FILM REVIEW – HALLOWEEN 2007.
Rob Zombie’s take on John Carpenter’s Halloween is surprisingly interesting and inventive, though it’s not a classic like the original undoubtedly was. .
Not so much a remake as a filling in the missing bits from the original story – we see Michael Myers as a child and see why he slaughters his redneck trailer trash family - - we then meet his psychiatrist – Malcolm McDowell taking on the Donald Pleasance role – as McDowell tries and fails to reach the kid, and his later adult self – good to see other characters, including McDowell are realistically aged over the 15 years too.
The film is weakest in retreading the murder spree of the
first film – and having a very dull and underused Scout Taylor-Compton in the Jamie Lee Curtis role.
Neat
touches – use of Carpenter’s original music, Myers watching The Thing From
Another World on TV – the film Carpenter remade as The Thing. McDowell writing a true-crime best-selling
book denouncing Myers as pure evil – a book which half the police force have
read when he meets them.
Zombie
lacks Carpenter’s precision timing and wisely doesn’t even try to go for it –
his Myers is just a brutal killer and not the ridiculously indestructible
figure of the Carpenter films. Myers
speaks when we see him as a kid but stays chillingly silent as a grown up.
The real surprise
is the ending – tacked on to the finale of the more familiar elements of the
story – Michael recaptures his sister as the cops, led by Brad Dourff, surround
him – McDowell persuades him to let her go and he genuinely responds to him,
but the police gun him down anyway and the camera pans back from the corpse to
fade out. Not great, but much better than I expected it to be.
The film on IMDB http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373883/
Arthur Chappell
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