Movie Review--Halloween (2007) [Unrated Director's Cut]

"Michael was created by a perfect alignment of interior and exterior factors gone violently wrong.  A perfect storm, if you will."

--Dr. Samuel Loomis, Halloween

Rob Zombie's Halloween remake is by far one of the higher quality horror remakes of the last 20 years.  A strong directorial vision and a refusal to just imitate the often superficial John Carpenter film breathe new life into a franchise that has otherwise relied on sequels.  The utter cheesiness of the original is replaced by genuine darkness and brutality necessary to let the basic Halloween lore both get presented in an original way and get treated as legitimately deep.  Never before has Michael Myers had such a philosophically significant backstory, which is used to sidestep copying how the original just had Michael literally kill without any deep personal or philosophical motive.  This elevates the remake far above the thematically shallow 1978 film on its own, but the entire cast also does a great job of making the performances much better than those of the very first movie in the very convoluted franchise.


Production Values

The 2007 Halloween is not a CGI-heavy film, but its practical blood effects are very realistic (and much better than the strange blood effects of Saw: The Final Chapter, which was released only three years later).  The acting is excellent from all parties, from the young Michael to minor characters that only have one or two scenes.  Not every ensemble film has acting this consistently strong across such a large cast.  Danny Trejo is among the actors and actresses who have smaller roles, as is Sheri Moon Zombie, the director's wife, who have roles as a sanitarium worker and Michael's mother respectively.  They are just two examples of the superb supporting cast even though they are confined to the first half of the story.  In the second half of the movie, a grown Michael Myers and Laurie Strode take the spotlight, played with great talent.  As a child, Michael speaks; as an adult, he is a massive, silent presence that conveys emotion, or lack of emotion, through his silence.  Scout Taylor-Compton brings more energy and personality to Laurie Strode than Jamie Lee Curties does in the original.  Also deserving of mention is Malcolm McDowell, whose Samuel Loomis is beautifully realized as a desperate but sometimes helpless observer as Michael lets his psychopathy control his life.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

This time, at least around a third of the film is devoted to portraying Michael's family life as a young boy.  A very dysfunctional family and the idiotic cruelty of school bullies make life miserable for Michael Meyers, who soon kills a tormentor from school before killing all of his family members other than his baby sister and his mother.  A prolonged trial leads to Michael being placed in a sanitarium under the eye of Dr. Samuel Loomis.  Loomis sincerely tries to bond with and help Michael, but the boy becomes progressively more detached from others until he kills a staff member.  Years later, he escapes (there are two different versions of the escape in the theatrical and unrated cuts) and Loomis fears he has come back to Haddonfield, Illinois to find the baby he spared on the night he slaughtered his family.

Intellectual Content

With murder, just like with rape or theft or some other such action, victim blaming is a philosophically false stance to hold.  Even being unjust to someone does not mean that a person could deserve to be murder or be responsible for being murdered, as murder is illicit killing that only takes place because of murderers themselves.  Parents, siblings, and peers cannot be responsible for a person's beliefs or actions, including murder or rape, short of actual mind control.  It remains true that some factors can wear down on a person's mind and exacerbate mental health problems that might already be present, or just spark new ones.  As Dr. Loomis says, Michael's descent into a killer was not just a matter of outward circumstance--though perhaps he means that Michael is partly blameless for his own actions despite being the one who carried them out.

As a supposed psychopath, this Michael Myers would lack a conscience from birth, instead of eventually acquiring sociopath and losing a conscience he once had.  Not once do any character acknowledge that conscience does not mean moral obligations exist or that one can just "know" right and wrong by introspection, but no one also even hints at how sociopaths and psychopaths alike can still be rationalistic and realize, just as those with a conscience can, that their perceptions or preferences do not reveal what is morally true or false.  Being born without a conscience or losing one does not damn someone to practice unjust violence, embrace egoism, or believe in any kond of irrationalism (as if having moral feelings is the same as being rational).  Even this version of Michael Myers can reason out that his lack of conscience does not mean he should do whatever he wants.

Conclusion

You can make an explicitly villainous character sympathetic and monstrous--more monstrous than most filmmakers tend to depict them as.  This is the twofold goal of Rob Zombie's Halloween, and it not only makes his film stand out from other recent or somewhat recent movies that try to make villains sympathetic to the point of diminishing their villainy, but it also succeeds as a film that modernizes and enhances the basic plot of the original.  Gone are the overacting, the thematic shallowness, and the short runtime that precludes fuller characterization in a story like this.  It might not be popular because it did not imitate the blandness of the original, with the original generally receiving far more praise than it deserves, but this is a remake with uniqueness, vision, and depth.


Content:

 1.  Violence:  This is a far more graphic movie than the original.  Michael slits throats bloodily, repeatedly slams people into things to the point of changing their shapes, and stabs people, again, rather bloodily.  In the unrated version, Michael's escape scene involves two sanitarium employees using his room to rape a patient.

 2.  Profanity:  "Bitch," "shit," and variants of "fuck" are used, many times in the case of the last one.

 3.  Nudity:  Full female nudity is shown in at least one scene from behind and in front, while others show female breasts (once again, though this is not true nudity on its own, many people and even the rating system erroneously regard it this way).

 4.  Sexuality:  Multiple scenes of teenagers having sex while at least one of them is partly clothed are shown.  There are lots of sexual comments made by characters outside of these scenes, ranging from degrading statements towards men or women for their supposed sexual undesirability to jokes.