Halloween (2007)

I can tell from the grainy filter shit just
got REAL BITCHES.

"Evil Unmasked."

Welcome back to The Tagline! I DID see Kick-Ass 2, and you'll hear about it soon, but while I compose my thoughts about it, I'll talk about a Rob Zombie movie instead. No it is not House of 1000 Corpses. I'm talking about the 2007 re-boot of the Halloween franchise, attempting to recover from the Busta Rhymes fueled crapstorm that was the 2002 Halloween: Resurrection (which I heartily recommend you see if only to watch Busta do Karate at Michael Myers). With Rob Zombie at the helm, we could all rest assured that it would be filled with blood, boobs, and people's butt cracks. Lady butts more specifically. His wife's butt most MOST specifically. Because he's just a classy dude like that, and his wife portrays Michael Myers mom who is a pole dancer also. So there's something right off the bat to look forward to! I guess! As mentioned, this film re-imagines the origin story of Michael Myers, starting with a flashback to his childhood, where we first see how shitty his life is, and then get to watch him massacre most of his family in a variety of seriously grisly ways. This sequence makes a good argument for never getting so drunk that you don't notice someone duct taping you in place to your recliner so he can slit your throat. After this charming sequence and a fair amount of boobs and butts, we spend some time observing the troubled young lad's therapy sessions in an asylum, with Dr. Loomis (Malcom McDowell, who I have a tough time not finding creepy no matter what). Then he kills some more people, but there are no butts in this part, so generally that was kind of a let down. We do get to see that the kid is a real aficionado of mask making. Paper mache in particular. He is a really talented fellow in that regard, if you want a horrible nightmare mask to wear around. Which naturally everyone does right?

That looks like a good killin' size.

Anyway where was I?  Right more murderings. So now we jump forward, to Mikie being all grown up, and he is now a giant. After some more disturbing sex stuff happens, compliments of some of the sanitorium guards, there is a lot more murder, and Mike is out on the loose, determined to kill kill kill. In particular he's after Laurie Strode, who is actually his baby sister who he didn't murder as a child (I guess he had a lot of time to change his mind though). I'm not 100% that he wants to kill her, so much as have her hang out with him while he kills everyone AROUND her, but really one of those is only a slightly better option than the other. As it happens, in pursuit of his goal Michael does kill most everyone around Laurie. While they're all having sex naturally.

Oh big deal you choked some girl who's two feet
shorter than you and naked. WHAT A BIG MAN.

So I think I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: I do not consider myself a "horror fan". That is not to say that I don't like a lot of horror movies. I do! I just judge them on the same criteria I judge any other movie. I am not a fan of horror for the sake of horror, and I DEFINITELY am not a fan of slasher movies and their tried and worn formulas. As a result, I find the first half of Halloween interesting as a new take on an old character, and the second half utterly forgettable. It's interesting to show Michael Myers as a troubled child who becomes a twisted killer, but the third act of the movie is more or less just a disinterested replay of the events from the original, updated to the current era, and I found it more or less indistinguishable in my mind from basically any other movie of the sub-genre. I am not freaked out or interested in teenagers having furtive sex and then getting stabbed to death. Yawn.

I would not be comforted by Malcolm McDowell.

That being said, I'm not sure any of that is really Rob Zombie's fault. What really WOULD you do to make a Halloween movie scary or relevant now? (hint the answer is not have Busta Rhymes reality show) It was sort of interesting to try and show the transformation of a troubled child into a juggernaut of death, but I felt like I was getting a sort of mixed message about whether I was supposed to think he was pushed to being a killer or that he was just destined to be a killer. Even then, the opening half of the movie seemed a lot fresher and was in a lot of ways more horrific than the second half. The other thing that always got me about these movies is that for no explicable reason, Michael Myers just WON'T DIE. Stab him, shoot him, blow him up with a missile or something, it doesn't matter, he just keeps coming back. That would be well and good if there were otherwise supernatural elements anywhere in the movie. Is he favored by the devil, or cursed by a gypsie or something? I am willing to be pretty forgiving of the reason, if you only bothered to give me one. Alas, that's not on offer here.

Man Monday Night RAW is weird this week.

Despite mixed to negative reviews leveraging similar criticisms to those above, this movie grossed somewhere around 80 million dollars against a modest 15 million dollar budget, more than enough to greenlight a sequel that was released in 2009. I haven't seen that one, but the first one didn't give me a whole lot of reason to. Maybe I will when I'm bored some day, and to spice it up I'll play random White Zombie songs at inappropriate moments. That sounds like a pretty good time.

And of course, lots of murder!

That's it for today! Join me again when I finally dish the goods on Kick-Ass 2, and then hopefully serve up a heaping portion of teen angst when The Mortal Instruments drops. I'm really hoping for a new franchise of teen garbage to replace the Twilight movies, but I know that dreams don't always come true.