SERIOUSLY, I THINK ROB ZOMBIE IS GREAT, BUT, SERIOUSLY, F*CK ROB ZOMBIE
Why would Rob Zombie direct Halloween 2?
I’m a fan of Zombie’s music (generally speaking). And he has written and directed three feature films now, and, honest to goodness, I’ve enjoyed two of them. House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects were like remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the mind-blowingly awesome original, not that piece of shit remake from earlier this decade) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (see last parenthetical), but the tones were backwards: TSM2 and Corpses are really campy and kitschy and over the top, and TSM and Rejects are more genuinely well-made and creepy movies. Corpses didn’t knock my socks off or anything, but I enjoyed it for what it was, and I legitimately think Rejects was just a really cool movie.
But fuck Zombie’s remake of Halloween.
As far as I’m concerned, John Carpenter’s original is one of the best horror movies ever made, and for someone who claims to love it, Zombie seems to have almost no understanding whatsoever about what made it great. For one thing, in the original, we learn almost nothing about Michael Meyers as a little boy, and what little we do see suggests that he’s from a perfectly normal middle class suburban family – which is fucking scary, because it suggests that the most evil fucking man in the world could be the little kid living right next door to you. Zombie’s decision to make the kid a freaky looking Kiss fan from a highly dysfunctional white trash family just plain sucks; you watch the environment this child grew up, and you think, “Well, of course he grew up to be a masked serial killer.” It’s not scary because there’s a clear lesson about how the creation of such a killer might be stopped.
And don’t even get me started on the second half of the movie, which is the actual “remake” part of Halloween. What witless, clumsy, stupid slasher flick Zombie managed to cook up. It’s interesting to note how little blood or gore we actually see in Carpenter’s Halloween, as opposed to Zombie’s version.
As bad as the movie sucked, at least I could bank on Zombie never doing a sequel. Shortly before Halloween 2007‘s release, he gave this interview to MTV:
MTV: And you won’t be coming up with ideas for Halloween sequels on the tour bus?
Zombie: No. I have no plans on watching them or making them. [He laughs.] My movie has a beginning, a middle and an end — and then I am done. Anything that comes after that? It will not involve me.
So now, of course, because for once I wasn’t cynical and took a metal musician at his word, it looks like Zombie may do that Halloween sequel after all. Of course, movie sites like Shock Till You Drop, the one reporting this particular rumor, traffic in bullshit – except that Shock’s information is generally reputable. If they say that Zombie is dropping his other project, the not at all dinosaur-related Tyrannosarus Rex, to do Halloween 2, I’d be willing to bet that Zombie is at least in talks.
And why the fucking fuck would Zombie suddenly have a change of heart about doing another Halloween movie? I’m just speculating, but I’d be willing to be the answer rhymes with “honey.” Or maybe Dimension, the studio behind the Halloween movies, promised him they’d bank roll T-Rex if he did them this favor.
Either way, this news sucks.
-AR
