15th October 2009

"Zombie! This is the police! Step away from the camera and put your hands behind your head!"

Before I start whinging again about how we're not making great movies any more - we are, but not as many, and we definitely ARE making more lousy ones. Despite the nuggets isolated by the FrightFest team, the gold-to-tin ratio within current genre cinema is pretty low and, I fear, likely to stay that way. Yes, there are some good movies out there, but there's a vast amount of crud on the other end of the seeSaw - shallow remakes, senseless dead-horse floggings of hollow franchises, dull slasher knock-offs knocking off idiots with enthusiasm but without anything more than the barest camera skills (if we're lucky).

And this week, joy of joys, saw the release of Halloween II - a senseless dead-horse flogging of a hollow franchise from a shallow slasher remake knocked off by enthusiastic but barely skilled idiots. This is the fourth film by Rob Zombie, whose filmography so far comprises a tedious TCM knock-off, a loathsome sequel and a pointless trashing of a genre classic. Now we have a sequel to that pointless trashing.

I've no real problem with remakes, but it's surely better to leave Halloween alone because it's perfectly fine the way it is. Don't remake The Omen or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Wicker Man. The bar's too high and you're not going to get over it. Remake He Knows You're Alone or Zoltan: Hound Of Dracula or Evilspeak. They're rubbish (yes, that does include Evilspeak) and even Rob Zombie could manage some improvements on the sources.

And I've no particular beef with sequels either, if there's something that can be brought to the table. Two of may favourite films are sequels: Aliens and the 1979 Dawn of the Dead (incidentally the latter is the exception to the remake rule; Zack Snyder's update is an effective, enjoyable and highly entertaining zombie epic that does deliver). And the original Halloween II isn't terrible - it's nicely shot, it goes some way to capturing the atmosphere of John Carpenter's film. Meanwhile Rob Zombie's Halloween II is an unmitigated disaster and one of the worst genre films of the year so far.

There were points in his Halloween remake which were effective. But they were the bits where he was emulating Carpenter. When he was doing his own stuff, it didn't work, the way that House Of 1000 Corpses didn't work and The Devil's Rejects didn't work: the closer it came to something that some else had written and all he had to do was just restage it, the better (or at least the less tiresome) the end result. The biggest problems came with all the backstory sequences which tried to explain Michael Myers. Explaining the villains just weakens them. Michael Myers just is. Jason just is. Leatherface just is. Chris Moyles just is. There's nothing more you need to know.

---SPOILER ALERT----

Halloween II, however, is all Zombie's own work and it's a sequel to his remake rather than a remake of the 1981 sequel. He's abandoned the crisp photography of the remake (it's not even in 'Scope) and gone for a very grainy look in the 70s manner. More damagingly, he's completely changed the characters from both his and Carpenter's original. The worst of these changes is Dr Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) no longer being any kind of heroic figure but a heartless, ranting egomaniac cashing in on the Myers legacy with a book tour. It's understandable that Laurie, our heroine, should have developed, given the traumatic horrors she went through in the first instalment, but she's now a slightly trashy, foul-mouthed young woman for whom it's hard to rack up any empathy: after having been reduced to screaming and tears by the contents of Loomis' book, yelling the almighty F-word over and over again, she decides she just wants to go to a Halloween party and get drunk.

In addition we have the dreaded dream sequences - the worst offender being the entire first reel of the film buliding to a frezied pitch and then BLAM! - oh, it was just a bad dream. We also have nonsensical visions of Michael's mother (hey, Rob Zombie had to crowbar Sheri Moon Zombie into the film somehow) accompanied by a white horse which is supposed to signify rage or something; there was an explanatory caption at the start but it didn't stick. Towards the end, it's not even clear whose visions they are.

Meanwhile Michael Myers shambles around, with no explanation as to what he's been doing for the past twelve months (this is all prefaced One Year Later), brutally slaughtering everyone he meets, such as the bloke who puts the bins out behind the strip club, for no adequately explored reason. Why him? Why not? Mysteriously the police don't seem particularly concerned, or even aware, of the trail of corpses left all across the county for most of the running time, and only launch into wailing siren mode in the last reel. And of course Zombie leaves the way open for an exciting new chapter of badly-shot slashings in 2011 (apparently in 3D as well although Mr Z is not involved; one imagines they've found a director who actually knows what he's playing at).

In summary: it's a mess. And if you want more from a movie than loud noise, constant swearing and brutal bloody killings, it's best avoided.

Until the next time.

Richard.

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