rob zombie

halloween 2

John Carpenter’s original Halloween (1978) essentially created the slasher craze of the 1980s. It either popularized or outright invented many of the tropes of the genre – a final girl, deaths coming to those who are promiscuous or otherwise “sinful”, killers’ point of view shots, etc. – and created a slew of knock-off holiday-themed horror films and generally influenced a decade of horror films.

It was followed by seven sequels and then was remade by Rob Zombie, that remake got a sequel and that was followed by the David Gordon Green trilogy which pretended none of the sequels happened and set the story 40 years after the original.

Rob Zombie remade the original film in 2007 and as I noted in my review, it is pretty terrible. Its sequel improves upon the first one a great deal, but it still isn’t great.

Scout Taylor-Compton returns as Laurie Strode some two years after the events of the original film (or the remake of the original film, or…whatever). She’s having a rough time. She’s in therapy, she’s taking a myriad of pills, and she’s having nightmares about Michael Myers every night. In a word, she was deeply traumatized by the events of Halloween night two years ago.

Now, horror movies about trauma may have been new in 2007. Certainly, a great many slasher sequels had the Final Girl return as bad as ever. They were able to shake off the events of the first film and come back after the evil villain with renewed vigor. But that isn’t reality. Surviving an attack by a vicious killer is traumatizing. It likely takes years, decades even, to overcome such a thing.

It is refreshing to have a horror movie’s protagonist have to deal with the trauma of the first film. Or it was back in 2007. I guess. In 2023 it feels like every horror film is about trauma. Hell, even Avengers: Endgame was about trauma. Certainly, the David Gordon Green Halloween films were about trauma. So watching this film now, and seeing how it deals with trauma feels a little old hat.

It isn’t as if Rob Zombie was doing something really interesting with the idea either. As mentioned, Laurie is in therapy, she’s popping pills, she has nightmares, she dresses like a punk goth, and covers her room in hard rock posters and “edgy” things like anarchist symbols and the number “666.” That isn’t a bad thing for this type of horror film, but it isn’t exactly original either.

It doesn’t help poor Laurie Strode that Doctor Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is back in town pimping another book about Michael Myers. In this film, he is a shallow huckster, trading stories about the murders for fame and fortune. His new book gives the audience new details that have come to light since his last one, including how Laurie Strode is actually Angel Myers, Michael’s sister. When Laurie finds this out it sends her spiraling farther into despair.

Meanwhile, Michael has apparently spent the last two years wandering the countryside, hiding out in old farms, eating the raw corpses of animals he’s killed, and waiting around for the second anniversary to come find Laurie and finish what he’s started.

In Carpenter’s original Michael Myers was the face of evil. He was an emotionless, soulless, killing machine. There is a scene in the original film in which he stabs someone to death, his knife holding the corpse to the wall, and Myers crocks his head just a little as if admiring what he’s done.

Zombie spent the first film examining just exactly what made Michael Myers a killer, completely destroying what made Carpenter’s character so terrifying. He drops most of that with this sequel though his mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) and a version of himself as a child (Chase Wright Vanek) continue to haunt him like memory specters.

What saves this film are some truly scary kill scenes, and some wonderful, even beautiful imagery. The carnage is a bit too visceral and gory for my tastes these days, but there is no doubt he blocks them in really interesting ways.

If you strip away all of the Halloween stuff, if you just look at it as a horror film, as a slasher, I think it is pretty good. But as another entry in the Halloween franchise, it doesn’t really work for me. It is a great improvement on Zombie’s first entry, but there are so many other better films in this series I don’t see myself ever returning to this one.

John Carpenter’s original Halloween (1978) didn’t invent the slasher genre. It has its roots in the Italian Giallo and films like Black Christmas (1974) came out earlier and contain all the elements of the genre. But Halloween really set the template for what slavers would become, and its immense popularity meant that it would be copied over and over again throughout the next decade.

It remains the greatest slasher ever made and is a truly great horror film. Much of this comes down to Carpenter’s economic direction. In just over 90 minutes he tells a complete story without an ounce of fat. It isn’t that the film is nonstop thrills either. There is a lot of exposition, we spend a lot of time just hanging out with the characters. But Carpenter makes them count. He lets us get to know the characters, especially Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in a career-defining role), which allows us to actually care for them when the horror comes.

As Doctor Loomis (a wonderful Donald Pleasence) constantly lets us know Michael Myers is evil personified. The film doesn’t provide a back story. We don’t learn anything about who he is or why he kills. We don’t need to know.

Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of Halloween is a terrible film. It takes all that makes Carpenter’s film great and chucks it out the window, then stomps on it with its dirty boots.

A good half of the film is filling in Michael Myers’s back story (played by Daeg Faerch as a ten-year-old boy and Tyler Mane as an adult). His mom is a stripper, her boyfriend is an alcoholic, abusive cripple. He’s bullied at school. Etc., etc., and so forth. It is all basic, boilerplate reasons for becoming a psychopath.

Here he doesn’t just kill his older sister as a child, but his entire family (excluding his baby sister, of course). We then spend a bunch of time with him at the mental institution where Doctor Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) tries to cure him. Or at least show him some kindness. Or at least talk to him. His mom visits every week, but Michael shrinks back into himself. He stops talking but continues to make little paper masks to put over his face and hide his true self from the world.

None of this is very interesting and it is all superfluous. Again, we don’t need to know why Michael Myers is a killer. Trying to give him human reasons for being who he is takes away the horror of who he was in the original.

When we finally arrive at Halloween night in the present (where the original film spends most of its time) I’d stop being interested in what this film was trying to do. Unfortunately, I had to keep watching for another hour.

Scout Taylor-Compton plays Lauri Strode in this version and all apologies to the actress, but she is not good. Jamie Lee Curtis portrayed the character as kind and good (it literally began the trope that the Final Girl in these films would be virtuous and a virgin), but also tough, a fighter. She’s innocent, but not naive or weak. Taylor-Compton turns her into a mostly whiny brat. Her girlfriends are even more obnoxious.

In the original, the teens do a bit of drinking and sexing, but Carpenter’s camera never leers at them. Zombie’s camera is nothing but leers. It lingers on the sex scenes, is zooms in on the nudity. There is a rape scene early on in the asylum that is as gross as it is gratuitous. The violence is more visceral as well, and not in a good way. I love horror movies and I’ve seen more than my fair share of gore and gratuitous sex. Maybe I’m just getting older, but so much of this film just felt like way too much.

I first watched this film in 2008 while living in Shanghai, China. In those days you could buy bootleg DVDs super cheap. There were literally guys on the street corners with boxes full of them. As soon as a film came out in the States we would get flooded with copies (usually cam copies where folks literally filmed the movie inside the theater). Sometimes we’d get weird cuts of films. After watching Halloween over there I was looking up reviews and realized I had seen a different cut than everyone else.

Apparently, there are three different versions of the film. There is a theatrical cut, a director’s cut, and an original version that was sent to test audiences. That last version didn’t do very well so they added some scenes and cut some things out. At a guess, I’d say what I originally saw was that first version. But I really don’t remember.

I believe what I watched tonight was the Director’s Cut. Whatever I watched, it was bad. Really bad. Just terrible actually.

I only watched it because the only film in the entire franchise I’ve never seen is the sequel to this. I was hoping to watch it on Halloween night. I guess I still will, but now I’m not looking forward to it.