Never have I wanted to walk out of a theater more than when I saw this soulless piece of schlock. Ninety unbearable minutes of unbelievably unsavory characters taking part and being subjected to grisly, meaningless, violence. Some may argue that “Making it hard to watch only makes it more effective.” but to that I respond “You are retarded.” Yes horror movies are supposed to be sadistic they are “Horror” movies after all, but they should also mean something. You should care and feel about what’s going on, relate with someone in the movie and overall it should be entertaining and hopefully even innovative. None of these are traits which Halloween possesses.
The approach here was to start with the origin story of Michael Myers which of course as we all know by now is always a terrible idea. Remember the Phantom Menace? All this does is ruin the mystique of the character, plus what more do we need to know about Michael? We already saw a prepubescent Michael slash up his sister in the original flick do we really need 15 more minutes of that in a “re-imagining?” Surprisingly Halloween is actually a case where humanizing the antagonist weakens his presence. Knowing that Michael was from a broken home and picked on by bullies just makes me feel bad for him, I’m supposed to fear him remember? He was scarier when his sudden bloodlust came out of nowhere because it was so unexpected. What we don’t understand, that’s what we fear the most.
After about 15 or 20 minutes of origin story, we are then subjected to a painfully dull rehash of the original film. Laurie has to babysit on Halloween, blah, blah, teens having sex get murdered, blah, blah, he’s dead, he’s not dead, and I don’t give a shit. Like I haven’t already seen all this done better about a hundred times before. The only reason any of this even exists is is to pad out the running time. I mean you couldn’t just have a twenty minute origin movie now could you? Which brings us to the fact that this movie “Should not have been made!” Though with Rob Zombie’s involvement or not, this movie was going to be made no matter what.
Could this movie had been remade any better? Well seeing that about 80% of horror movie remakes are beyond unwatchable, probably not. What almost depresses me the most is how John Carpenter doesn’t give a shit about the legacies of his own movies. It’s like all he does these days is collect paychecks and piss off his fans. Not that it’s really any of his control with the studios and everything, it’s just the fact that it doesn’t bother him. I mean you’ll be hard pressed to find a Carpenter fan that likes or approves of any of these Carpenter remakes so stop making them!
Really it’s that damned Hollywood machine that deserves the most blame. It seems cliched to talk about how much Hollywood cares about money over artistic vision, but as far as I can tell that seems to the be the case in a nut shell. Sadly we are to forever be surrounded by terrible remakes of these classics. Though it’s up to both you and I to try and ignore them and look to other venues for our freaky fix.