This movie is so bad it would be laughable, if only it wasn't such a sad, sad abomination. I'd like to leave it at that, but I won't. Zombie's fortunate to follow Resurrection. He must have just had carte blanche -- "No worries about not being able to write dialogue, pal. It HAS to be better than Resurrection!" Well, just barely, and that's for the unintentional laughs, the disbelief you as a viewer experience, thinking "Jesus! Somebody not only MADE this, but they thought it was good enough to RELEASE! Un-fucking-believable!" Zombie thinks he's being edgy by showing Michael's childhood, but it's one horribly written Jerry Springer cliche after cliche, and then the movie becomes a bad cover tune of the original classic.
You watch this movie and can't believe anybody working on it thought it would be good. It's so stupid, they couldn't be taking it seriously, right? But, no, Zombie has plenty of interviews where he talked about making Michael "scary" again, and fleshing out why he does what he does. But, man, does Zombie miss the mark, unless he finds hillbilly cliches, shaky-cam and terrible dialogue to be the scariest things in the world. Everybody is so vile and vulgar in his movies. Who talks like the people in this movie? Who behaves this way? Does Zombie seriously think this is realistic dialogue? What the fuck goes on when he's out on the road, if this shit is what he considers to be a reflection of life?
The movie is full of over-the-top violence (for the sake of it) and trashy, foul-mouthed cliches. Nearly very female character in it acts like the worst example of a trashy groupie you can think of. (Which I guess is what you get when you get a rock star to write movies.) Not only do most of the female characters act like, I don't know, Stifler from American Pie, but Zombie has nearly every actress show skin and lingers on the nudity to the point where it all just feels lewd. Zombie's a fan of '70s exploitation movies, and this movie veers too far into that territory, lingering on the violence against women until it begins to slip into a I Spit on Your Grave level of discomfort. (You'll feel especially uneasy during a lengthy scene where Michael is battering around a topless and bloody Danielle Harris, especially considering her history with the franchise.)
It's like all of the things critics unfairly accused the 1978 Halloween of being -- sexist, misogynistic, trashy -- Zombie made sure his movie actually was, kind of to the detriment of the first movie's legacy. I wonder what the late Debra Hill, co-writer of the original -- who tried hard to make the women characters authentic and treat them fairly -- would have had to say about Zombie's remake.
The whole movie is just Zombie giving the finger to the franchise and its fans. From muddying its name to creating pretty obnoxious versions of classic characters like Laurie and Loomis (who here isn't a heroic modern Van Helsing, but a greedy, uncaring, opportunistic, unlikable shithat). I know Zombie claims to be a horror fan, but it seems to me he doesn't like Halloween, or doesn't respect it. (I think he thinks he's too cool to be doing Halloween movies, yet another problem with getting a rock star to write and direct the goddamn thing. Because P.J. Soles has a story about how hard Zombie was geeking out over a copy of her original Halloween script she gave him.) His two Halloween movies are proof enough, but just look at how he doesn't understand Michael.
Michael was a normal kid from an average, middle class family, who just one night snapped. The unexplainable, unknown reasons he snapped is what's meant to be terrifying. (And I know Zombie's spoken derogatorily about how the original handles this, but he thinks his version is an improvement?!) Why'd Michael snap? It's something only Michael knows. Not even the patient and wise Loomis can break through, so his only conclusion is that Michael is evil. So, to not only give Michael this cliched trailer park background, but also depict him being a psycho well before that Halloween night? That alone misses the mark, in a movie that continuously misses the mark.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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