In the Flesh: Halloween (2007)

I hope you don’t like looking at anything for longer than three seconds, because that’s about as long as Rob Zombie can go before cutting. Halloween is a collage of frantic images each more amateurish than the last, devoid of any framing more sophisticated than centering a figure and often unable to maintain basic spatial continuity. Combine this with Zombie’s adoration of fake-outs and of retreading earlier scenes virtually beat for beat and a script which might be charitably described as simultaneously thin and plodding and the resulting film, while possessed of an earnestness I can see others finding appealing, feels like mid-budget local access cable. About the best thing I can say for it is that it’s mostly indistinguishable from the late-night shlock with which Zombie is so clearly infatuated, a faithful reproduction of aimless, meandering violence and blathering expository dialogue.

The problems begin when Zombie tries to build out a backstory for Michael Myers. Repression, familial abuse, queerness, unethical capitalization on tragedy, the uneasy relationship between parental and childhood sexual expression and understanding; from the word “go” he’s throwing wildly disparate thematic material at the wall and not bothering to see what sticks. He wants to humanize Michael, but he wants the faceless, elemental presence that made Carpenter’s original film famous, too. He’s interested in expanding on and dissecting the sexual anxieties of the original, but he also wants to reproduce them in exacting detail. Don’t get me wrong, you can square the intimate and the unknown to compelling effect, but simply dumping them in the same bowl and hoping they taste good together isn’t so much an artistic approach as it is two unrelated approaches. They do not, in the end, compliment one another.

The movie’s not without its strengths. Daeg Faerch is perfectly cast as a budding and delicately beautiful white trash sociopath, there’s a halfway memorable shot of a woman’s screaming face turning white as a death mask as she’s being strangled, and the scene in which the adult Michael stands up to loom facelessly over his jailers like some kind of storybook ogre is genuinely uncanny. Brad Dourif is giving his all as sheriff Brackett, even saddled with some of the worst expository dialogue I’ve ever heard, and Malcolm McDowell is as game as ever as the film’s Dr. Loomis, a man inexplicably introduced as Michael’s school psychologist and then transferred to an asylum for the criminally insane to treat him after he butchers his family. It’s the kind of small logistical detail you’d wave aside in a movie with anything going on, but here it’s emblematic of the unskilled zeal driving virtually every aspect of the film. Why not simply introduce Loomis at the psychiatric institute? Why repeat Michael’s game of cat and mouse with Laurie to diminishing returns? It lacks craft, it’s ugly, and it has nothing to say.