movie+reviews+Halloween+Emma+B

Halloween
Blood and breasts. These are the two primary ingredients that epitomize Rob Zombie’s classic seventies remake, //Halloween//. Whether you are watching a drunken redneck endure a slice to the throat by a psychopathic ten year old or a teenager being heaved across Michael Myers’ attic mid orgasm, the entire film teeters between comedic gore and twisted brutality. Still, who can expect anything less but another //House of 1000 Corpuses// from notorious screenwriter and director Rob Zombie. Picture this (or rather don’t): a young murderer, Michael Myers, sulking because his older sister won’t take him trick- or- treating. Cut to his mother putting on a sweater after a long night of stripping. Cut back to the Myers house where Michael’s sister is “entertaining” her boyfriend and finally cut to Michael, wearing a clown mask and gripping a butcher’s knife in the kitchen. Cue sirens. The rest is simply cinema history repeating itself in a bad remake from an even worse original. In comparing the original and remake of //Halloween//, however, it is interesting to note the addition of the Myers family anecdote in the beginning of the film: How the masked Michael came to be. In the original //Halloween// the opening scene is a young, innocent looking boy holding a knife over his dead sister; his apparent innocence emakes it really difficult to label him as a psychopath. But in the remake Michael has modernized. Even as a boy he looks older with unkempt, long hair, torn, baggy blue jeans and an AC/DC shirt-- a personal Rob Zombie makeover. Otherwise, aside from the lack of Jamie Lee Curtis and a new contemporary approach, Halloween stays boringly true to its predecessor. Since the majority of horror movie fanatics have already seen //Halloween// and its many, equally unimpressive sequels it seems an incredible waste of two hours to watch an essentially (and deliberately) identical movie. The original Halloween was bad the first time, so why see it again in the form of a remake? There is no good reason for suffering through either //Halloween// other than to use it as an excuse to cuddle or cringe in your seat. Even so, there are plenty of better movies to initiate cuddling that do not involve the quintessential Jason or Michael or Freddy. If you are, however, fans of these cinematic achievements consider therapy or, if that is too extreme, reevaluate your movie tastes. by **Emma B.**