Playboy Online Articles ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
   rising stars | celeb photographer | woman on the verge | dotcomversation | movies | dvds | music | games | books
PLAYBOY.COM MOVIE REVIEW
RECENT REVIEWS
ARCHIVE

Halloween
(R)

Our rating:
Playboy DVD Review
Your rating:
Playboy DVD Review
(Click a rabbit to cast your vote.)
E-mail this review to a friend »
MOVIE REVIEW:


Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) reaches out to sweet babysitter Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton).

Classic horror movie buff and metal frontman Rob Zombie set a standard for hillbilly slasher flicks in 2003's House of 1000 Corpses and 2005's The Devil's Rejects. Now he tracks mud into dangerous territory by attempting a remake of John Carpenter's 1978 horror staple about a psychotic masked killer terrorizing the teenage girls of suburban Haddonfield, Illinois on Halloween night. But Zombie puts his own crank on this retelling, turning Jamie Lee Curtis's preppy babysitter nightmare into a psychological white trash family bloodbath.


Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) seeks refuge with Dr. Loomis (Malcom McDowell).

At age 10, cherubic Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch) looks like a young Meat Loaf with his fleshy maw and golden tresses, but secretly behaves like a demonic Michael Vick, killing pets for sport. One Halloween night, he goes all Manson on his family, putting on a plastic clown mask to slash or bludgeon everyone except for his absent mom (Sheri Moon Zombie) and infant sister Boo. Michael's murders are detached, gory and varied (and we're kind of glad that he slits his abusive stepfather's neck). Michael's actions are not so scary, just cathartic and unfortunate.

Halloween devotes roughly its first half to exploring the causes of young Michael's pathology, first at home and then in the mental hospital. But the narrative justification is overkill: a dead dad, a violent gay-baiting stepfather, a stripper mother and school bullies. As his therapist, Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) describes it in a subsequent tell-all book titled The Devil's Eyes: "It's the perfect alignment of internal and external forces going horribly wrong." Still, we do feel a little empathy for the poor kid. That is, until he hacks up the nice nurse in the mental hospital where he's incarcerated.

Some 15 years later, the adult Michael -- mute, still sporting long hair, but now built like a furnace (as embodied by wrestler Tyler Bates) -- puts on a home-made mask, breaks out of the booby hatch and heads home to Haddonfield in search of his long-lost baby sister. For what, we don't know, but suffice it to say to find her he's going to have to kill a number of horny teens along the way. Unlike its iconic 1978 predecessor, the murders here are concussive, violent and disappointingly un-inventive, especially for a modern slasher. None of his victims puts up much of a fight. In Zombie's signature way, they're rather efficient, so we don't have time to fear.


Deborah Myers (Sheri Moon Zombie) can't believe what her little boy Michael (Daeg Faerch) did.
We're left yearning for a hatchet in the forehead, or at least a clothes hanger in the eye. In the final reel, when Michael faces off against sweet babysitter Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton), the tension kicks into overdrive, making spectacular use of treacherously confined spaces like the inside of a wall and an attic crawlspace. Still, the tension is fleeting, so for the most part Zombie's Halloween is more style over suspense.

By Rob. Walton

Photo credit: Marsha Blackburn LaMarca/©2007 Dimension Films

E-mail this review to a friend »