This was my third appearance on G4’s daily live program, and I hope there are many more to come; I have a really good time sitting in a chair in front of that greenscreen (I’m totally not really on some roof! I’m in a studio!) and trying to come up with dumbass remarks that won’t get the network fined by the FCC.

You can see my latest appearance in the clip below. I don’t think it’s my best work, as I was holding back a bit – this was a nervous young man and I am very aware that I come across as aggressive, fat and hairy. You want to get good shots in there, be funny and win the debate, but you also don’t want to seem like a big bully. Thanks to everyone at G4 for their continued commitment to the Uglification of Television, and I hope you find this segment entertaining, amusing and possibly arousing.

Oh, that Vincent Canby, who fumed the above in 1982 for The New York Times, didn’t live to see days such as these.

Though recognized as a horrror/sci-fi classic today, it’s important to remember that John Carpenter’s gore-soaked remake of Christian Nyby’s (and Howard Hawks’s) The Thing from Another World was either loathed or dismissed by critics upon its initial release. To these viewers raised on Universal horror and Val Lewton, Carpenter’s film was a defilement, indicative of a cultural coarsening that had begun in the 70s with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and finally reached its nihilsitic nadir with the slasher movement – which, in 1982, was in full swing thanks largely to another picture directed by Carpenter called Halloween. The exploding heads, chests and mutating pooches were the end of subtlety, a deal breaker; anyone eager to abuse the audience with such ghastly sights surely wasn’t after bigger thematic game. And even if there was a metaphor lurking under the copious fake blood and latex, it was the product of a diseased and stunted mind; nothing subtle or thoughtful was kicking around in Carpenter’s head.

A lot has changed in twenty-five years; Carpenter is now universally recognized as a master (though his best days are sadly behind him), while horror movies are once again shredding the decency envelope. And, as the complete dismissal of Eli Roth’s first Hostel proved, critics are still prone to missing theme in movies that upset them. The difference this time is that a movie called Halloween is late to the orgy of ugliness; also, rather than launch a brilliant directorial career, it just might end a semi-promising one.

Rob Zombie’s Halloween isn’t just a misfire, but a bad-faith attempt at genre revision by an artist who has nothing interesting on his mind. There is a metaphor here, but it’s been chewed, swallowed, digested and evacuated, leaving the audience to endure the stink of its abject stupidity for 120 minutes. Broken homes warp minds. Thanks, Rob.

The problem with Zombie’s brand of horror is that he’s incapable of playing anything straight; there’s no menace in the material because he’s too busy winking at the audience with cameos and intentionally rotten dialogue (I can’t imagine the vitriol spewed by William Forsythe’s crippled, live-in boyfriend is meant to be anything but hilarious in its awfulness). You’re acutely aware that this is Zombie & Friends’ Halloween; he’s playing for his own amusement when he should be playing for keeps. This is evident in the parade of bad hairpieces (Malcolm McDowell and Ken Foree are big losers in this department) and imbecilic allusions to the previous movie (The Thing from Another World gets worn out here). He might as well have titled this Max Fischer’s Halloween. It’s stuffed to exhaustion with the same ostentation that ruined The Devil’s Rejects, and it feels like overcompensation; Zombie’s too well-adusted to go where his horror heroes went. He makes the tamest grindhouse movies ever.

So whence the "semi-promise"? There’s the slow-motion pullback in House of 1,000 Corpses, or the interrogation of the family in The Devil’s Rejects (personally, I thought the "Free Bird" finale was risible and poorly executed), and it briefly flashes in Halloween with Michael’s brutal first murder – which is the first time Zombie has ever intentionally unnerved me. The blood flowing from the nose and ears of Michael’s teenaged tormenter after being repeatedly walloped with an unforgivably sturdy branch feels real, and, oh, what an awful feeling it is; the camera swirling off into the barren treetops suggests a world unmoored from any semblance of goodness. Had this explosion of violence come out of nowhere, had Zombie not strained for unpleasantness from reel one, had he not shown Michael cutting up hamsters in the character’s introduction, the savagery of this moment might have scarred. It could’ve been the first walk-out moment prompted by Zombie’s talent rather than his creative futility.

This futility is most forgivable in Halloween‘s first half, which is Zombie’s attempt to explore the pathology of Michael’s evil. It’s awash in a stupid kind of literalness borne from a lack of purpose, but at least it’s Zombie’s movie and not an abbreviated runthrough of Carpenter’s classic undone by incoherent geography and suspense-free pursuits that feature Michael tearing apart a rickety old house like a pissed-off Bob Vila. Delving into the mind of a killer is cliche anymore; besides, it was done too well by John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (which you should stay in and watch if you’re desperate for a creepy night out at the movies this weekend). And it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Michael such a terrifying monster in the first place; he was an unstoppable, hell-sent killing machine who ceased being human a long time ago. This is why Loomis wanted him dead if he could not keep him locked up.

Malcolm McDowell’s Loomis is too innocuous and too busy trying to be Michael’s best buddy in the early going to bring the requisite sense of immediacy to the second-half – which is so rushed and stylistically different from the first half that Zombie might as well have farmed it out to a director who knows how to generate a palpable sense of dread (Steve Miner could’ve done better). Malcolm McDowell’s been in a lot of stinkers over the years, but I’ve thankfully avoided most of them; I did not, however, dodge this spray of buckshot, so I’ll go ahead and declare this a career low (and, yes, I’ve seen Tank Girl).

The rest of the performances aren’t much better, and some, dear god, are worse. With three movies to her dubious credit, it’s safe to say Sheri Moon-Zombie has no discernible talent and should never be seen onscreen again. Fortunately for us, she’s only appeared in one non-Rob film, and that was a Tobe Hooper movie; I could live a contented life if I never see another film from either auteur again. The big news for Halloween fanboys is Danielle Harris doffing her top; that they’ve been lusting after her since Halloween 4, in which she was ten-years-old, is an issue they’ll someday take up with Chris Hansen. As for Tyler Mane as a ‘roided-out Michael Myers, it’s one of the film’s least egregious offenses, though his excessive presence is in keeping with the movie’s throttling obviousness.

Does anything work? Sure. Matthew Fox does a good job portraying assistant coach Red Dawson. He’s really the only character in the film that isn’t a football movie caricature. He seems to be a genuinely likeable guy who’s sorting his way through a terrible disaster, and there are a few moments where you might catch yourself pulling for him. The film also looks really, really good. There’s a perceptible 70’s footage grainy-ish effect that seems to work well to age the film, and the brown and beige color palette looks nice. The football scenes (when we get them) can be fun, even though they’re lifted directly from every other “rag-tag-team-comes-from-behind-to-make-the-big-win” football film. Cue the obligatory recruitment of “soccer guy” for kicker.

It’s North by Northwest with 100 percent less wit, class, and style and 100 percent more dermal topography.

The Humans

Paul Walker, Laurence Fishburne, Jason Flemyng, Keith Carradine, Olivia Wilde.

Ex-military criminal goofball Tim Kearney (Paul Walker) is facing a long prison sentence after a series of screw-ups and a jailhouse killing done in self-defense. He gets a lifeline from a shifty DEA agent (Laurence Fishburne) who wants him to impersonate a famous, seemingly dead criminal named Bobby Z that Tim happens to have an uncanny resemblance to. But when Tim/Bobby Z is pressed into action in a trade for Fishburne’s partner, things go crazy and he finds himself on the run from the DEA, an Aryan biker gang, and one pissed off Mexican drug lord (Joaquim De Almeida). Along the way, he has to come to grips with Bobby’s sexy ex (Olivia Wilde) and a mysterious child in her care (Gee, I wonder who the father could be?!)

If you had a brain fart over that, the remainder of the film is straight lobotomy, son. Walker is captured by the Huertero goons, but they take him to their boss’s estate where he’s treated like an ambassador. An ambassador that will die violently when Huertero gets back into town. In the meantime, eat well and fuck some of our women, ok?

Huh?

But don’t worry. Walker’s an ex-Marine, so he not only escapes, but miraculously morphs into a master horseman, motorcycle rider, and finally a mixed martial arts fighter of the highest quality (A Liddell pal choreographed the fights which explains the abundance of leg scissors takedowns and chokeholds). Well, his stuntman pulls all this shit off anyway. It’s all seen in wide shots from far off except for the fight scenes, which are (unintentionally) comically sped up in the grand style of the 1960s to cover for Walker’s lack of skills. Hell, he doesn’t even have skillz. While all this is going on, Fish covers his bets by tipping off the Aryan gang (headed by MC Gainey) to Walker’s new location while also calling on the local Mexican police (Robert Rodriguez mainstay Julio Oscar Mechoso, who is bribed to find and kill Walker….and then never shows up in the film again).

Oh, and I didn’t even mention the best part! Instead of having Walker pull a Van Damme to play both roles, they cast Sex and the City’s Jason Lewis as Bobby Z. So what if they have completely different demeanors, heights and voices, right? I guess it’s no more nonsensical than the rest of this disaster, but it does become rather insulting to the point where Walker is actually SURPRISED that Bobby Z’s hot ex-chick realizes he’s not the real article after fucking his brains out for a couple of nights. At any point, it’s not as dumb as the myriad chase scenes where Huertero’s men shoot, knife, and throw live grenades at Bobby…after being told to bring him back alive.

The only extras to be found are a routine documentary with a bizarre turn by Bruce Dern (who is not in the movie, mind you) as a burned-out old surfer dude awaiting "the return of Bobby Z, mannnnnnnn!".

What’s the point of this alternate timeline brouhaha? Others on the web have already said that the whole thing reminds them of Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, a reboot of the classic Marvel characters that was supposed to give new readers a ground floor entry into a mythos that had become overcomplicated. But that was a complete new start, with nothing tying it into the old Marvel Universe, and that’s why it worked. Creating a complex backstory that ties the events of this film into the other Star Trek franchises… that seems like more trouble than it’s worth.

In fact, I really believe that the general audience doesn’t give a flying shit about continuity. Exhibit A must be Casino Royale, a film that just starts over at square one without having to send Bond through a Q-built time machine. Exhibits B and C would be Batman Begins, which reboots a film series still modestly fresh in the minds of the target audience and Smallville/Superman Returns, which showed that audiences wouldn’t be confused by two competing Clark Kents. They just wouldn’t like one of them very much.

If the general audience won’t care about continuity beyond the most basic aspects (ie, don’t make Bones a jive talkin’ homeboy), who will? The Trek fanbase is at an ebb these days, pummeled out of existence by a series of increasingly shitastic television shows. The Trekkies are no force of any sort to reckoned with, and their unhappiness with the film wouldn’t register as a blip on the opening weekend take.

Speaking of the parade of poor Star Trek series, that’s what this movie sounds like to me the most; it’s easy to imagine a weekly series where our heroes explore a slightly off-kilter Star Trek universe circa the original show, filled with in-references for the fans. Maybe we could have an alternate take on the Redjack story where it’s Chekov who is suspected of the murders! What if they steal Sulu’s brain instead of Spock’s? Etc, etc etc – I don’t feel the need to supply Abrams with future story ideas.

What’s worst of all is that this whole project feels like the thing that’s killing the superhero comic: continuity porn. Instead of making a new Star Trek with familiar elements that’s accessible to a whole new generation, Abrams is making a Star Trek whose main distinction will be the slight ways it deviates from the original. So you want to blow up Vulcan, JJ… just fucking do it. Your Star Trek film does not need to play perfectly when placed next to the original series – just basic technology and fashion will ensure that*. If you want to include nods to the original Trek, just include them, but don’t make that the whole point of the exercise. I’m reminded of that classic Saturday Night Live sketch, where William Shatner is hounded by continuity-obsessed fans. Isn’t it enough to just be a good story?

I’ve not been wholly positive about JJ Abram’s Star Trek, that much is true. And I’m not sold on this concept, which I do not doubt will be the basis for what we see on screens in the finished film. But I’m still holding out hope. I love the original series and the original characters, and I think those are the only aspects of the Star Trek legacy worth exploring. I think that now is a perfect time to bring these characters back and to return to that slightly groovy vision of the future. I just don’t want it to get bogged down by having one eye always cast on the past.

Now, the bad news: Abel Ferrara and Harvey Keitel are not attached. Basically, this is the desperate Edward R. Pressman’s attempt to get a movie up and shooting before the guilds cause a potentially cataclysmic work stoppage. I think. According to the L.A. Times, the script for Bad Lieutenant ’08, written by Steven Bochco protege Billy Finkelstein (he has a Cop Rock credit!), "is less a sequel or a prequel than an attempt to take the raw material of the original film and weave it into 21st century, post- 9/11 New York. In the draft I have, dated July 24, 2007, Finkelstein provides the Lieutenant with a small amount of addiction back story, the event that prompts his promotion from sergeant and the drug-related murder of five Senegalese illegal immigrants to pursue." Huh?

Pressman’s a shameless producer; this is the guy who built a franchise out of The Crow in spite of the negligent killing of Brandon Lee. He’ll make this movie if he can scrape up enough financing. I’m just amazed that Bad Lieutenant is somehow worthy of a sequel; Keitel’s unnamed protagonist was more notable for his dangling schlong than his tough guy act – which, oddly enough, is why he reminds me of Gene Rayburn. There are no Gene Rayburns today… only Peter Tomarkens.

There’s something else that must be addressed before proclaiming Rob Zombie’s Halloween to be the worst film of the year: the idea that my stance on this film comes from an inability to let go of John Carpenter’s original film. The people who believe this will likely be of the opinion that Zombie has made a film that exceeds Carpenter’s; these people are morons. So while I’ll talk more about this later in the review, lets’ get this out of the way: Rob Zombie’s Halloween would have been awful garbage even if John Carpenter had never been born.

But while we’re talking about Carpenter’s movie, it’s interesting to note how much Zombie doesn’t seem to actually understand that film. What was scary about Michael Myers in the original was the idea that he sprang, fully evil, from the bosom of suburban complacency. The Myers family, in the few moments we see them, appear to be just another group of happy white people in middle class bliss. In the year 2007 this concept is stronger than ever – the idea of Michael Myers as some kind of John Walker Lindh, a tumor growing inside our familial unit, resonates. As does the idea that Michael Myers is just evil; we live in a time of Dr. Phil nonsense to the extreme, where every bad kid has a litany of environmental excuses to explain why he set the cat on fire. But what if there’s no reason? What if you’re a good parent and your kid just happens to be a soulless embodiment of carnage? What if there’s nothing you can do to keep the evil out of your life because the evil is already living there?

You know that Zombie misses this crucial aspect of Myers’ iconography when he opens the movie not only with young Michael engaging in pretty standard, Dahmer-esque animal abuse, but he shows us that this kid lives in a house that couldn’t be more toxic if it was located in Love Canal. Mikey’s mom is a white trash stripper, his sister a whore and his stepfather an abusive, crippled drunken asshole (who gets the best line in the movie. I don’t take notes in movies, so I don’t know the exact line to quote it, but it involves skullfucking). Looking at the breakfast table milieu of filth and debauchery that Zombie creates, how could anyone be shocked that Michael turned to a career in the Slaughtering Arts?

I don’t know if Rob Zombie thinks this white trash stuff is funny – he keeps coming back to it in his films – or scary or cool or what, but he holds our faces in it for the first act of Halloween. I have to give him and his art director and set decorators credit in that they’ve created a truly repulsive atmosphere in the Myers home. Unfortunately it’s a cartoonish one; it reminded me of the house in Running With Scissors, where things were so extremely fucked up that I just couldn’t buy into the basic reality of the situation. Am I supposed to feel for Michael Myers? It’s hard to tell when he’s living in an upscale version of Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel’s shack (more on Zombie’s confused treatment of Michael later).

We do thankfully get out of the house for a little while, when Mike goes to school and gets bullied. A dead cat is discovered in his locker, and Mommy Myers is brought in for a meeting with a hilariously swinging Dr. Loomis. Depressingly increasingly hacky Malcolm McDowell gives a career worst performance here (well, maybe it’s not as bad as Heroes), but never again in the film comes close to being as bad as he in this first scene, wearing a terrible wig and quite possibly boozed to the gills. Confronted as a budding sociopath (shades of my own career day!), Michael escapes the school and then the film gets its one and only disturbing moment. Let’s give that moment its own paragraph.

Michael waylays the kid who bullies him and beats him to death with a big tree branch. This scene works – it’s among the best and most horrifying murders I have seen onscreen in years. Zombie doesn’t make the violence too graphic, but the way the bully moans and pleads for his life and the way Michael does not react is terrific. It’s a visceral scene, and it’s scary because we’re not seeing some kid blundering over the line or being forced over it, but rather taking a very calculated step from fucked up child to cold hearted killer. At this point I began to think that maybe Zombie’s new take on the classic could have something to add.

Rob Zombie wasn’t about to let me think that for long. That night it’s Halloween, and Mama Myers has to go pole dance, so she leaves Mikey in the custody of his slutty sister Judith, who bangs her boyfriend instead of taking the kid trick or treating. This leads to a moment so unbelievable that I began to rethink this movie, wondering if it wasn’t a massive practical joke being played on us all: Zombie has Mike sitting on a curb, dejected, intercut with his mom dancing… all set to the song Love Hurts. It’s a break-up scene between a mother and her murderous child. It’s like something out of a Zucker Bros remake of Psycho, frankly, and it’s the kind of moment that makes you wish for a time machine so you could go back to visit Rob in the editing room and find out for yourself first hand just what the fuck he was thinking when he saw this ridiculous footage cut together.

So there’s the murder at the Myers house – except this time it’s Rob Zombie, so it’s the murders, and the step dad and the boyfriend all buy it as well. Young Mike gets shuffled off to the sanitarium (leave me be) where he’s in therapy with Dr. Loomis, looking less mod now. Michael claims to not remember the killings and doesn’t seem to know that anyone is dead at home. Loomis is doing talk therapy with Michael, which is all well and good until he stabs a nurse to death with a fork; after that he never speaks again and transforms into Tyler Mane. It was at about this point that I began to find my groove with Halloween 2007; it was obvious that Zombie just didn’t get the original, but it was becoming apparent to me that this take was something very different, and I realized I needed to stop comparing this Michael to the character created by Nick Castle. While I may not have liked it, it seemed like Zombie was in fact doing his own thing with the property, and hey, good for him.

But just like that scene with Mike killing the bully, Rob Zombie stepped right up and proved me wrong! When the asylum weirdly decides to move him in the middle of the night before Halloween, Mike breaks out in a bloody melee and heads to Haddonfield, where he grew up. At this point the film becomes a beat for beat remake of the first Halloween, but taking one third of that film’s time. Zombie even has Michael re-enact kills from the first film – like the kid getting nailed to the wall with the knife – completely. Lines of dialogue are lifted directly from the original. Characters are introduced who will only have interest for people who remember those characters from the original, where they were actually given personalities or even things to do besides get killed.

This is a monumental disaster, and while the first two thirds of Zombie’s Halloween was bad, it’s this speeded up carbon copy of the original film (think of when Weird Al does those medleys of hits set to super fast polka) that just sinks the rickety ship. Up to this point the film has been annoying and unengaging; from here on in it’s actively boring to people who know the original film. And if you don’t know the original film you’re just not going to understand the sudden change in the Michael Myers character and you’re not going to care at all about his victims.

It also seems like the movie requires Michael Myers to have seen the original Halloweens; he blows into Haddonfield looking for his baby sister, completely aware that she’s been adopted. How? Zombie spends two thirds of the film’s runtime expanding on the first ten minutes of the original and he couldn’t have fit in a simple explanation for this? Why ground Michael Myers in all this realistic psychotherapy bullshit if you’re going to just make him a supernatural DNA sniffer? And why does he even care about his sister at all? It isn’t like Mike had strong motivations in the first film, but that was sort of part of the point. Here Zombie is trying to lay him bare… until it’s time to just reinsert him into historical re-enactments of the first film.

Not helping matter s is the cast; it feels like the casting director went around the autograph hall at a Fangoria Convention and rounded up as many C-level horror types as possible. There’s a certain point where having Udo Kier (even if he’s in it for just long enough for you to recognize him and then disappear), Clint Howard, Tom Towles, Danny Trejo and Bill Mosely all working at the same mental health facility makes you wonder how you could ever cast lunatics to play against these people. Ken Foree, Sid Haig, Dee Wallace Stone and Halloween 4 and 5 star Danielle Harris, among others, just complete the illusion of this having been shot behind the San Diego Convention Center during a lunch break.

What makes it even worse is that none of these people (well, except for Ken Foree, who really does have the best scene in the movie) do good work. Sherri Moon Zombie redefines terrible as Mike’s mom, and no one else has a moment that even approaches credible or real. None of this is helped by Zombie’s script, which bounces between inane and stilted and grotesquely over-stylized (that skullfucking line, while great, comes across as something that Zombie typed and then sat back with his hands behind his head and smiled about). Reigning over this mass of thespianic criminality is McDowell, delivering lines so bad that they’re almost parody in a style that screams, ‘Give me my paycheck, and perhaps a cruller from the craft services table.’ To be fair, Tyler Mane’s pretty good at hulking about, but even the silent guy gets the short end of the script: Zombie makes him spend what feels like twenty minutes smashing walls looking for heroine Laurie Strode. He crosses the line from homicidal maniac to contractor right there.

What’s most frustrating about the third act of Halloween (besides the fact that you come to realize that you’re still in the theater watching this shit) is how the character of Michael Myers just disappears. After breaking out of the asylum, Mike gets his hands on the Shatner mask (set up back in act one, where young Mike wears it while killing his sister and looks like a big fucking bobblehead) and becomes The Shape. Which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but the movie spent so long dealing with this human character that to just ditch him, and suddenly shift the whole film to Laurie Strode’s POV, is irritating. All of the ‘new’ stuff Zombie threw in has nothing to do with the meat of the story, and it all feels like fanfic that you’ve been forced to sit through.

Apparently this wasn’t always the case; the workprint that leaked online this week shows that at one point Zombie was making a more sympathetic Michael Myers, even giving the kid a reason (not a good one, but a one) to kill that nurse in the asylum. The escape scene was also different, and motivated – two guards were raping a retarded girl and tried to get Mike in on it. Of course I don’t know what impact this would have had on act three, where Michael tears through a group of Haddonfield teens without rhyme or reason*. This is the ultimate cop out of Zombie’s main conceit, which was to humanize the monster – he humanizes him until he becomes a monster and then just lets the movie go where it will. Or where John Carpenter took it, anyway.

There’s a lot more to complain about this film – the continuity is horrific (in one scene a character’s head is squished and blood comes out of his eyes; when he drops to the floor he’s without blood. Is the guy dead?), the kills are boring (at least three people get stabbed by Michael, crawl away in agony and get stabbed more and/or pulled back by him. It’s like his MO), and the film is without suspense or tension (Mike doesn’t creep around the film, he just keeps standing in the background of shots. He seems to be playing the role of that guy who is drawn to a live on the scene newscast, that guy who stands in the back and just waves. Spooooky, as Count Floyd may have said). Halloween is, objectively speaking and without thinking about the original, a crummy film. As a remake of the Carpenter movie it’s a heinous abortion.

What bugs me is that the film didn’t need to be this way. Supposedly Dimension told Zombie they didn’t give a shit what he did with the property, and he could have reimagined it more or less from the ground up. And Zombie’s not a bad filmmaker – I’ve grown to be quite the fan of The Devil’s Rejects, and I do think that Zombie has talent. He’s just not showing it here.

After seeing the film my friend Brian (who is a huge Halloween fan) and I compared notes, and I think that Halloween 2007 may be the worst entry in the franchise. Yes, that means I like Bustah Rhymes kung fu fighting Michael Myers better. Yes, that means I like the mystical mumbo jumbo with Druids and Paul Rudd better. Yes, that means I like the one with Tom Atkins and no Michael Myers better. Brian’s gone back to see the film and will probably revisit it this weekend, but I can’t imagine sitting through this jumbled, poorly thought out mess ever again. I can only urge you not to make the mistake I did and to stay away from Rob Zombie’s Halloween at all costs.