I loved House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects (especially Sid Haig as Captain Spaulding) but Rob Zombie needs to keep his fucking hands off the Halloween movies before he does any more damage. His remake of the first one was so atrocious as to defy description, though many heroes step up and give it their best effort on IMDB. (Those almost make up for the agony of watching the film. I watched the fucking thing for free and it still wasn’t worth it.)
One cool thing about the original 1978 version was the way there was no explanation given for why Michael Myers was a killer. He just was. And even though they tried to unnecessarily (and unconvincingly) explain him in the sequel as being motivated by a desire to kill his siblings, he still remained not so much a personality as simply a force of nature, not entirely human. They even referred to him in the credits as “The Shape”, which fit perfectly with Dick Warlock’s portrayal of him as the lumbering man-mountain who never hurries and never shows the slightest emotion. (That, plus the fact that the second movie took place in the eerie, antiseptic setting of a near-deserted hospital during the graveyard shift, makes it my favorite of the two.)
Zombie, of course, gave us the revised image of Michael Myers as a fat dork with an alcoholic stepfather and an oblivious stripper of a mother, who gets bullied at school and finally snaps, after giving helpful warning signs such as torturing small animals (okay, one funny deleted scene: Malcolm McDowell as Dr. Loomis, trying to convince Michael’s mom of the seriousness of these actions: “And this canary has clearly been raped!”), before growing up to be a greasy-haired, giant, mute redneck with a thing for making masks like an obsessed Slipknot fan. You could almost imagine the Oprah episode about it. Now he wants to fuck up another version? Bastard. Get back in the studio and release more music. Knock this moviemaking shit off.
And on that note, here’s what I know: I still want the two hours of my life back I wasted watching the execrable Grindhouse: Death Proof. It’s rare for me to find a movie where you wish for almost every single character in it to die quickly and horribly, but there you have it. I would rather stab my own eardrums with an icepick than sit through the most inane dialogue delivered by the most obnoxious, unlikable bitches imaginable again.