lowquality.net

Nation of Ori­gin: USA

Rat­ings:
Kim: 5 out of 5
Joe: 5 out of 5
Justin: 5 out of 5

Notes:

In Rob Zombie’s re-telling of Hal­loween, Michael Myers is upgraded from the arche­typal tac­i­turn, masked psy­chopath to a bru­tal jug­ger­naut (played by Tyler Mane) which Dr. Sam Loomis describes as a “per­fect storm of exter­nal and inter­nal fac­tors gone hor­ri­bly wrong.” The fact that he’s 6’5″ doesn’t hurt, either. This ver­sion of Hal­loween gets into the pathol­ogy and psy­chol­ogy of Michael Myers which makes for a more com­pelling inter­est in the char­ac­ter but the news that Myers is a vic­tim of his child­hood kind of flips the audience’s align­ment in favor of the slasher. Since crim­i­nal psy­chol­ogy wasn’t national past-time in 1979, the updated Hal­loween expounds more on the ori­gins of The Shape and how he became the pit of noth­ing­ness that he is pur­ported to be. Also changed from the orig­i­nal is the esca­lated level of annoy­ing­ness por­trayed by Lau­rie Strode and her friends and as a result you feel far less apa­thy for Myers’ vic­tims– which tends to be a let down for me because it plays into the tone of the slasher rip-offs that fol­lowed the orig­i­nal film.

SPOILER: Any good remake ful­fills the expec­ta­tions of the orig­i­nal film and adds some­thing extra. The final exchange con­cern­ing the boogey­man between Dr. Loomis and Lau­rie Strode is only the begin­ning of a much more grisly end­ing for Myers which really should have com­pletely elim­i­nated any hope of a sequel (Zom­bie didn’t want to make a sequel, but did Hal­loween 2 because the stu­dio wanted to make it and he didn’t want any­one else to ruin his vision). I haven’t seen Hal­loween 2, but I don’t know how they are going to man­age revers­ing the effects of a point-blank shot from a .357 slug to the face.