I finally caught Rob Zombie's Halloween the other night.
It did nothing to disabuse me of my idea that he's an incredibly talented director and a crap screenwriter.
The guy simply has an amazing visual sense that few directors have--visually speaking, his movies are works of art. I know I'm a smartass, but I'm actually being totally serious here. I would stack the title sequence of The Devil's Rejects against just about any sequence in any movie.
I also like the fact that he makes great use of music in his movies. This means he does not use any of his own crappy music. I respect that.
I also like the fact that you can pretty much count on seeing Bill Mosely, Ken Foree, and Sid Haig in every one of his movies.
But this movie...it's impossible not to compare it to the original and find it wanting in pretty much every respect.
The original Halloween, written and directed by John Carpenter, clocks in at 91 minutes. Rob Zombies version is 109 minutes. So while the original is a tight scare machine, this one's a bloated bore with nearly an hour of backstory.
Worse, though, while the original is a movie about Laurie Strode and how her pluckiness pulls her through when she's beset by inexplicable evil. What's really horrifying about the movie is that Michael Myers is an evil relentless killing machine, and there's just no reason for it.
Rob Zombie's Halloween, though, is a movie about Michael Myers and how a poor abused lad becomes a psycho killer and then snaps when abandoned by his therapist (Malcolm Macdowell, chewing far less scenery than I expected, and, frankly, hoped). Because the evil in this movie is completely explicable and probably avoidable, it's not scary. And this cuddly Michael Myers doesn't even want to kill Laurie! What the hell?
Rob Zombie has a great movie in him. I hope he makes it some day.
