If you were to ask an average movie-goer to describe the movie Psycho, I suspect they'd have a pretty easy time of it until they get to the end. "So then, Norman jumps out dressed as his mother, only to be subdued before he can kill the girl. And then... um... he's arrested? I think..." Let's face it: Psycho is a brilliant film until the final scene - a scene so backwards and banal that most people don't even think about it. For those who don't remember, a refresher: we get a lengthy psychological explanation from a doctor as to why Bates dressed up as his mother and killed people. It's about as uninspired an ending as you can imagine to such a thrilling film. But what, you ask, could this possibly have to do with Halloween, Rob Zombie's re-imagining of the 1978 horror classic? Picture someone trying to remake Psycho (again) and centering the focus of the film not on Norman and his victims, but on that final scene stretched out for half of the run time. That, essentially, is Rob Zombie's Halloween.Remakes are pretty much always a mistake. You generally have two options: you can either just retell the same exact story and update the setting and style to today's standards, or you can focus on a certain part of the original and go in that new direction. If you go the first route, you are basically saying there's no real reason to see the new version unless the first was deeply flawed. If you go the second route, you risk alienating fans of the original by going places no one cares about. Zombie chose the second option, and it is completely the wrong direction to take this story. What made Michael Myers so chilling in the original was that we didn't know anything about him. Why was he killing people? Why was he after Laurie Strode (an answer not given until the sequels)? By giving us explicit answers (and answers none too exciting or daring) it takes away from the suspense.
What's perhaps most jarring is that, for a film billed as a horror movie, there is a huge dearth of actual horror. The first half hour is spent with young Michael Myers and his deadbeat family. We see him verbally abused by his step-dad, tormented by bullies, and ignored by his older sister. But none of this is meant to scare us. Even when Myers snaps and kills his family, it's not presented in nearly as frightening way as the opening POV shot of the original. Instead, he just wanders around with either a knife or a bat, attacking whomever he comes across. There's no buildup, no suspense, no jump moments. It's all very matter-of-fact in the way it's presented. And once he does murder his family, we get a long period of him in the asylum with Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), talking about his fascination with masks. One would assume that Zombie is spending all this time boring us with details about Michael so as to make him a more interesting character in the second half of the film, but alas, once Michael escapes and heads back to Haddonfield in search of his baby sister Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton), everything that has been established about the character is thrown out in favor of simple slasher material.
Really, where the first half bores us with its silly examination of what makes Michael tick, the second half is even worse. Imagine taking the original Halloween and cutting it in half and you'd get the second part of Zombie's version. But even that is to give this too much credit. In order to get the film to its conclusion in under two hours, Zombie cuts out all sense of tension or atmosphere. One perfect example that sums up why this half of the film doesn't work is to look at the way Zombie kills of Annie (Danielle Harris) vs how Carpenter did in the original. Carpenter spent a good five or ten minutes building suspense without showing us Myers. We'd get spooky POV shots of someone watching Annie change her shirt. We'd watch with bated breath as Annie investigates a sound out in the laundry room in the garage. It wasn't until we began to assume that maybe she was safe that Carpenter let Myers pounce. Zombie, on the other hand, has Annie fooling around with her boyfriend while Myers just stands behind them. No build up, no tension. There he is at the beginning of the scene. One gets the impression that Zombie believes that copious amounts of blood and nudity will make up for that lack of atmosphere, but it never does.
Perhaps the reason it's all so boring isn't just the lack of artistry in how Zombie creates tension, but in the way he creates his characters. The cast is almost unanimously awful and unsympathetic. One would think that Malcolm McDowell would be a fascinating choice as Loomis, but he plays Loomis as far too jovial and lacking in gravitas. We begin to wonder if he actually realizes how dangerous Michael Myers is. At times he treats Myers as more of a buddy who had a few too many drinks and went on a drunken rage than as a man who has murdered close to twenty people. Tyler Mane as the adult Myers is satisfactory, but then anyone with a good build could do this role in their sleep. I don't like to rag on child actors, but there's no getting around the fact that Daeg Faerch is miscast as the young Michael Myers. Aside from the fact that he simply doesn't look like a future mass murderer with his blond hair and baby fat face, he can't bring any menace to his lines. Nor is he sympathetic, something we assume Zombie wanted him to be. Scout Taylor-Compton is a non-entity, not showing up until late in the movie and not getting an opportunity to do much more than call her friends bitches and scream a lot. It's clear we aren't supposed to see her as the same Laurie of the original, but she isn't able to create a new, interesting version of the character either. The rest of the cast is largely cameos, and none do much with their parts. And only Rob Zombie would think to cast Danny Trejo as the kindly janitor at the mental institution.
In every possible way that this movie can fail, it does. Zombie's desire to humanize Michael Myers comes off as silly and dull. His attempts at horror are rendered fruitless because he can't seem to build any suspense whatsoever. His intention to reinvent the characters we already know prove fruitless because of the way the film is split into two halves, forcing him to rush through each half without focusing on the characters. I consider myself somewhat of a horror film aficionado, and I can enjoy even some of the bad horror films out there as long as they deliver on the basic promise every horror film makes: a few good jumps, some suspense, and even a laugh or two. Rob Zombie's Halloween does not deliver on any of these promises, and even the most forgiving, open minded horror fan will find nothing to enjoy. It's simply a disaster.
