Sixteen Continued Screams For Halloween: Day 16 (Rob Zombie's Halloween)

Boo.

 oooooOOOOoooo!!! Here we are, once again! Spooky night is upon us, I have had many children wearing hoodies with cursory Halloween masks come to my door and ask for treats, and I have bestowed upon them the boon of snack size Pringles. With enough left over for me tomorrow, mwahaha. All great fun. Which is what I wish I could say for our cinema of choice to close Sixteen Screams this year. Traditionally we end on a Halloween picture. Unfortunately, since I've been doing these for so goddamn long, I have done nearly all the Michael Myers pictures to exist. Only two remain: the Rob Zombie duology from the late aughts. I wasn't exactly looking forward to this, but soldier on I did anyway. This was a trend that happened in the late aughts: 80's slasher remakes. Halloween got one, then Friday the 13th, then Nightmare On Elm Street. Curious. Whereas the latter two were one and dones, Halloween at least got one follow-up. That's for next year, though. As for this year, how was Rob Zombie's Halloween?

Nnnnope, I don't like it! It's not an incompetent film like some of the other bum Halloween movies I could name that I've done before. Rather, it feels animated a little by the malicious mean streak that powered other Halloween films I dislike, like Halloween 2 (1981) or Halloween Kills. Of course, a lot of what fuels it is the particular grimy grindhouse aesthetic of Mr. Robert Zombert. This is admittedly the first film of his I've sat down with, but he has a bit of a reputation. I am not exactly inclined to see another, as this sort of misery is just not my sort of bag. It's quite bleak, filled as it is with a sort of white trash grime and a propensity for brutality in its kills. Add to that the poorly-aged elements like the casual slurs and graphic depictions of assault, and you got a motion picture that ain't pleasant. No, gang, I can't say I'm a fan. It's very of its time, and did well enough to get Mr. Zombie another crack at it, but this is not the sauce for me.

Structurally, the film is bizarre as well. A third of it is devoted to what takes about 10 minutes in the Carpenter original: Michael Myers murdering his sister as a child, being locked up and looked after by Dr. Loomis, and escaping years later on Halloween night. This is where the film is at its most theoretical interesting, doodling in margins left unspoken by a Halloween film yet. We see Michael as a child, see his shitty home life, see his sociopathic tendencies, and watch as he kills multiple people and is sent away to slowly lose himself to the creeping void of a monolith we know Michael as. There's some interesting symbolism involving his use of masks to hide away his true self that could be saying something, but then an hour in the other movie drops. You may have heard of it. It's called Halloween and it was made in 1978 by John Carpenter. I went in this determined to give the movie its fair shake, and to not overtly compare it to the Carpenter original. It's a reimagining, it's going to do new things, it has its own sauce, et cetera. Well, it had its own sauce. Once we introduce Laurie Strode at the halfway point, the movie just becomes Halloween. Beat for beat, line for line, action for action it is just that movie again... to a point.

There is some remixing, like Bob and Linda getting killed earlier and in the Myers house, and the way Annie and Paul get it is also changed around. It's utterly strange though, a movie caught between two poles. On the one hand, it has the feeling of a version of a better slasher movie I love that came through a rift from a dystopian universe. It's that movie again, but grimier and bloodier and incorporating the Halloween 2 sibling retcon into it. On the other hand, it does more than its fair share of new things to either try to throw me off from just seeing that same movie again, or to be truly original. It's stuck between those two modes, and it confuses and confounds. Perhaps the biggest way it confuses me is with the boogeyman shit. In the original, it makes perfect sense. Michael is this lurking shape, hiding in the darkness, preying on you when you least expect. Here? Where we've spent so much time delving into his psyche, in his backstory, and shown him stalking out in the open? It doesn't make sense to port it over from old to new! 

It is not a great motion picture, and not one I will revisit any time soon, that's for damn sure. At least Malcolm McDowell is pretty damn good in it. I have been told Zombie's Halloween 2 is a better film, but that's 365 days away. For now, I'm putting this bad boy to bed. Happy goddamn Halloween, I'm going to palate cleanse from this film by rewatching Hausu, and tomorrow I'm going to feel just like the piano girl in that movie because NOVEMBER WRITING MONTH BECKONS AND MY FINGERS ARE GONNA FUCKING BLEED. See you later, gang, and wish me luck.