Trick or Trailers: Halloween (2007)

Remaking Halloween is an idea that came one film too late for the series. Starting over after H20 would have made much more sense rather than trying to carry on. Still, in 2002 the idea of remaking Halloween would have likely been greeted as heresy. Remakes of movies from the olden times of the '50s or '60s, fans were cool with that. But to start remaking the iconic fright films of the '70s? No way. 

That just wasn't going to happen. 

Until it did. 

As the '00's went on, and horror exploded in the wake of films like Saw and Hostel with a renewed emphasis on the kind of hardcore, visceral thrills that defined much of  '70s horror, suddenly once unthinkable remakes of everything from Dawn of the Dead to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to The Hills Have Eyes became a reality. 

Once that dam burst, it was inevitable that the next step in reviving the Halloween franchise would be to reboot it. I forget what my reaction was to hearing that Rob Zombie would be directing the new movie. At that point, he had directed only House of 1,000 Corpses, which I absolutely hated, and The Devil's Rejects, which I thought was much better, even if it wasn't really my thing. If nothing else, Zombie was definitely a choice in perfect tune with where the genre was then. House, along with Cabin Fever and Wrong Turn, was one of the first films to start the trend towards a return to '70s style horror. 

But how would this guy handle a retelling of Halloween, a model of classic suspense? The answer is that he would just make it entirely in his own fashion and fuck it with even trying to ape Carpenter. 

 

Even though this is not that old, watching this trailer, it feels further in the past to me than Resurrection from '02 does. Maybe it's just that the style of horror from the mid to late '00s was so specific to that era that it's strange to revisit it and be reminded of that vibe.  

From the trailer, seeing Malcolm McDowell in action as Loomis, it's clear - as if anyone could doubt it - that casting him in that role was a killer move. You can't better Pleasance, no, but if you've got to go with a second choice, McDowell is perfect. Even in '78 he would have been great. 

As for Tyler Mane as Michael, well, I say it's a very on brand choice. Of course Zombie would cast Michael as a hulking monster. Nothing about Michael has ever been about his size. Here, though, it looks like he could stride through a cement wall without missing a step. 

When you see him holding a knife, it's laughable. It looks like a toy in his giant mitt. If you ever saw this guy coming at you, the knife would be the last thing you'd worry about.   

From the trailer there is also the reveal that even in this rebooted reality, Michael and Laurie are siblings. Why you wouldn't get away from that, given the opportunity, I don't know. Zombie has claimed that he came up with this idea independently, not remembering or knowing it had been introduced in Halloween II but I call bullshit. 

It's like Zombie wanted everyone to know that he was too cool to have the slightest awareness of what happened in any of the other lame Halloweens and yet here he was repeating the hackiest mistake of the sequels. Completely under his own inspiration, apparently. But whatever. 

Also, I had forgotten the Halloweens were still summer releases at this point. Of all the dumb moves that Dimension Films made with Halloween, putting them out in the summer might be the dumbest. 

Call me crazy but when Halloween is in your title and your movie takes place on Halloween, just put the movie out in October. Not September, not November, and certainly not in fucking August.  

For what it's worth, I believe the case can be made that this is the best Halloween to come from the franchise's Dimension Films years. 

As that's a group that also includes Curse and Resurrection, that might not be high praise but I do think this is a solid movie in its own right, even if it feels more like a curious snapshot of its particular era rather than a film that has endured beyond it. If Texas Chain Saw were to go trick or treating dressed as Halloween, this would be it. 

Trick or Trailers: Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

With subtitles like Revenge of and Curse of, Michael Myers, by his sixth movie, was beginning to have the air of an old-timey movie monster. While I don't think that there was much in the way of actual revenge in 5 and the "curse" is pretty vaguely defined in 6, just the same I'm just sorry that we never got to see a Son of or a Ghost of Michael Myers.

By 1995, fans had been left hanging for six years (!) to find out what happened after the mysterious Man in Black had blown Michael out of a Haddonfield jail cell at the end of Revenge. 

The fact that we were finally going to get some answers was, in itself, cause for celebration. It was also just cool to have a new Halloween to look forward to. Horror had taken an extended downturn in the '90s with the franchises that had been box office champs throughout the '80s putting out last gasp final installments. 

In what seemed like potentially promising news, Halloween 6 was arriving under the Dimension Films banner, the genre-specific division of Miramax Films that had already brought franchises like Hellraiser and Children of the Corn to theaters. Those movies might not have been good but, you know, at least it gave genre fans something to check out. And in the '90s, that wasn't anything to sneeze at, man. 

And I gotta say, the first Halloween 6 trailer had me intrigued.  

  

You've got an unusual vibe going on with cult members and what looks like a hint of some computer or internet stuff and a lot of talk about the mythology of Halloween and the promise of an explanation for Michael and, above all that, Loomis was back so, hey, even though I'm wondering why Michael Myers looks kind of paunchy now, I'm in! 

 

Once it came out, though, 6 was greeted as a low point for the franchise, acerbated by the fact that Donald Pleasence had passed away before its release and this now had to stand as his swan song for Loomis. I mean, we know the filmmakers were put in an awkward position by the end of 5 but I don't know. Seems like a lot of this stuff should have been thought better of before it got off the ground. 

And recasting the part of Jamie Lloyd away from Danielle Harris and then dispatching this beloved character in such a cruel way...not great. But the idea of bringing Tommy Doyle back was an A+ move and even better was casting a pre-superstardom Paul Rudd in the role. That fact that Halloween Kills decided to bring Tommy back as well feels like a nice bit of vindication for 6 in that respect. They can always say they did it first! And while Anthony Michael Hall makes a for a solid Tommy, I dig Rudd's portrayal of him as a twitchy weirdo. 

Overall, though, this was not a roaring return for the franchise. If anything, it seemed poised to finally tank it altogether. Rumors of a Producer's Cut fueled hopes that a better version of this movie might exist but it turned out that the different cut was not a miracle fix. 

I gotta say, though, I've come to dig this a little more than I do 5. If only it had a better ending! It's crazy that both the theatrical and the producer's cut endings are totally unsatisfying but, oh well. Whaddya gonna do? Other than that, I've warmed up to how batty this one is.  

For what it's worth, this is where the original continuity of the series ended. That alone gives it a special place in Halloween canon. After this, reboots would keep splitting up and rewriting the timeline that began in 1978. Given that, I think the fact that 6 made such crazy retcons to Michael's backstory makes it more fun in retrospect. It's much easier to enjoy all the Cult of Thorn nonsense as a one-off. 

Or maybe just the fact that it didn't prove to kill the franchise is all it took for 6's "curse" to be lifted and allow it to be regarded a little more fondly. 

Dimension's Dark Decline

Being completely outside the world of film, when it comes to the business of Hollywood, I only know what I read in the entertainment press. However, while I'm no inside authority, the news that Bob and Harvey Weinstein's Dimension Films - along with the entirety of The Weinstein Company - is facing grim times (as reported by Deadline Hollywood) has me thinking of the often-exasperating history of what began as a genre label of Miramax Films. In the early '90s, when I first started noticing the Dimension logo on films like Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice and Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (both 1992), even though the movies themselves weren't stellar, it was still encouraging to see a dedicated new provider of horror movies at a time when studios were reluctant to embrace the genre. At the time I thought, hey, give 'em a chance - these guys are bound to start putting out better films.

And from time to time, those better films did come along. Thanks to Dimension, I got to see at least one Stuart Gordon movie in the theaters (Fortress, 1993). And in 1994, they released The Crow which was pretty sweet. In the mid-'90s, they were on kind of a roll with The Prophecy (1995), Scream (1996), and From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and in recent years, there's been favorites bearing their imprint like The Others (2001), Grindhouse (2007) and The Mist (2008). However, over the course of all these years, the ratio of quality to shit in Dimension's catalog has been impossible to ignore. And their handling of franchises like Children of the Corn, The Crow, Highlander, Hellraiser, and (in particular) Halloween has often been infuriating.

But history may show that the Weinstein's all-time fuck-up move was to roll the dice on Rob Zombie a second time with Halloween II. While the Weinsteins had some success with Zombie's 2007 reboot of Halloween, that film had the novelty of being the restart of the franchise - an event that was going to bring in a flock of curious fans regardless. And by telling the origin of Michael Myers, Halloween '07 also had the semblance of a story to it. But Halloween II is a disaster on nearly every level and the Weinsteins have only themselves to blame for letting it happen. Was the negative reaction to Zombie's first Halloween (not a universally negative reaction but more than enough to be a cause for concern) something they thought they could completely discount? I can't blame Rob Zombie for making Halloween II his way but I can't believe that this project ever looked to the Weinsteins like anything but a death-knell.

Maybe the debacle of Halloween II just at the moment when their company needed a big success is karma for the Weinstein's long-running abuse of the Halloween franchise (1998's Halloween: H20 being the rare Halloween under their stewardship to respect the series' history and gild its legacy rather than trash it) but regardless, making a Halloween that was only appealing to the Rob Zombie faithful looks a lot like suicide. And to put Halloween II in a game of box office chicken with The Final Destination when they could've easily moved to a more advantageous release date was just begging to lose and to lose hard.

While Zombie's sequel has found some admirers, I think most paying customers feel that Zombie fucked them in the ass and to quote The Big Lebowski (1997), "This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!" What's galling about both of Zombie's Halloween movies - but II especially - is the contempt that it shows for anyone who is so conventional-minded as to actually come to the theater hoping to see a Halloween film that is suspenseful and scary. I mean, there hasn't been much luck on that front in awhile but for Zombie to at least have tried would've been sporting of him. And personally, I don't see anything in Halloween II that makes me think he did. It's not a bad film because it's not Carpenter's vision of these characters, it's bad because Zombie is a capable visual stylist who has a poor aptitude for writing.

Zombie has said that he wanted to make Laurie and Annie come off as traumatized by their previous run-in with Michael Myers but apparently the entire population of Haddonfield was also attacked by a serial killer as there's nothing to differentiate Laurie and Annie from the rest of the town. Everyone looks and talks exactly the same (and I defy anyone to tell me how the squalid living quarters of Sheriff Brackett's house looks any different from the squalid apartment of Laurie's friends, the dishevelled record store that she works at, or the trashy interior of the Rabbit In Red Lounge). If Zombie really wanted to show how Laurie and Annie have been drastically altered by their ordeal, he needed to show how their lives now contrast against the 'straight' world. To have Laurie and Annie attending college classes or working jobs side-by-side with peers who are optimistic about their lives and their futures, oblivious to the darkness that Laurie and Annie carry with them could've set up a poignant portrayal of both girls (as would the introduction of new romantic relationships, hampered by the girl's emotional baggage). But if anything, it looks as though Laurie and Annie (particularly Laurie) have finally found their niche in the world thanks to their lives taking a dark turn. It makes one wonder how these girls ever fit into the Haddonfield social scene before.

Zombie's done with Halloween now (well, at least it looks that way - remember that he swore up and down after the release of Halloween that he wouldn't do a second film) but rather than hiring Zombie and letting the chips fall where they may, I think Dimension should've shown more concern from the start towards rebooting the Halloween franchise the right way. I know some believe that Zombie should be commended for doing something different but I think his revisionist approach only put the series into a worse corner than it already was (and it didn't result in very good films, either - even if assessed strictly on their own terms). There's no reason why a venerable horror series like Halloween couldn't be relaunched with the same quality control that James Bond and Batman were shown with Casino Royale and Batman Begins (I can imagine directors like The Stepfather's Joseph Ruben or The Strangers' Bryan Bertino doing well with Halloween) but as long as companies like Dimension don't care enough to match the right talent with the right franchise, it won't happen.

And to me, that just seems like bad business.

The First Bad News Of 2009

It didn't take long but just two days into the new year the first letdown has happened as Dimension Films announced that its upcoming Halloween sequel H2 is slated to premiere on August 28th and not in October as some sites had initially speculated. Many might say that Rob Zombie being allowed to author a second Michael Myers installment is already the far worse crime, er, news but I was willing to overlook whatever complaints I had with RZ's Halloween (I do wish the theatrical cut was readily available on DVD as I far preferred it to his director's cut) for the promise of having Michael Myers make a proper Halloween homecoming. But now all that's shot to hell.

Sure, I'll still see H2. Hell, I'll probably get kind of excited for it. I might even stop thinking how stupid calling Halloween 2 "H2" sounds. That's just how I am - I'm easy that way. But I will have to pretend that I never put H2 on my twenty films I'm looking forward to in '09. Sorry, H2 but you can't burn me so early in the year and not pay a price for it. Although honestly, I was looking for an excuse to bump your ass in favor of Martin Scorcese's Ashecliffe and this'll do it. No hard feelings.

To the folks at Dimension Films, though - I don't get it. Even if October is overcrowded with horror films, this is Halloween we're talking about. Everything else is just a pretender to the throne. A Halloween movie in October has the home court advantage so why act like that's the last place you want to compete? A Halloween movie in October feels like an event. But a Halloween movie in August? Not so much. Michael Myers is as Halloween as candy corn - to have him sit out another All Hallow's Eve feels like The Night HE Got Robbed.