Halloween.

"Rob Zombie knows and loves horror films," begins Jeffrey M Anderson. "Given that, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect his new remake of Halloween to have some kind of expert enthusiasm, or at least some kind of subversive slant. How disappointing, then, to see a film as callous, noisy and stupid as any of the other horror remakes that have been cluttering up multiplexes as of late."

"Halloween is brilliant," counters Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "It's a stroke of slice and dice genius. It represents some of the most solid film work this growing fright night giant has ever brought to the big screen, and it argues for putting real fear aficionados behind the lens of your latest take on a tale of terror."

Updated through 9/1.

Brian Orndorf: "Before anyone takes a dump all over Rob Zombie's remake of the John Carpenter classic Halloween, let me remind the picky bastards out there that the last time we saw Michael Myers on that big screen, he was trading karate chops with Busta Rhymes. Yeah, now this update doesn't seem so bad, does it?" More at Hollywood Bitchslap from Mel Valentin and Peter Sobczynski: "[W]hat Zombie has done to Halloween is roughly akin to what its central character does to virtually every other member of the cast - he hacks away until all we are left with is a bloody and virtually unrecognizable mess that lingers around painfully for a while before mercifully expiring."

"[T]he first half of Zombie's Halloween works," argues Noah Forrest at Movie City News. "It just doesn't work as a Halloween movie."

"Apart from the stale atmosphere and complete lack of tension in this film, there's also a generally low level of technical sophistication that leaves the viewer with a sense that no one involved with the production was really operating on all cylinders," writes Ryan Stewart at Cinematical. "The film isn't incompetently made or anything, it just stinks of being unnecessary and doesn't really hit its mark on any traditional level."

Chats with Zombie: Cheryl Eddy (San Francisco Bay Guardian), Richard Harrington (Washington Post), Aaron Hillis (IFC News), Jennifer Merin (New York Press) and Chuck Wilson (Voice).

Updates, 9/1: Halloween "wants us to care about Myers - who busts out of a mental institution 17 years after murdering most of his family and goes home to reconnect with the baby sister he spared - even while it depicts him as a mute, literally faceless grim reaper. The two impulses cancel each other out," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "That's too bad, because the case study part of the film re-establishes Mr. Zombie's status as modern American horror's most eccentric and surprising filmmaker."

"Rob Zombie's gut understanding of what makes 70s horror so great - its volatility, its nihilism, its unrepentant, take-no-prisoners viciousness - is unfortunately glimpsed in only short, sporadic bursts in Halloween," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "Unlike The Devil's Rejects, which captured the grungy spirit of his favorite grindhousers, the musician-turned-filmmaker's updating of John Carpenter's seminal 1978 slasher flick skews in the opposite direction, attempting to tonally distance itself from its source material by replacing Carpenter's eerie, otherworldly menace with grim, brutal realism."

Tasha Robinson for the Chicago Tribune/Los Angeles Times: "It's a more polished, high-fidelity version of a story that's played out on screen many times since 1978, but once Zombie runs out of subtext, he's right back to the same old slasher text: 'Blood. Guts. The end.'"

Posted by dwhudson at August 31, 2007 9:21 AM