is watching her from inside, but in this instance, she slips an envelope through the slot in the door and Michael picks the envelope up and sniffs it; Tommy Doyle being obsessed with the boogeyman; Laurie sees Michael watching her from across the street while she's in school and when she looks out the window a third time, he's not there anymore; someone at Smith's Grove tells Dr. Loomis that if the security wasn't sufficient enough to keep Michael contained, Loomis should have told them (Loomis even says, "Two roadblocks and an all-points bulletin wouldn't stop a five-year old" and is told that Haddonfield is miles away from Smith's Grove); while walking home from school, the girls notice Michael, this time standing on the other side of the street instead of driving by, and one of them, Lynda this time, gives him crap; Laurie feels like she's being followed as she walks home, although they don't do the shot with Michael and the hedge this time; Loomis visits a cemetery with a caretaker who recounts how shocked he was when he heard about the murders and they find that Judith's tombstone has been taken but in this instance, they also find a dead coyote impaled next to the grave; Michael killing Bob by stabbing him against the wall, tilting his head while looking at his body, and putting a sheet over him when he appears to Lynda, only this time Bob had the sheet over him to begin with (which only works if you've seen the original film, though); Lynda showing her breasts to Michael and saying, "See anything you like?"; and Annie bringing Lindsey Wallace over to where Laurie is babysitting so she can go be with Paul. I just find it so funny that Zombie talked about how it would be too easy to just redo the original film shot for shot and yet, he did quite a bit of that during the second half of this movie. As the film draws to its climax, it starts to become more like its own film again but even then, he still feels the need to replicate Judith's tombstone being placed near the body of one of Laurie's friends and the, "Was that the boogeyman?" line. Even most people who like this movie feel that this second half is the weaker part and I can see why with the overwhelming sense of deja vu that you get while watching it.

You cannot pinpoint what time period either half of the film takes place in at all. You'd assume that the first half takes place in the 70's given some of the clothes, particularly Michael's KISS T-shirt, and hairstyles as well as the music that you hear playing and the fact that it's Rob Zombie, who loves setting stuff during that decade. But then, you have the issue of how Hanna Hall looks, which is that supermodel type of body that you only started seeing in the last couple of decades. It's akin to how the characters in the Platinum Dunes Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies looked even though they were supposed to be taking place in the late 60's, early 70's: while there were some good-looking people back then, they didn't look like that. And plus, despite some of the clothes looking like they're from the 70's, others are so vague that they could be from any time period. Ultimately, you can't really be sure when it's taking place given all these factors. Your only guess could be that it's some time in the late 70's, early 80's due to the music and Michael's KISS T-shirt. But then again, the same goes for the second half of the film. You have Big Joe Grizzly, who looks like he came from a Blaxploitation movie with that afro and Elvis-like sideburns, some of the jackets that the teenagers wear as well as their hair (this movie showcases some of the worst wigs I've ever seen) look like they're from the 70's, you're still not hearing any songs that are more recent than the 80's, and at the same time, you have modern-day portable phones and cellphones. It's okay to make the time period your film is taking place in vague but you can't throw out logic and put in a bunch of stuff that wouldn't exist in modern day along with things that do.  

I'll give the movie this: the death scenes are pretty impactful because of how savage and heartless they are. Rob Zombie definitely doesn't pull any punches and this film not only contains some horrific deaths but a fair amount of gruesome, realistic makeup effects as well. Some of them I think go on a bit too long and are kind of overkill (and, as I've said many times, don't feel like acts that Michael Myers would commit) but the majority serve their purpose well to me. The first death is that of the bully who picks on Michael and says some really nasty things about his mother and sister when he runs into him in the restroom. Michael follows him into the woods and attacks him with a branch, repeatedly bashing him with it. After the bully falls to the ground and looks up to see Michael, who's wearing his clown mask, he screams, "You're so fucking dead!" which isn't a smart thing to say to someone who's standing over your with a branch, and Michael in response continues to pummel him. The bully's demeanor changes pretty quickly then and he begs for Michael to stop. Michael, naturally, doesn't, and the guy attempts to crawl away but Michael follows him and beats on him some more. By this point, the guy's face is busted open, with blood everywhere, and he begs for mercy again, apologizing for picking on Michael. And this is something I give Zombie credit for: even though this character was a total foul-mouthed asshole who picked on Michael for no reason, I actually feel a bit bad for him when he's getting brutalized like this and is crying and pleading for Michael to let him go. Michael pulls his mask up, reaches into the guy's pocket, pulls out the flier for Deborah's strip club that he used to taunt Michael, pulls his clown mask back over his face, and finishes him off by smacking him several more times until he finally dies. Michael then walks off, leaving the guy's body there in the woods.

The next batch of kills is when Michael massacres his family, starting with Ronnie. While he's asleep in the chair, Michael puts duct tape all over his buddy and then slices his throat open with a butcher knife. I think it would have been better, though, to just have Michael slit his throat because the sight of this guy being duct taped to the chair is not only silly but pointless given that he wouldn't have been able to get far or call out once his throat was cut. And wouldn't you know if someone was taping your body to a chair, even if you were asleep? I guess they're trying to imply that Ronnie was drunk since he had a bottle of liquor in his hand earlier but I wish they'd made it more clear. The makeup effect of his slashed throat is nice, though, and the sound of his muffled choking as he bleeds to death adds an appropriate visceral feeling to it. Michael then kills Judith's boyfriend when he comes downstairs to make himself a sandwich by beating him relentlessly with an aluminum baseball bat. The first hit would have been enough but even as he lies on the floor convulsing, Michael beats him many, many more times, turning his head into a bloody pulp and leaving him lying there as he drops the bat and heads upstairs to take care of Judith. He goes into her room as she's lying on the bed, touches her leg, and when she turns around and sees that it's him, while wearing his trademark mask after finding it lying on the floor in the room, she curses him out and smacks him a couple of times. Michael then stabs her right in the gut and pulls the knife out, leaving Judith shocked as to what just happened. Bleeding profusely, Judith staggers out of the bedroom and down the hall but she doesn't get far in her weakened state before Michael pursues her and slashes her a few more times, causing her to fall to the floor where she slowly expires. (Noticing a pattern here?) Michael kills one more person while he's still a child: the bitchy nurse who insults him when she's instructed to look after him while Dr. Loomis sees Deborah out. When she turns her back on him, he takes his fork and stabs her in the neck. We don't see the gory details of the actual kill since it's shown through a security camera but we see a bit of the aftermath as she lies there dying, with a close-up of her bloody hand twitching and her face as she expires. I'm not going to count Deborah's suicide since it's not really a kill and in any case, all you see is some blood splatter after she blows her brains out.

Now we get to Michael's escape and the interesting thing about this is that, depending on which version of the film you see, there are two different ways this plays out. The theatrical version, for me, is the more sensible one, which involves Michael breaking loose while being transported and killing the guards sent to escort him. He beats the crap out a couple, grabs one and bashes his face against the glass door, one of the guards accidentally shoots the other in the process, and Michael somehow, I couldn't tell because of the shaky camera and fast-editing, slashes the final guard's throat open. I guess he used his chain but I'm not entirely sure. In any case, while Michael's strength in this scene may fly in the face of Zombie's obsession with realism, even though both versions do that anyway, I think this is a good way for Michael to escape because it properly shows that he's a force to be reckoned with. The scenario in the unrated version, however, is retarded. That douchebag orderly who gave Michael crap earlier and his cousin decide to take advantage of their duties by raping this rather attractive inmate... and they decide to go in Michael's room to do so. How stupid can you get? Not only do they go in there and rape her for some ungodly reason but they also make fun of Michael and touch his masks, which is his berserk button, prompting him to get up and pulverize them. Michael grabs one guy, slams him against the wall, and throws him down onto the table before chasing the other, who can't run because his pants are still down around his ankles, outside, grabbing him and throwing him against either side of the hall before finally grabbing him and smashing the back of his head against the wall, leaving a bloody mess there. Besides the stupidity of that whole thing, I don't like the idea that Michael was provoked into getting out. It makes more of an impact if he just decides, "I'm out of here," and proceeds to make it happen. Whichever version you see, his next victim is Ismael Cruz, who finds Michael wandering around after coming across the bodies of his victims (some of the guards from the transport scene as well as a receptionist who's lying in a pool of blood and seems to have had her throat torn out). He attempts to get Michael back into his room and attempts to put some handcuffs on him but Michael grabs him, brutally slams him around, shoves his head into a sink filled with water several times, turning the water red with blood, throws him down, and smashes a TV onto his head. Damn! This death is also sad since Cruz was one of the few people who was decent Michael and he even says so, crying in despair bashes the crap out of him. The only thing that kind of hurts it is that when you see the shots of Cruz's head under the water, Danny Trejo has a bit of a disinterested look on his face. Otherwise, it's an effective kill.

After escaping from the asylum, Michael's next victim is Big Joe Grizzly in the gas station restroom. Michael walks up to the stall's door while Joe and knocks on it. Grizzly, who's doing his business and looking at a pornographic magazine while doing so, tells him it's going to be a while. When Michael doesn't leave and knocks on the door again, Grizzly realizes that this guy is going to be trouble and gives him one more chance to leave. When he doesn't, he pulls up his pants, takes out his own knife, and opens the door, coming face to face with Michael. Grizzly threatens to cut Michael's mask right off his face and that's when he attacks. He grabs ahold of Grizzly and the two of them struggle before Michael gains the upper hand and slams him repeatedly against the stall's wall, breaking it off of its hinges. While doing so, Michael manages to take Grizzly's knife and although Grizzly manages to get a punch in, he ultimately gets the knife right in his gut. Michael stabs him again for good measure before he finally dies and Michael takes his coveralls. If you think about it, though, this kill was unnecessary since Grizzly wasn't even wearing his coveralls when Michael killed him. Michael could have just taken them wherever they were hanging (they weren't in the stall) and left but I guess Zombie figured they needed another kill.

Now we get to the last act of the film where Michael arrives in Haddonfield and begins stalking Laurie and her friends and family. His first victims are Lynda and Bob. Michael makes short work of Bob when he jumps him while the latter's heading upstairs with a sheet over him to scare Lynda. After he slings the sheet off of him, the kill is virtually identical to how it was in the original: Michael slams Bob against the wall, lifts him up by the throat by one hand, takes out the knife, and stabs him right in the gut. We even get a shot of his convulsing feet going limp as he dies and, as I mentioned earlier, Michael inquisitively turns his head while looking at him before walking off and leaving him hanging (it's much briefer here, though). And also like before, Michael appears to Lynda wearing the sheet and Bob's glasses, Lynda taunts him, and, eventually growing tired of his just standing there, asks him where her beer is. In this instance, Michael actually takes the beer out and when he doesn't walk over to Lynda and give it to her, Lynda gets up, walks over to him, takes the beer, and cracks open (completely naked while doing so). That's when Michael takes the sheet off of him, comes up behind her, grabs her by the neck from behind, and squeezes, slowly choking her to death. These kills to me are the weakest in the film because they're just rehashes from the original and they were done with much more suspense and creepiness there. Anyway, Michael's such a dick that he attacks Laurie's parents after she leaves with Annie to go babysitting. He comes out of nowhere and attacks Mr. Strode while he's still on the porch, slashing his throat and shoving him inside the house. After the guy's body onto the floor, Michael slowly approaches Mrs. Strode, who attempts to defend herself with a fireplace poker but Michael gets ride of that effortlessly and corners her. You don't see what he did to her because we get several shots of the living room before Mrs. Strode crawls out and attempts to call the police. Michael grabs her from behind, shows her a framed picture of Laurie, indicating that he's going for her next, and then slams Mrs. Strode through the table before grabbing her by the hair, pulling her head back, and breaking her neck. Apparently Michael wasn't done yet, though, because when Sheriff Brackett attempts to call them when Dr. Loomis tells him that he believes Laurie is Michael's target, we get a panning shot of the living room with blood everywhere, Mrs. Strode lying back in the chair with blood all over her body, and Mr. Strode is lying by the fireplace with a lot on him as well. In this continuity, Michael Myers is so demented that even Jason would probably think he was going to far!

Michael later attacks Annie and Paul while they're making out and just about to have sex. He grabs Paul by the back of the neck while he's lying on top of Annie and kissing her, pulls him up, stabs him in the front, and throws his body aside before advancing on Annie. Michael doesn't kill Annie in this film but he comes close. Annie tries to run outside but Michael grabs her and pulls her back into the house. She does manage to give Michael a run for his money, kicking him in the stomach, running into the kitchen, and getting a knife to defend herself but he manages to smack her down onto the floor. She tries to crawl away (how many times does that make that I've written that?) but he grabs her leg and drags her back into the living room. Like Mrs. Strode, you don't see what Michael does to her next but when Laurie brings Lindsey Wallace back over to the house, they find Paul's body hanging from the ceiling with a jack-o-lantern on his head and Annie lying on the floor, bloody and bruised. Again, given how demented and sick Michael is in this film, I'm not sure I want to know what he did to her. After he chases Laurie back to the house where she was babysitting, Michael then kills the police officers who arrive to help them. When one officer is trying to coax Laurie and the kids out of the bathroom where they're hiding, Michael slams his face against the glass and stabs him in the back of the neck, causing him to cough up blood onto the glass. After he bursts through the door, the officer shows up and confronts Michael before he can attack them. Michael charges at him and the cop shoots but it just grazes his shoulder, only causing Michael some minor discomfort before he reaches the officer and hacks him to death. And while it's not a kill, the last gore effect in the film occurs when Loomis, after having seemingly saved Laurie before Michael got back up and started attacking again, tries to talk him into letting Laurie go. Michael then throws Laurie aside and goes back up to Loomis, grabs his head, and appears to crush his skull and shove his thumbs into his eyes. At least, I think he did. It's kind of hard to tell because he drags Loomis' body into his old house and when he finds Laurie and starts after her again, Loomis suddenly wakes up and attempts to stop him by grabbing his leg. He doesn't even have any blood on his face and his eyes aren't damaged at all. So what exactly did Michael do to him? It's more than a little confusing.

This is a prime example of a film that overstays its welcome. Every time I've watched it all the way through, one thing has always remained the same: during the last thirty or so minutes, I was ready for it to be over. The movie's two hours long, you're stuck with a bunch of jerkass characters for virtually the entirety of it, and the climax consists of little more than Laurie screaming and Michael smashing through walls and junk while trying to get her. Plus, that finale just drags and drags like nobody's business and what's worse, prolongs it all by stopping and starting again. And because I don't care at all about what happens and it's as predictable as you can get, that makes it even more of a pain to sit through. After she finds Annie along with Paul's body, Laurie attempts to call the police but Michael attacks. That scene in and of itself is devoid of any tension whatsoeer because I can predict what's going to happen, one of the reasons being because I've seen the original, and sure enough, like the original, Michael chases Laurie back to Tommy Doyle's house. He bursts through the front door, chases her and the kids upstairs, they hide in the bathroom, the police arrive and there's no sign of Michael when the one cop comes up to the bathroom door while the other investigates the house. You just know that Michael's going to pop out at the last minute, kill these cops, and continue chasing Laurie, which is exactly what happens. Michael manages to get ahold of Laurie and take her back to his old house while Tommy and Lindsey run off to get help and inform Dr. Loomis of what happened. Then comes the part where Laurie wakes up in the basement of the Myers house, finds Lynda's body, and Michael shows up and unsuccessfully tries to connect with her, even taking his mask off (you can't get a good look at his face because of the long hair, though). She pretends like she wants to help him but manages to get his knife, stab him in the shoulder, and attempt to escape. She's screaming and banging on the walls, manages to break her way out of the basement, Michael regains consciousness, puts his mask back on, and bursts through the wall to continue pursuing her. Not only is this drawn out but it's so murkily lit and the camera is so shaky that it's hard to tell what's going on. Laurie manages to get outside but she falls into the dried up swimming pool and Michael walks up and paces back and forth a little bit, watching her while she screams for help, before finally walking down into the pool after her. That's when Loomis arrives (in a cop car, even though the last shot of him had him running down the street!), tries to get Michael to stop and when he doesn't, he's forced to shoot him.

I know full well that Michael's not dead (even though he should be because Rob Zombie said he tried to be realistic with this) and that the movie's not over yet so this stuff where Loomis helps Laurie to the cop car and thinks about how he had no choice but to "kill" Michael makes me rub my temples. And, wouldn't you know it, Michael smashes through the car's window, grabs Laurie and drags her back to the house, Loomis tries to talk him down and Michael reacts by crushing his skull or whatever while Laurie runs inside and hides. This is where I was really wishing this damn movie would just end. Michael drags Loomis into the house and looks for Laurie as well as stand around and ponder where she could be for what feels like an eternity before smashing through the walls to try to find her. While he's doing that, Laurie takes Loomis' Magnum and that's when Michael sees her and chases after her again, despite Loomis' feeble efforts to stop him. Laurie climbs up into a crawlspace in the ceiling and Michael, realizing where she is, takes a beam and starts smashing through the ceiling with it. He keeps smashing and smashing while she attempts to stay ahead of him in the crawlspace and eventually gets cornered at one point. It just goes on and on and I was so well past not giving a crap that I just sighed in frustration. Laurie eventually falls through a weak part of the ceiling, gets to her feet, sees Michael standing in the doorway, she raises the gun but before she can shoot him, he drops the beam and charges at her, causing them both to go through the boarded up window behind her and fall off the balcony. Laurie wakes up lying on top of Michael, grabs the gun, points it at his head and clicks an empty chamber, spits on his mask before clicking a couple of more times, his hands grabs her wrist, and after struggling for a bit, she finally manages to shoot him and the movie ends with her screams fading into home movies of the young Michael as the credits roll. Thank God. This movie sucks. I know there's an alternate ending (I'm not sure but I think the theatrical version had the ending I just described) where, after Michael rips Laurie from the car and Loomis tells him to let her go, he does so and drops the knife before Sheriff Brackett and the police show up and gun him down. I don't really know if I would have preferred that ending or not because that just sounds anti-climactic  whereas this ending goes on far longer than it should so maybe some middle ground between the two would have been better. It doesn't matter, though; either way, the ending still blows and so does this movie.

To top everything else off, the music score for this film is as lame as you can get. It's composed by Tyler Bates who, besides being Rob Zombie's, as well as Zack Snyder's, go-to composer, is one of the most lackluster musicians working in Hollywood today. He's done the music for movies that I enjoy like Snyder's Dawn of the Dead but the thing is, I barely remember the music from those films because his work is so generic. Even though he did the score for The Devil's Rejects as well, the only music anybody talks about with that film are the 70's rock songs that Zombie put on the soundtrack, which worked very well; the actual score, though, is forgettable and consists of little more than low droning that's meant to inspire dread. In any case, his score for Halloween can be summed up in two sections. One is the recreation of John Carpenter's original music, like the main theme, Laurie's theme, the Myers House theme, the Michael Kills Judith theme, and the Shape Stalks theme, the latter two of which I think are used far too much. Putting aside the fact that these themes don't fit at all with the tone that Zombie creates for the film, I think the covers sound rather uninspired. I don't care for the way the main theme sounds (it also doesn't work when you start playing that when young Michael Myers runs down the hallway of his school), especially the way they made it sound in the trailer with the loud banging keys and sounds behind the actual music, and the Shape Stalks theme simply consists of the, "Dun, dun-dun," played over and over again with no build-up in it and it's done so loudly that it becomes more obnoxious and distracting than it does terrifying. The Myers House theme sounds okay, although it's not played enough for me to give a definitive opinion on it, but Laurie's Theme I don't think fits with this version of the character and while the Michael Kills Judith theme sounds passable, I don't like hearing it over a montage of Deborah Myers finishing stripping, getting her clothes on, and heading home (which is far from the most egregious example of inappropriate music placement here). And the other section of Bates' music is that same droning stuff that he did for The Devil's Rejects, particularly whenever Michael Myers appears and is slowly stalking and killing someone. There's no other way to describe it other than generic and unmemorable.

One would say that the actual music scores in Rob Zombie's films matter less than the choice of songs, especially seeing as how The Devil's Rejects made use of some great tunes like Midnight Rider, Seed of Memory (I think that movie actually introduced a lot of people to Terry Reid), and, most notably, Free Bird, which Zombie used brilliantly during the last few minutes of the film. Unfortunately, it seems like for Halloween, Zombie lost his touch with choosing songs. I didn't mind the use of KISS' God of Thunder at the very beginning (I think there's one version that uses The Monster Mash there, though) and of course, just like the original, he's got to have Don't Fear The Reaper playing at a couple of points but that's a nice song so I didn't mind it either. But the placement of Love Hurts by Nazareth during the montage of young Michael sitting outside the front of his house and his mom pole-dancing at the strip club made my jaw drop the first time I saw it and it still does. I should not be seeing and hearing that in a Halloween movie! It doesn't fit! It makes me wonder if Zombie was even thinking seriously about this or if he was trying to antagonize fans of the franchise by putting that in there. Maybe it doesn't bother others but that still dumbfounds me. It feels so out of place in my opinion. And while I don't mind the version of Mr. Sandman that's performed by Nan Vernon in this film, I still scratch my head about it even being here since Zombie bashed the sequels so much. Maybe he didn't want to use the original by the Chordettes and instead asked Tyler Bates to come up with a new version of it to differentiate himself but still, you're recreating a song that was used in a couple of those sequels that you supposedly hate word for word. It's more than a little baffling. Anyway, that's all I've got when it comes to the music for this film. I know there are other songs but those are the ones that stuck out to me and some of them not in a good way either.

Rob Zombie's Halloween just isn't my cup of tea. While there are a few things about it that I like, such as a few of the characters, the look of Michael Myers, especially when it comes to the mask, and some nicely gory, brutal kills, there's still a lot that I don't care for. The majority of the characters are completely unsympathetic, the amount of profanity gets annoying and distracting, the characterization of Michael Myers and his backstory is not a good or interesting idea to me, the film goes on far too long and during the last half hour, I was begging for it to end, the score and soundtrack are lame, and Zombie himself is what ultimately taints this movie for me most of all. When the director is a guy who seems to pull stuff out of his rear and whose statements you can't trust, can't seem to make up his mind about what kind of film he's even making, and whose reaction to the fans of the franchise who don't agree with his decisions is one of, "Bite me," it really hurts my ability to enjoy a movie. I'm well aware that Zombie has a lot of fans and there are quite a few people who like this movie and that's perfectly fine. If you get some enjoyment out of this film, power to you. I'm not going to say you're stupid or you don't know crap. If you like this more than John Carpenter's original, again, great. I don't understand it, but by all means, continue to do so. Far be it from me to tell you what to like and what not to. It's just that this movie does not appeal to me, it never has, and I doubt that it ever will, particularly since it's a safe bet that I'll never watch it again. That's simply how it is.