movies

[Darkweasel]

Remake, eh? The last I read, it was undecided whether it was going to be a remake or yet another sequel.

Pallet's boobs make a welcome appearance in Part 6.
But first, this...



DAY #16

WRONG TURN 5: BLOODLINE
(2012)



Four sequels down the line and it's obvious that the Wrong Turn series has long since given up even attempting to maintain any sense of continuity or sense within its own timeline. Now, in this fourth and obviously direct to DVD sequel, the inexplicable decision was made to re-introduce the toothless and virtually pointless old man from the first two films and make him a central figure. This time though, instead of an old, dentally challenged yee-haw, we have someone called Maynard Odets played by the very English Doug Bradley (Pinhead from Hellraiser), a serial killer father figure to the three Hillicker brothers. Oh yes, sorry, I forgot to mention the happy little mutants were given a completely unnecessary family name in the last movie. Anyway, Odets spends most of his time saying "focking" and his entire character barely makes any sense at all. Mind you, at this point in Wrong Turn Land, nothing makes any sense any more. Even the fourth film looks like it may actually have been some kind of reboot now.

After being arrested while trying to kill some dispensable teenager morons, Odets is thrown in the town jail where for the next hour of the film he repeatedly, and with irritating smugness, proceeds to tell everybody within earshot that "you're all going to focking die". Meanwhile, the three brothers come down from the hills to rescue him, shutting off the town's power in the middle of a music festival, and killing everyone with bouncy boobies and/or a speaking part.

Continuing down the road to torture porn, there really is nothing of any value here at all. While the original actually managed to be scary in places, and the second had a handful of decent characters (as did the third, but to a much lesser extent), parts 4 and 5 don't even have that. Each character is introduced purely for the sake of being killed as ridiculously as possible. No scares and no shocks, just (occasionally amusing) impractical and prolonged murder set-pieces. Over the course of two short films, the once scary inbreds are reduced to being nothing more than particularly mean-spirited hillbilly versions of Wile E Coyote.

So, apart from an early appearance by a largely untalented Finn Jones (Marvel's rather dismal Iron Fist), and the fact that like the third film, this one was filmed entirely in Bulgaria with an all British cast doing shit American accents, there really is nothing worth mentioning apart from the blood, tits, painted sausages, and maybe the bit where two unlucky chaps get mowed to death.
3.5/10

[Darkweasel]

Day #17

WRONG TURN 6: THE LAST RESORT
(2014)



The Last Resort.
Wow.
Never before has a film been so accurately titled.

But before we begin, let's do a fun little recap so we know exactly where we are. Let's face it, at this point we're almost guaranteed to know more than the producers.

Wrong Turn – Three mutant hillbillies (Saw-Tooth, Three Finger, and One Eye) try to kill Eliza Dushku's acting career.

Dead End – Henry Rollins fights Three Finger and an unexplained new family.

Left For Dead – Convicts vs mutants. Three Finger gains another new brother. And then promptly loses him.

Bloody Beginnings – A snowy prequel/possible reboot featuring the original mutants who are now called the Hillicker brothers.

Bloodlines – Another prequel. Possibly. Who knows at this point? Now with the three Hillickers and an escaped serial killer.

All caught up? Good.

With absolutely none of the previous movies actually being shot in the US, the only sense of continuity this time (the three murderous inbreds aside) is that Wrong Turn 6 keeps firmly away from the country where it's actually meant to be set. Taking us back to Bulgaria, we're given another predominantly English cast doing some really bad American accents.

An annoying twenty-something called Danny inherits a massive European looking health spa in the middle of Sofia, West Virginia. After taking an instant dislike to Danny's friends and girlfriend, the caretaker/manager and his lovely sisterwife take him to one side and explain that he's actually related to a family of forest-dwelling inbreds and that he should give up his nice life in the big city, move to the countryside and fuck all his relatives.

It doesn't take long for Danny to lose his marbles and in the space of just one or two days, he goes from disliking his new family members to liking them, to taking up the bow and arrow and shooting a deer, to discovering a hidden village of inbreds living in the woods, and trying to get his cousin pregnant. Meanwhile, Saw-Tooth, One Eye and Three Finger just run around the place (now occasionally in robes for some reason) doing their best to kill everyone in a variety of increasingly unlikely ways.

Not one single character in this film is likeable. Not even accidentally. The worst of the bunch being former Emmerdale actress turned reality TV bad girl, Roxanne Pallett, who spends the first half of the film acting like an entitled brat and the other half getting all her clothes off. In fairness, her sex scene is one of the best the series has to offer and ends in a predictably nasty manner.

Anyhoo, by the time Danny's girlfriend realises what's going on, she's pretty much already the final girl as everyone else in the film is already deader than their acting careers. And in true Wrong Turn fashion, it all ends on a spectacularly bleak note and everybody goes home just that little bit stupider and dirtier for having watched it.
2/10

[Darkweasel]

DAY #18

TARANTULAS – THE DEADLY CARGO
(1977)



An unwanted bunch of eight legged bitey things hitch a lift on a wobbly aeroplane piloted by Tom Atkins (Halloween III, The Fog), and Howard Hesseman (Commandant Lassard's boring brother from Police Academy 2) as they transport coffee from South America back to the US. It doesn't take long for the banter between the pilots to go a bit stale and the angry arachnids respond by biting their way through some expendable South American extras in the back of the plane, eventually making it into the cockpit and causing the aircraft to crash in a small US town.

Escaping the wreckage, the killer spiders wander about all over the town, randomly biting anybody unlucky enough to come in contact with them before local doctor Pat Hingle (Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever etc.) realises that hairy, spindly legged immigrants are to blame for everything.

After the spiders finish biting some not altogether talented actors, they gather together in the local orange production factory, attracted by the smell of succulent fruit. And it's then that the frankly preposterous plan of playing the sound of angry wasps through a dodgy PA is hatched, the idea being that the sound of the buzzing insects will put the spiders into a terrified trance, enabling some nervous looking unpaid extras to get rid of the temporarily catatonic menace.

Looking every bit as wooden as the made for TV thriller it is, the acting is reasonable but the script sits on shaky ground as the facts stated during the regulation straight-faced, stare-dramatically-into-the-camera sciencey bit are demonstrably incorrect. With the film using a mixture of cuddly Mexican red-kneed tarantulas, and the admittedly horrible looking - but also virtually harmless - California Desert Tarantula, the movie's designated spider expert tells us authoritatively from behind a microscope that these are in fact Wandering Spiders, or “Banana Spiders”. The problem is that now, as every graduate of the University of Animal Planet will tell you, the Wandering Spider isn't actually a tarantula. And apart from having eight legs and nasty fangs, it doesn't even remotely look like one.

Obviously I understand the filmmakers reluctance to chuck bucketfuls of the deadliest spiders in the world over the heads of actors (no matter how untalented they might be), but surely it would have been easier to say that these rather normal looking tarantulas were in fact mutants, hybrids, or even, as in William Shatner classic Kingdom of the Spiders, released earlier that year, just blame the whole thing vaguely on "some sort of imbalance" and just leave it at that.

One thing that this film does make crystal clear though, is that during the 1970s, without the benefit of a hundred National Geographic channels at the flick of a remote control, the cinema-going public was an awful lot easier to scare than today.

[Darkweasel]

DAY #18

THE BURNING
(1981)



The film I hold entirely responsible for my love of slasher movies, I didn't actually get to see The Burning in full until two days after I started it. Being aware of the film from video magazines and having seen it in the tabloids during the “video nasty” scare, when my old man bought a pirated video home with him one night, I had to ask him to let me watch it. He was fine about it but my mother was the problem. She hated horror films. Reluctantly, she went against her better judgement and allowed me to see it.

All was going well (especially after seeing my first ever pair of ladyboobs during an early shower scene) until after the infamous raft sequence when she suddenly shot up from her chair, strode towards the video recorder, and viciously pushed the eject button. Snatching the cassette roughly from the toploading VCR, she ungraciously shoved it back into its slipcase and disappeared into the kitchen with it.

Bedtime.

Great.

Thanks, mum. Not only did you let a twelve year old watch a video nasty but you turned it off while the freaky looking psycho killer was still creeping around slashing kids faces and fingers off. So, without any form of closure, I lay awake for hours wondering if those plucky kids would see off the maniac with the worryingly sharp garden shears, or if they would fail horribly and he'd be staring into my bedroom window the next time I looked nervously outside into the dark. Eventually I fell asleep but I made finding the confiscated video my number one mission. It didn't take too long and a couple of days later I finished it off before going to school.

As uncomplicated as it gets, some teenagers at a summer camp play a prank on a drunken caretaker called Cropsy which results in him almost being burned to death. Cropsy survives, and after scaring a couple of doctors and stabbing a flabby prostitute to death with scissors, heads back to the summer camp where it all began with revenge on his melted mind. Armed with a shiny pair of garden shears and an enthusiastic Rick Wakeman keyboard score, Cropsy starts picking off the terrified teenagers one or two at a time.

With the exception of one dodgy looking rubber hand, the special effects (courtesy of Friday the 13th's Tom Savini) are superb. Fingers get chopped off, throats are slashed and impaled, and the ending features arguably the best axe through the head scene in '80s horror. The suspense leading up to some of the red herrings and murder sequences is highly effective, the script is often really quite witty, and the acting is surprisingly decent.

While Friday the 13th gave the world Kevin Bacon, many of the actors in The Burning also went on to bigger and better things. Jason Alexander became George Costanza from Seinfeld, Fisher Stevens went on to play the Indian scientist in Short Circuit (as well as being Michelle Pfeiffer's other half for three years), Oscar winner Holly Hunter (Broadcast News, The Incredibles) makes a brief appearance, and other cast members went on to appear in films with the likes of Al Pacino, Jean Claude Van Damme, and Mel Gibson. It was also one of the first movies to be produced by entertainment giants Miramax, the company started by Bob Weinstein and his brother, the currently unpopular celebrity masturbator, Harvey.

A completely unbiased 9/10

[Ghost]

Ah the burning is one of my favs. Better than Friday the 13th that's for sure. My dad brought it home on a pirated video too except I was only six at the time ha ha. Funny even though I enjoyed watching horror at such a young age I will not let my son do that.

That shot of cropsy standing up on the raft with the sun behind him should be studied as one of films amazing images. The lighting in that scene is perfect.

Ha ha I never realized he was the guy in short circuit. Why does he put on that awful accent in short circuit? Couldn't get away with that now.

[Darkweasel]

DAY #19

HALLOWEEN
(2018)
*SPOILER FREE REVIEW*



Set forty years after the original, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) lives on her own, partially estranged from her family in a house filled with secret hidey-holes and security devices, paranoiacally preparing for killer Michael Myers to return. A British couple wanting interviews for a podcast show up at the hospital to interview the perma-silent killer, and then visit Laurie, but neither give them anything they can use. During a prison transfer, Myers inevitably escapes and heads back to Haddonfield to carry on where he left off forty years ago.

Completely ignoring every last sequel, reboot and remake, this latest addition to the series is easily one of the best. Managing to be scary, funny, and even sympathetic, there are little references and cheeky callbacks to the previous films scattered throughout (Hey, Mr Elrod), and John Carpenter's return as the film's musical co-composer helps no end.

Although not especially bloody for any length of time, there are certainly a few moments of gore and brutality among the fairly large body count, but like the original, this one goes more for atmosphere than splatter with a healthy amount of effective, and often fun, BOO! scares thrown in for good measure. There's also a surprising amount of screen time given to Myers unmasked face. Sometimes out of focus, sometimes out of shot, but you still see enough to know that he's in his sixties now and not a spring chicken any more.

Where Halloween 2018 falls down is with its slightly lengthier than necessary running time, slightly lop-sided structure and some of its characters. With so much careful build up during the first forty-five minutes, the rest of film – although never actually feeling rushed – certainly seems geared towards getting to the climax with as little fuss as possible, sometimes to its detriment. And although I'm willing to accept it's what the director might have been aiming for, some of the murders almost seem to be routine and by-the-by rather than suspenseful or shocking. That said, there are still more than a couple of excellent murder sequences to enjoy.

While the main set of characters, from Laurie down to the town Sheriff (Will Patton), are all well drawn, things get wobbly with the supporting cast, one of whom isn't the slightest bit necessary in any way and quickly becomes an irritating distraction. The journalists, so heavily featured in the opening half an hour, are left with their story feeling a little incomplete, and another interesting character does something you might not expect, but instead of exploring the idea in more detail, things just sort of drift off without an interesting resolution.

Overall though, all of those faults can all be seen as minor flaws in an otherwise superb slasher movie which manages to pay homage to the past, while being able to stay relevant without the need to go all meta and post-modern.

Horror films, maybe more than most, tend to be judged on their final battles, and Halloween 2018 leaves you with a superbly directed finale. Although, if you abide by the TV/movie rule of “if you don't see the body" and stay until after the credits...

8.5/10

[Darkweasel]

DAY #21

PRISONER OF THE CANNIBAL GOD
aka Mountain of the Cannibal God
aaka Slave of the Cannibal God
(1978)



Although it contains a story far too convoluted than is necessary for a film about a tribe of primitives slurping on human innards, Prisoner/Mountain/Slave of the Cannibal God is actually one of the better cannibal movies of the late 1970s.

Starring a young Stacy Keach (American History X) wearing cargo shorts entirely unsuitable for trekking through dense rain forests, and sixteen years after becoming the first ever Bond Girl, a now apparently desperate for work Ursula Andress, this fun bit of grindhouse cinema features all the usual things associated with cannibal movies.

Setting a lethargic, almost soporific pace for the first half, the film goes on to feature extreme gore, extreme bad acting (one guy sounds like C-3P0 in the middle of a particularly troublesome toilet break), wobbly stock footage aerial shots, wobbly-bobbly boobies, and all the usual and unnecessary animal torture. Seriously, do we really need to see monkeys and birds fed to pythons, and live iguanas disemboweled? I'm here for the human evisceration, gut chomping, ritual wanking and bum sex, not to watch Sir Hiss having his skin pulled over his head.

The first of director Sergio Martino's loosely connected 'Jungle Adventure' trilogy (the wonderfully titled 'Island of the Fish Men', and 'The Great Alligator' being the other two), the story features the actually still very easy on the eye Ursula trying to track down her missing husband, last seen heading towards a sacred mountain in the middle of a New Guinea forest.

Falling afoul of big spiders (ffs, Stacy, it's a reasonably sized Bird Eater. It will absolutely not “kill you in three days”), and big rubber snakes, it eventually turns out that sneaky Ursula doesn't actually give a shit about her hubby and is far more interested in uranium deposits inside the mountain. Inevitably captured by the cannibal tribe, Ursula is stripped naked and covered in orange paint, then given a nice dress and some fancy headwear as she waits for her impending ritual death-by-munching. Obviously, she escapes, realises the error of her ways, and everyone goes home for tea and lives happily ever after. Apart, of course, from those who were stabbed, gutted, shot, eaten, pushed off cliffs, beheaded, or had their danglies brutally hacked off.

6/10

[Darkweasel]

DAY 22

CELLAR DWELLER
(1988)



Aspiring cartoonist Whitney Taylor (Debrah Farentino) takes herself off to an artist's retreat in the middle of the woods to work on her next project. Trying to recreate a comic based on the work of famous artist Colin Childress (Re-animator and From Beyond's Jeffrey Combs not even making it out of the opening prologue this time), she meets up with a bunch of assorted artists, either arguing with them or making friends with them. Sometimes both. It really doesn't matter.

Drawing a vicious monster as her comic strip's villain has unexpected consequences for Whitney, because as shown in the film's prologue, Jeffrey Combs did the exact same thing years ago and accidentally brought the creature to life. So, after Whitney repeats history, she has to figure out a way of killing the monster - which as we've already seen during the prologue – involves burning the original drawings.

A simple story told reasonably well by a fairly competent director (Friday the 13th Part VII's John Carl Beuchler) and some bad actors including (an aged) Lily Munster herself, Yvonne De Carlo, Cellar Dweller is 75mins of silly horror fun with some decent monster effects, a surprising amount of blood and gore, a small but perfectly packaged pair of boobs, and to my knowledge, the only film which features a monster bested by correction fluid.

6/10

[Darkweasel]

DAY #23

BARRACUDA
(1978)



There's a line in Jaws where Mayor Vaughn says to Chief Brody, "You yell Barracuda, everyone says 'huh, what?'". Well, that line pretty much sums up the entire first half of '70s fishy flick, Barracuda.

After an opening sequence which could have been lifted from Spielberg's classic itself, we find that divers in the sea off Palm Cove (pop. 4000 and steadily decreasing) are being eaten by rubber fish/dead fish/stock footage of fish. There's lots and lots of thrashing around underwater as fake hands get bitten off, bottoms are munched, and an unhealthy amount of red dye gets released into the ocean.

We soon find that the town, as is not unusual in 1970's animal horror movies, has an evil chemical plant with an evil boss who controls the fortunes of the town due to the amount of locals he employs. His dimwitted son, Bubba, is of practically no use as a thug, of even less use as a character in general, and the chap who plays him is of absolutely no use as an actor. And because of that, Bubba will not be appearing in this review again.

A scientist and the local Sheriff begin looking into the recent deaths of all these extras and overly optimistic actors, and discover that (shock, horror) the chemical plant is the cause of the recent and unnatural aggressive piscine behaviour. So, as soon as we get the blindingly obvious love story between the scientist and the Sheriff's daughter out of the way, the story actually gets interesting.

If you'd told me beforehand that a film about killer fish would completely end its interest in showing said fish halfway into the film, then I probably wouldn't have even started watching it in the first place. However, as soon as scientists start sciencing and Sheriffs start sheriffing, the story jerks quickly away from earlier Jaws comparisons and begins new life as a government conspiracy film with an ecological message it likes to club into your head every time it gets the chance. Which is a lot.

The strange thing is though, despite its heavy handed message, bad acting, laughable continuity, invisible gunshot wounds, the least accidental drinks spillage ever, and the dimmest deputy in police history who suggests that the diver who disappeared just a few hours ago, and whose head has just been found, savagely chewed on the beach, "maybe just drowned", it's actually quite enjoyable. The science is just the right side of silly, the acting actually improves (slightly) as the film progresses, and there's a nice amount of government paranoia and shady characters thrown in. Not to mention the ending, which is way more downbeat than you would ever imagine.

"It's the government. They'll control us all one day!"
5/10

[Darkweasel]

DAY #24

RIARU ONIGOKKU
aka TAG
(2015)



A few weeks ago, I discovered an odd little Japanese movie called Jisatsu Sâkuru (Suicide Club) from 2001. An incredibly strange film full of the paranormal, metaphysical and theological as well as bucketloads of gore, I decided to see if the director had gone on to do anything else since.

Well he had, and Tag was the one of the titles which stuck out the most so I slung it on and gave it a go. Although a completely different premise, Tag goes down the exact same road as Suicide Club – a great idea that doesn't quite add up to the sum of its parts and hurts your head in the process.

Opening with two school buses filled with giggly Japanese schoolgirls in short, frilly skirts, one of the girls drops her pen on the floor and as she bends down to pick it up, everybody else is cut in half by the wind. Yup. One moment, everyone's giggling and laughing and talking about boys, and the next the buses are filled with bodies bisected at the waist, spurting gouts of fake blood.

Escaping the razor sharp wind, the surviving schoolgirl, Mitsuko, finds her way to a nearby lake, strips off all her blood spattered clothes and takes some from one of several dead girls lying around the vicinity. Getting to school, she somehow completely forgets about the entire incident and quickly bunks off school with three friends, each of them as giggly and short-skirted as herself. After a strange talk about parallel dimensions and multiverses, the girls return to school just in time for their teacher to mow everyone in the class down with a massive machine gun. All the teachers join in, hunting the schoolkids as they run away with their short skirts deliberately revealing their underwear (seriously, Japan, why?) and firing rocket launchers at them as the kids try to escape.

Then all of a sudden Mitsuko isn't Mitsuko any more. She's now Keiko. She has a completely different face, and she's getting married. One of her friends from school reappears, telling her that they're being watched by someone, and the wedding begins. All is fine until she gets halfway down the aisle when all her friends and guests, happy just a moment ago, now all start pelting her with stuff and screaming abuse at her. By the time she reaches her husband to be - a man in a coffin wearing a suit and a scary as fuck pig's head – Mistuko/Keiko decides it's time to leave. But not before her friend starts snapping the guests necks, legs and arms in two, and stabbing them in the head. As you do.

Running from the church, Mitsuko/Keiko is now a long distance runner called Izumi and she soon gets attacked by another angry crowd. Mitsuko/Keiko/Izumi escapes into the mountains where her friend from earlier, Aki, tells M/K/I she is part of a fictional world and has to kill her if she wants to get out. After pulling some cables out of Aki's wrists, Aki is pulled apart and a portal opens up which M/K/I walks through into a place called “Mens World” where it turns out she is actually the main character in a violent video game.

From then on, things get a little peculiar.

After fainting, she wakes up in a temple and it appears we're actually 150 years into the future. An old beardy man tells M/K/I she is a girl he liked at school and when she died, he took her – and her friends - DNA to make a 3D computer game. Because that's how computer games work, obviously. A younger version of himself gets onto a bed and tells her to sleep with him because it's the ultimate fulfilment of his destiny or something. She attacks him and kills him, then realises the only way out is to kill herself. So, all three versions of themselves do just that, and the film ends just as my brain waves a little white flag.

Although clearly bonkers, there are also many messages, metaphors, and meanings hidden among the absurdity. Some clear, some not so clear, and some which probably require you to grab a spoon, scoop out some of director Sion Sono's brain, and taste his insanity. Better, certainly more memorable, and yet somehow easier to follow than Suicide Club, stupidly gory with some hilariously inept gore effects, Tag is yet another film to prove the Japanese need a nice and cosy special ward all of their own.

7/10

[Darkweasel]

DAY #25

HALLOWEEN H20
(1998)



Completely ignoring movies 3-6, Halloween H20, as the title suggests, begins twenty years after the events of Halloween 1978. Now a divorced mother living under an assumed identity, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is the paranoid, alcoholic headmistress of a secluded private school in California (obviously, exclusive schools were crying out for paranoid alcoholics at the time). Josh Hartnett's bad haircut (The Faculty) plays her son, and Michelle Williams (Species, Venom) plays his puffy-faced, fluffy-haired, but not altogether unattractive love interest.

Having discovered Laurie's new identity and location, Michael kills the nurse from original movie and a teenage Joseph Gordon-Levitt and heads to the school for a spot of 20th anniversary slaughter, doing so with suspiciously young looking hands and apparently without any of the burns he would have sustained at the end of Halloween 2.

Despite its problems, H20 is a definite return to form for the series, with the suspense scenes and the final confrontation handled well by veteran horror director Steve Miner (Friday the 13th Parts 2 & 3). Managing to be scary and occasionally funny, this entry also succeeds in making Laurie a lot more interesting than the crying, screamy thing last seen wearing a bad wig in (the still far superior) Halloween II. The supporting cast do their jobs to the level required (although Adam Arkin's death scene is unintentionally funny, and LL Cool J only just manages to stay the right side of irritating), and there's even time for some neat little references to the original as well as a sly wink or three to Psycho.

7.5/10

[varangian]

It`s not bad at all, certainly far superior to many if most of the Teen post-Scream slashers that came out at that period
Josh Harnett`s haircut is indeed the worst thing!
I`m going to have to sit through Halloween:Resurrection soon, memories are not fond ones

[Darkweasel]

Resurrection is total arse.


DAY #26

HALLOWEEN III - SEASON OF THE WITCH
(1982)



Delivering a successful third instalment after two successful horror hits was always going to be a tricky prospect, especially when John Carpenter and Debra Hill (Carpenter's co-writer/producer on many movies) only agreed to produce a second sequel if the story had nothing to do with Michael Myers.

Leaving Myers with nothing more than a brief TV appearance and only using Jamie Lee Curtis as the voice of a telephone operator, the studio moved away from the slasher genre altogether, concocting a story about an evil toy-maker who wants to kill all the kids in America by using magic Halloween masks, new-fangled computers and stolen bits of Stonehenge. Many fans of the first two films were left bitterly disappointed, with this instalment being remembered mostly as "the one with that annoying song" (referring to the "Eight more days to Halloween, Silver Shamrock" song which plays at least once every five minutes).

In truth, Halloween III is in no way a bad film. It's just very, very different to what people were expecting. The acting is fine, the story is original, it's just as gory as any of the other entries, the Alan Howarth/John Carpenter score is nicely atmospheric, and like the original, the whole thing actually feels like Halloween.
8/10

[Darkweasel]

DAY #27

HALLOWEEN
(2007)




Rob Zombie's remake has come in for a lot of abuse over the years. Some of it justified, but most of it not. The first part of the movie - the origins of Michael - although an interesting enough take on the established mythology, simply isn't required. At all. The whole point of Michael Myers is that he came from a perfectly normal suburban family. If there was a reason why he decided to butcher his sister that Halloween night in 1963, we weren't privy to it. We didn't need to be. He just did it.

Everything we needed to know about Michael in the original was explained perfectly by the relentless paranoid rantings of the obsessed Dr. Loomis. Yet in this version, for some reason Zombie wants us to get to know Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) as a trendy, hip psychiatrist first. As well put together as the first half may have been, young Loomis, and the dreadful trailer trash background given to Michael was all just way too Rob Zombie.

That said, from the moment the story moves into the present, Zombie's Halloween becomes an entirely different beast. Forget the lame-brained escape from the mental asylum (the deleted scene where he kills four security guards is so much better) and just concentrate on the suspense and scares. And there, Zombie nails it as iconic shots from the original are reworked by using different characters or locations. The violence is brutal and shocking, but still feels more in tune with the original than most of the other films, and Zombie's love of the original is clear with his almost OCD-like attention to detail. For example, the Rabbit In Red Lounge where Michael's mother (Zombie's wife, Sheri Moon) works as a pole dancer, is actually taken from the red matchbook that Nurse Chambers leaves on Loomis's car seat when Michael makes his escape in the original movie.

There are many other little nods to the original as the film goes on, but never anything to distract you from what the unnecessarily hairy director is trying to achieve. And as flawed as his version of Halloween might be, he does manage to create some of the best suspense-filled sequences since the first two films.

In fact, once it gets going (which admittedly is far too long), Halloween becomes one of the best, most underrated remakes out there. Even if it simply delivers everything you expect it to. More blood, more violence, more boobies, and more '70s rock, punk and metal on the soundtrack.
7.5/10

[Darkweasel]

DAY #28

HALLOWEEN RESURRECTION
(2002)



If you remember, at the end of Halloween H20, Michael's head decided it was time to go solo and rolled off into the trees to seek its fortune. Or so we were led to believe.

Yes, in the first of many stupid and inconceivable moves, we're now expected to believe that while half of the LAPD were rooting around the school grounds, Michael was left on his own with a single paramedic with just the right amount of time to be able to crush his larynx and swap clothes without being noticed. All this somehow meaning the body in the back of the ambulance who Laurie eventually killed at the end of H20 wasn't actually Michael at all, but the paramedic.
Er. yeah. Okay.

Anyway, it's three years later and a now long haired Laurie is living in a mental asylum. Fifteen minutes later, Michael has found her, chased her and killed her in the cheapest way since Alice's murder at the beginning of Friday the 13th Part 2, before heading back to his old stamping ground where it just so happens a reality TV show is being filmed in his old house. What an amazing, and not at all shit coincidence.

Busta Rhymes is laughably bad as the reality show's presenter, Tyra Banks does nothing of any interest apart from get killed, some kids run around the old house getting naked and murdered, some other kids watch the whole thing on a computer, and a pre-Battlestar Galactica Katee Sackhoff turns up with her name spelt incorrectly in the title credits, but somehow correctly at the end.

An absolute shambles from beginning to end, and the mask looks shit too.
Go away.

3/10