Halloween

By Linda Winsh-Bolard

A remake of John Carpenter's 1978 film comes early this year.

When we are introduced to strangely androgynous, 10 years old Michael Myers, he is torturing his pet rat to death. In a meantime, his abusive father and stripper mother scream at each other, throw things around the kitchen and his big sister, with a sewer for mouth, screams to get him down to join them. When he comes, he is already wearing a mask-it's Halloween.

Michael is abused at schools as well, for his oddities and for his Mom's occupation. When it comes out that he likes to torture animals, and before anybody can do anything about it, Michael goes on a killing rampage, his school abusers, Daddy, Sis, her lover- at the end of it only Mommy dear and the baby are spared.

Michael is send to maximum-security mental diseases prison where Dr. Sam Loomis attempts to break his shell. Fifteen years later he gives up, he had found Michael to by a psychopath without redemption. Dr. Loomis leaves while Michael stays silently behind with his masks that "hide his ugliness".

That same evening two of the asylum guards drag a new inmate to Michael's cell to savagely rape and beat her. Michael kills them both and escapes. He is on a mission to find his sister.

There is gratuitous killing scene at the truck stop, and from then on the killings pile on as Michael returns to his hometown, promptly finds his old trashed home, kills Mom, figures out where his baby sister, who was adopted, lives and watches her and her best friends, masked, when raging with hormones, they scream at him. He kills them, as well as anybody who happens to be around.

This genre always suffers from misogyny, but Zombie's version drips with it. There is the early sequence intercutting the little Michael sitting with his pumpkin basket all alone on dark Halloween night, while his Mom is coming down the pole and dancing in a stripper bar. The females engage in heartless sex, and get killed in long scenes, naked from waists up, screaming, again and again as Michael, faceless in a mask, tall and huge, wields cutting weapons and destroys the sinful flesh of teenage beauty queens.

Screaming washes out all other sounds. The girls have few distinguishing marks, the blond slut? The dark hair friend? The sister with glasses, obviously signifying her intellectual superiority?, but they do have strong lungs. The other characters are there just to be killed.

There are two exceptions, the good doctor Loomis, who might have as many as 50 lines, and the small town sheriff who does not believe in psychopaths or doctors. Most memorable, and audible, are the doctors comments: Murder came to your little town (to the sheriff). And: For lack of other words, Michael is pure evil.

Of course the males connect to save the (somewhat tarnished) virgin at the end.

Unlike Carpenters classic, Zombies version lacks all the suspension, the expectation of evil that might come, the terror of waiting, all what distinguished Carpenter from the hundreds of other screaming horror films.

Since the characters are not developed, most of the plot lacks sense (how did Michael find his sister?), no reason exists for the mass killings, and just how did Michael managed to become seven feet of Kevlar vest that keeps being shot at and never falls in a padded cell? Since all what this is, is just fast editing, jerky camera movements and absurd fury leaking through the lens, it cancels, despite recalling some of the original scenes and sounds, any relationship to the original, and for all that matters, to any lasting recognition.

We might see Michael again, as we might see another Halloween, if so, may it take a more interesting route.

Starring Malcolm McDowell, Tyler Mane, Sheri Moon Zombie,Brad Dourif, Danielle Harris, Hanna Hall, Kristina Klebe, Daeg Faerch, Danny Trejo. Directed, written by Rob Zombie, based on the original screenplay by John Carpeter and Debra Hill.