Halloween

Rob Zombie’s utterly misguided take on John Carpenter’s seminal horror flick, Halloween is entirely devoid of any of the elements that made the original such a memorable piece of work and indeed, there’s little doubt that the movie ultimately fares even worse than any of Halloween‘s seven sequels. (Even those weird druids are looking pretty darn good right about now.) The now-notorious decision to focus on Michael Myers’ abusive upbringing proves to be disastrous, as Zombie infuses such scenes with precisely the sort of sleazy sensibility he’s become known for – which effectively ensures that the majority of Halloween‘s first half plays like an over-the-top parody of a Rob Zombie flick (right down the casting of William Forsythe as a redneck idiot). One might’ve been able to overlook such shenanigans had the movie’s second half, in which Myers’ embarks on his inevitable killing spree, contained even a single effective sequence, but there’s little doubt that Zombie’s uniformly poor directorial choices (his use of shaky camerawork is just out of control) firmly cancel out Halloween‘s few positive attributes. That Myers has inexplicably been transformed into a hulking psychopath stands as Zombie’s most poorly-conceived innovation, though Malcolm McDowell’s entirely underwhelming work as Dr. Loomis is extraordinarily disappointing in its own right (Loomis as a hippie? Really?) The inclusion of a finale that feels absolutely endless certainly doesn’t help matters, and, bottom line, there’s no denying that the movie will force even the most ardent Halloween fan to question what it was about this series they ever liked (it’s just that bad).

1/2* out of ****