They don't call them remakes anymore. They call them "creative reimaginings." I'd wager that this term has come to popularity since these new cinematic updates-of which Rob Zombie's Halloween is the latest-bear little in common with the films whose titles and intellectual property they so shamelessly purloin.
To be fair, there have been two great creative reimaginings produced in the past seven or so years: Zack Snyder's 2004 retelling of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead and the Sci-Fi Channel's 2003 reboot of the Battlestar Galactica franchise. To be accurate, however, there have also been Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, last year's Black Christmas and 2003's Michael Bay-produced Texas Chainsaw Massacre, all of which were outstandingly abysmal. Like this later sorry lot, the latest from shock-horror auteur and veteran metal-head Rob Zombie (House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects) handled its fairly solid source material in ways neither creative nor imaginative.
For those unfamiliar, master of horror John Carpenter's 1978 original laid down the fundamental groundwork for what would become known in the 1980s as the "slasher film" (think Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.) And while this stalk 'n' chop narrative may have been preceded by Hitchcock's Psycho and Canuck director Bob Clark's original Black Christmas, the success of Carpenter's Halloween and its resulting slew of imitators has been keeping both C-list horror directors and feminist film theorists employed for decades.
Sadly, Zombie's take on the tale of child-killer-cum-superhuman-killing-machine Michael Myers, while sharing the characters, plot points and many of the sadistic pleasures of Carpenter's film, bears little else in common in terms of inspired genre revision.
It all starts well enough, with the audience being introduced to the ten-year old budding psychopath (Daeg Faerch) and his sufficiently dysfunctional family. Here, it all seems like a Rob Zombie film. There's unchecked vulgarity of the F-word and C-word variety, weird little kids in creepy clown masks and a classic rock soundtrack chock full of Nazareth and Blue Öyster Cult. And further, watching the young Mikey's murderous tendencies reveal themselves is fairly compelling: we see him torture animals, tell off school principals and withstand torrents of abuse from stepfather, sister and school bullies.
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