Meadhall of the Comitatus

Dear Robert Zombie,

You don’t know me and I don’t know you.  I believe we are both better off this way as I find nothing appealing about the prospect of life in prison, and I am sure you find nothing appealing in the prospect of being murdered.  I am, unfortunately, familiar with your work, and while you were never my favorite musician I would not hold that against you.  I refer instead to the so-called “movies” you have tried, in vain, to generate auteur credit with.  I found House of 1000 Corpses dreadfully boring and, for all intents and purposes, an exercise on your part in self-gratification via digital manipulation of your own genitalia.  I found The Devil’s Rejects perhaps even worse.

However miserable and frustrating those “movies” were, at least they were your personal creations.  It is true that they were weak and hackneyed imitations of far superior movies, but those two were at least your own, and unable to damage any reputation but your own.  But sir, now you have “re-imagined” a movie that, I feel, no one was asking for a “re-imagining” of.  I am no stranger to trashy cinema, nor am I particularly prudish or squeamish, so I must point out that my blackest of black hatred for your Halloween movie stems from no Puritan sentiment or artistic elitism.  Indeed, my intense loathing for your Halloween is in direct proportion to how highly I esteem the original Halloween as created by master John Carpenter—a movie to which I find myself very much indebted for my interest and appreciation for the ghoulish, the morbid, and the grotesque.  I find the idea of even discussing your abhorrent remake nauseating, yet my therapist insists that perhaps confronting your Halloween directly will allow me to disentangle my soul from the dark pit of despair and blind rage you have mired me in.

It is, of course, common knowledge that Halloween as a franchise has not been in particularly good shape since at least nineteen eighty-one.  Robots and microchips made from Stonehenge were a low point, certainly, as was once-famed rapper Busta Rhymes karate-kicking Michael Myers on a reality TV show competition.  No man in full control of his faculties and sense would stoop so low as to defend such things.  Though certainly dreadful, our one merciful escape from those horrors was that they were sequels and thus impossible to conflate with the pinnacle and monument to the genre that was the original Halloween.  There is a distancing, a moat, if you will, one is allowed by being able to refer to an abysmal sequel as Halloween 3 or Halloween: Resurrection.  As a further testament to your crimes against horror, and perhaps to cinema more generally, you no longer allow us this sweet release.  By “remaking” or “rebooting” the franchise and refusing to dub your pestilent “movie” a sequel to the original Halloween, one feels that you are trying to replace it with your new and “more definitive” vision.  Already in this letter it has become evident that I must, for convenience and clarity if nothing else, refer to Carpenter’s classic as the original Halloween.  I curse you with every fiber of my being for this . . . if I am ever to discuss the original Halloween again, must I always refer to it as “the original” and be doomed to remember that shameful rainy afternoon in October when I was first afflicted with the odious and malignant blasphemy hereafter to be referred to as Zombiween?

Yours,

Ozmodeus

P.S.: I also did not enjoy this movie. –Furor

OK Rob, we all know you're not really talking about Michael Myers here. Try to deny it.

Premise: 0/5

Oz rants: Since I’ve seen two other RZ flicks, I can safely say that what he’s done is just remade the same damn movie three times now.  The screaming rednecks, the brutal yet boring and ultimately pointless violence, the gallons of blood everywhere, the dirt, the f-bomb apocalypse, and the feeling that you’ve just wasted that much time out of your life that will never be returned to you: it’s all the same, which means that RZ is fundamentally unoriginal, unimaginative, and, undeniably, a hack.

The “origin” of Michael Myers felt like it was more than half the movie–I don’t know if that was because it really did take that long or just that it was soooooo goddamned boring and drawn out.  And of course the big problem with the origin story is that it seems to be trying to humanize Michael, who always worked best, IMO, as more a FORCE of evil than as “generic slasher villain x” who’s justified in his killing because his childhood was shitty or whatever.   Michael in the original doesn’t really have any reason why he snaps, since he had this nice middle-class suburbanite childhood and there was no “justification” for him becoming a monster.  That was much more disturbing than a forty minute long love letter to the word “fuck” and its variants!

The chubby, KISS-loving face of evil.

Of course, after spending so much time trying to make us care about Michael, when he finally loses his shit and breaks out of the asylum, that all gets cast by the wayside.  He just starts randomly killing everything and everyone around him–including the janitor who’s done nothing but be nice to him since he first showed up at the asylum all those years ago.  So it’s like RZ told us an origin story, then said “but you can forget about that now ‘cuz it’s KILLIN’ TIME!”  That’s bad enough, but so much time spent on Michael at the beginning means we get less time to get to know his soon-to-be victims (not that we want to know them, since they’re all so utterly obnoxious and non-dimensional) which is part of where the dread came from in the original Halloween. We cared about the characters who were about to have the worst Halloween on record–now we’re just watching a giant mute killing total strangers for no good reason.

There is zero suspense in this movie.  Absolutely none!  No buildup, just gore.  When you go back and look at the original Halloween, there’s a surprisingly small amount of gore, but many people still consider it a classic and still scary today–doing the math, that’s because instead of gore Carpenter was interested in building suspense with all the stalking and skulking before Michael strikes, and making you sympathize with the victims (even the shallower, whorier ones).  This is proof once again that RZ is almost kind of semi-capable of copying something, but completely lacks any understanding of how or why it worked in the first place.

Oh great. This shit is somehow also a love letter to Insane Clown Posse.

Furor rants: To quote the movie itself, “Bitch I am makin’ a MENTAL LIST!”

Rob Zombie has the worst movie-translation software out there. He typed in AWESOME and it came out NAWSOME.  As has already been said, this remake should never have happened, but Moustapha Akkad loves him some cash. But since it has happened, we’re left to wonder how anyone, even this guy, could have fucked it up so thoroughly.  I really believe that a writer/director who publicly hated Halloween and the entire slasher genre would have made a better remake than Zombie’s.  Remarkable.  The one thing I’ll give RZ is that he got all the proper nouns right.

Oz further rants: Yeah, he just had to use “fuck” in between each one of them so he could keep it all straight.

Posthumously, JFK also looks on, asking "WTF?"

Cast: 1/5

Oz froths: Look!  Rednecks, assholes, and whores!  This is certainly new territory for Rob Zombie!  Also, young Michael Myers talks too damn much in this movie. He was creepy in his silence as a kid in the original, but RZ seems to not believe that anything should EVER be quiet EVER.

Furor froths: Were there actors outside of the guys they pulled outta Rob’s own cloning vat?  Seriously, everyone in the movie is emulating Rob himself, which basically involves growing their greasy hair over their faces while hollering crudities and browbeating  hot chicks.  You won’t remember anyone in this movie, which is awfully kind of you.  Then there’s the guy in the rape scene who looks like he’s straight outta the Spin Doctors.

I didn’t like this Dr. Sam Loomis at all, and that kills a lot of it right there.  I don’t think McDowell is a bad actor, but he usually plays villains, and the godawful dialogue just gives him nothing to work with: “I’ve known you twice as long as my first wife . . . It’s strange, Michael, in a weird way you’ve become my best friend.”  What the hell is that shit?!  Who DOES that to Halloween?  Rob, couldn’t you have contented yourself with fucking up Child’s Play?  We wouldn’t really have missed it!  Okay, I would have!

Equally disastrous is that this Laurie is horrible.  There’s nothing that separates her from the other girls or makes you care about what’s happening to her at all.  She’s annoying and we want her to die ASAP.  In fact, Myers attacking Laurie doesn’t take center stage in the movie–nothing does.  How is that even possible?  Well, Rob FOUND a way.

Oh Jesus, really? Baby Slipknot is in this movie too? Fuck me!

Technical/FX:  .5/5

Oz spews: I’m still wondering just why Michael’s sister’s boyfriend has a MICHAEL MYERS mask on when he’s trying to scare her after they fuck like bunnies (yay, I made a Rob Zombie-level comment!).  It makes no sense–the mask in the original was just a shapeless blank thing that was horrible in its blankness.  This is literally a Michael Myers mask that I could run up to the store and buy right now as a “MICHAEL MYERS” mask.  I’m also wondering why the hell Michael buried that mask under the floorboards of his house after he killed his sister, and how on earth it managed to stay in relatively good condition for the 15 years he was locked up in the asylum.

There’s also the issue that Michael never has that unnatural tendency to appear and disappear that made him so disquieting in the original.   Yeah, RZ’s “humanized” him somewhat, but he can sustain MASSIVE trauma and still chase down and kill his victims in the remake, despite how very dead or crippled that would make a normal human.  The Strangers was more akin to the OG Halloween than this crapfest is.  Do you even know how much that hurts to say?

In Rob Zombie's universe, mental patients get raped by their "caretakers" all the time in the cells of mask-obsessed murderers.

What makes this worse is that there’s scenes that RZ was obviously copying from the original movie that benefited from Michael being there one sec and gone the next that RZ flubs.  I’m thinking of the scene where Laurie and her friends are walking down the street and Myers is behind them a good way just standing there, when someone feels his intensely evil stare on them and then turns around, seeing the big weirdo in the mask.   I think it was just Laurie who had that experience in the OG movie, but it was creepy because she turned around the next second and he was gone.  In RZ’s version, we see him actually turning aside and walking out of the camera frame.  How is that in any way better than the original?  Spoiler: it’s not.  If you can’t copy the scenes right, Mr. Zombie, please don’t do it at all.   And if you’re going to copy scenes from the original, how could you POSSIBLY leave out the “closet/coat hanger stab in the eye” scene?

And they played “Love Hurts” while young Michael Myers is crying on a curb because no one took him trick or treating, intercut with his mom (Sheri Moon Zombie, what a surprise!) showing that she knows how to work a stripper pole.  Fuck YOU, movie.

A naked blood-soaked chick crawling along the floor away from a psychopath? Yep, this is a Rob Zombie movie alright.

Furor spews: Everything that made the original, well, original, is absent here.  Carpenter created the right effect with his excellent POV shots, creepy pans, innovative lighting effects and . . . Rob Zombie knows the word ‘fuck’.  How he fucks THIS movie up is beyond me.  A great scene where the girl runs into her car only to be knifed by Myers from the backseat is . . . gone.  Laurie’s mounting fear, which took the whole movie to culminate, is almost entirely gone.  Our reason to watch is gone right along with all of that.  What a surreally uninteresting and ugly movie.

Dirty blood-covered chick screaming while the camera gets uncomfortably close to her face? Yep, definitely still in a Rob Zombie movie.

Popcorn factor: 0/5

Oz loogies: I think that I would rather have diseased vultures rip out and devour my eyes while my hands are being slowly crushed in a vise as rats eat their way through my intestines than ever watch this movie again.  It is soul-killing.

Furor loogies: I especially hated the ending, which doesn’t even have Myers escape, or die, or feature a final scene.  There IS no ending.  Again, something I would not have thought possible in a medium like the movies where I am accustomed to seeing things happen to people under the auspices of a plot.  Rob Zombie skips straight to credits assuming that everything else is a waste of time.  Had he done this after the first five minutes, I would’ve agreed.  Zombiween is made of hate and ultimately only serves to further the already yawning gap of righteousness separating us from the RAW generation.  This fail isn’t even epic.

She's crying because she just saw this REALLY bad remake of "Halloween" on TV and . . . oh wait.

Furor is not amused: This guy should have stuck to the music biz, aiming no higher than churning out songs about the bat eating the rat eating the cat.  He’s brought this same shooting-gallery variety to filmmaking, only now he’s overambitious to boot.  Truly a sad development and a godawful flick.

Oz is also unamused: We would like to point out that the star rating above is a ZERO.  Zero.  Zeee-ro.  Nil.  Nothing.  A black hole that stars disappear into forever.  We didn’t even have a graphic for ZERO STARS and had to make one ourselves.  To compare, even The Ghouls and Howling 7 have received a half-star.  Thanks to Rob Zombie for creating a new low and giving us something to hate even more than those two movies!