DVD Reviews

Halloween

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• Details: Malcolm McDowell, Daeg French, Brad Dourif, Scout Taylor-Compton.

More of a cover version than a remake, Rob Zombie takes it upon himself to tinker with John Carpenter's 1978 classic; but whereas Carpenter didn't waste any time with the opening gambit (the original sequence took about three minutes), Zombie expands it by almost an hour and Michael Myers' character and motivation are fleshed out. Myers is now called Mikey, he talks and, after torturing a few cats, is driven to his first kill by beating to death a school bully. That night, Halloween, ten-year-old Mikey (French) goes about his house with a kitchen knife and baseball bat butchering his stepfather, his sister and her boyfriend, saving only his baby sister. Incarcerated in a mental hospital under the watchful eye of Dr. Samuel Loomis (McDowell taking over from Pleasance), Mikey shuts down and any attempt Loomis makes to get behind his mask come unstuck. Years later, Myers (now played by wrestler Tyler Mane) escapes and returns to his home where he finds Laurie Strode (Taylor-Compton), a double for his murdered sister. The movie then slinks back into Carpenter's original story - the killing of the babysitters - albeit a truncated version. This has a Hannibal Rising angle - how Myers became Myers - but Zombie's reinterpretation succumbs to the same problems as Peter Webber's film; if we know too much about him, the mystery is gone. It's certainly a bloodier affair than the original as Zombie multiplies the body count, but suspense is nowhere to be found and the director's attempts at making Myers more human in the opening half isn't consistent with the soulless killer in the second.
Details: US / 109mins (18).

Review by Gavin Burke