The guy who opened up his major-label debut album with a song called 'Welcome to Planet Motherfucker' is now in a league with Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Nick Cave, Henry Rollins, and Ice Cube as a rock star who has been able to successfully make a name for himself in non-music related artistic mediums. With House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects, he established himself as the best writer/director of Horror films to come by in years. With Halloween, there's no denying that he's gone Hollywood (the film's executive producers include the Weinsteins), but that Zombie is able to successfully create Grindhouse-esque gorefests in the land of watered-down, tween-targeted remakes (The Omen, Wicker Man, and Texas Chainsaw, to name a few) makes his creation all the more amazing.
Halloween is Zombie's riskiest project to date, re-imagining one of the greatest horror movies of all time without turning it into one of the aforestated disasters. But unlike the directors of those travesties, Zombie knows, loves, and understands Michael Myers in a way that few people can without being locked up. It would have been so easy for some hack director to demystify one of the greatest on-screen terrors ever created by exploring his childhood, but Zombie does so in a way that gives Myers a sense of realism that other Halloween movies lacked. The young Myers' calm belligerence, coupled with his outcast status both at home and in school, are enough to leave an impression on anyone who ever wondered what the most fearsome serial killers were like as children. When his white trash stepfather verbally abuses him, we can see the boy ready to take his anger out on the world, and when the young Myers confronts a school bully, the result is far closer to Columbine than Revenge of the Nerds.
Despite the depiction of Myers' dire childhood, Zombie scores by not making him a sympathetic character. Here Myers is a cold-blooded killer whose victims' pleas can't do them the least bit of good. All attempts from Dr. Loomis (played perfectly by Malcolm McDowell) and Michael's mother (Sheri Moon Zombie, in by far her most serious role to date) to find any humanity in the boy are in vain, and in person he is nearly as expressionless as the mask that he wears. Zombie imagines Myers as realistic, but not humane, and the murder scenes are as chilling as they've ever been in the series.
As with most slasher movies, Halloween is easier to review for its context than its content. There's a lot of blood, sex, killings, debauchery, camp, laughs, and genuine scares; basically everything that's kept people coming back to horror movies in spite of how boring most of them are nowadays. When there's a good one, there's nothing better, and this is one of the good ones. Go see Halloween.
Of course, if you haven't seen John Carpenter's original, check that out first--it's a must-see for any horror fan, whether your bag is Hitchcock or Tobe Hooper (hopefully both). The 1978 version has become iconic over most higher-budget films from that era, and it offers suspense, multiple scenes of people getting hacked up, and a more profound depiction of suburbia than anything in American Beauty or Donnie Darko. Seriously.
Before he started making movies, Rob Zombie directed a great scene in Beavis and Butthead Do America..
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