Rob
Zombie’s Halloween
I’ve had this theory
going for some time now that any film that opens with a happy middleclass
family having a nice breakfast in their home will go on to have bad things
happen to the family. If you see the mum serve smiley face eggs and bacon
to a bowl-haircut kid and then dad comes in wearing a suit with a loose-knot
tie and smooches mum and affectionately runs his fingers through his kid’s
hair, then you fuckin’ know the kid is going to get kidnapped by terrorists or
the wife killed by Triads or something bad. The presence of a breakfast
routine is a guaranteed bad omen. A paradise that exists only to be lost.
This new
avant-garde masterpiece I’ve just watched called Rob Zombie’s Halloween
has kinda expanded on this theory. This movie starts, not with a happy
middleclass breakfast routine, but with an unhappy white trash breakfast routine.
But bad stuff still happens to this family. So I guess it’s any film that
starts with a family having any kind of breakfast together that’s a bad omen,
but here’s the kicker: in the second half of the movie we get introduced to a
new cast of characters and it starts with a happy middleclass breakfast routine
and even worse things happen to them.
So here’s the new
rule: the badness of the family breakfast omen is in direct relation to your
socioeconomic class.
So the movie
starting with a family breakfast routine had me expecting something bad.
We meet the Meyers family, a teenage daughter who kinda looks like Mischa
Barton, a sassy cripple stepdad, young Michael, the baby, and the mother.
The mother works as stripper in a club similar to I Know Who Killed Me,
Mum Meyers goes
into school because young Michael has gotten into some trouble. Then
Malcolm McDowell struts into the school and I’m thinking awwwww shit, this is
when the breakfast omen gets realized. This motherfucker is never good
news in a movie. Whenever he shows up somebody gets raped. But Rob Zombie
plays with our expectations again. McDowell plays Dr. Loomis, a
psychiatrist, and not even a very competent one.
For awhile I was
expecting him to be evil because he’s Malcolm McDowell and if you’ve seen Tank
Girl you know he normally does stuff like using his shredder arm to deflect
projectile beer cans from hitting his holographic head, but then it’s Michael
who goes home and kills his stepfather, his older sister, and her
boyfriend. And that was the fruition of the breakfast omen! Dr.
Loomis being played by McDowell was just another red herring. God damn it
Mr. Zombie, first making a clothed stripper in a movie full of nudity and then
getting Malcolm McDowell to play Robin Williams’s character from Good Will
Hunting? What loop will you throw us for next? Danny Trejo
playing a nice guy? Oh wait, that does happen.
That’s right,
Michael gets thrown in the home for the criminally insane and Danny Trejo plays
an orderly with mutton chop sideburns who’s actually a really nice guy.
Trejo sees Michael looking depressed in his cell and tells him not to let
imprisonment get him down. Trejo says he has spent enough time behind
walls to know how lonely it can be; this is clearly an allusion to Trejo’s
character growing up in
The other orderlies
are a bunch of assholes, and stupid assholes at that. Over the years
Michael grows to be a seven foot tall mute. These other orderlies don’t
seem to notice that he’s huge, historically homicidal, and unrestrained when
they taunt and abuse him. At least those pricks in Terminator 2:
Judgement Day waited until Sarah Connor was sedated and in full restraints
before licking her, this institution seems to attract even worse
employees. Except for Danny Trejo, who as I mentioned, is strangely not a
sadist in this feature.
Michael kills
Trejo and Trejo seems legitimately scared. For this performance Danny
Trejo must have drawn on the expressions of all the people who’s asses he’s
kicked in real life, because there’s no way Trejo has ever trembled in fear
like this himself. I think he deserves an Oscar, by my logic, Trejo
playing a guy who trembles in fear then gets his ass kicked is way more of a
stretch than Charlize Theron playing an ugly lady.
Since Michael
Meyers had a similar upbringing as Conan The Barbarian being taunted and abused
and exploited, it’s no surprise he grows up to be a big violent maniac like
Conan. They probably have the same definition of what is best in
life. The only problem is that Michael lives in modern times and that type
of behaviour is no longer admired. I’m sure back in the day Michael
would’ve become king by his own hand. And this story should also be told.
Michael’s
conquest of suburbia starts off at truck washing station. He either kills
this trucker who is listening to Rush, or because the trucker is
listening to Rush. I’d like to think the latter. The trucker
obviously fancies himself some sort of Superfly type despite listening to
irritating Canadian rock music. He gives a good performance and gets
killed on the can, although regrettably the toilet is not utilized in the kill
or in the post-kill clean up.
Michael steels
the trucker’s greasemonkey outfit and I think the implication is that Michael
steels the truck as well. In which case Michael’s got a good memory and
is a quick learner. He obviously wasn’t driving a truck during those
fifteen years he spent in the nuthouse, so he must’ve learned back when he was
eight years old before he was locked away. I imagine it would be hard for
a child to drive a Mack truck, those things have like twenty gears.
Respect.
Then Rob Zombie
throws us for another loop! Michael Meyers stops being the main character
and this whole other movie starts complete with middleclass family breakfast
routine bad omen. We’re now watching the adoptive family of Michael’s
baby sister, Lorry, the one he didn’t kill. It seems you can take the
girl out of the trailer park but you can’t take the trailer park out of the
girl, because her idea of breakfast humour is dancing around with two bagels in
front of her breasts and then fingerfucking one of the bagels for her parents’
amusement. She’d better eat those. Cause I sure wouldn’t touch a
bagel my daughter just fingerfucked, even if she is adopted.
Lorry hangs out
with a small posse of sexually aggressive trash-talking girls from her high
school. These characters all have nice modern hairstyles and in my
opinion, are more realistic than a similar group of trash-talking young ladies
in Death Proof. Rob Zombie has obviously done some deep research
into the female mind by reading Cosmopolitan Magazine and he knows that real
women don’t hang out talking about Vanishing Point like they did in Death
Proof, real women just talk about cock.
We then check
back in with Dr. Loomis, who after spending his life failing to heal Michael’s
mind with psychiatry and calling Michael “like my best friend”, he’s
turned around and written a book exploiting Michael and made lots of money and
gained huge international credibility even though the book pretty much
documents his own failure. Loomis gives seminars on Michael Meyers to
young psychologists. He calls Michael the perfect match of internal
factors such as the evil gene (which if you look at the DNA double helix, the evil
gene glows bright red and has 666 etched into its side) combined with external
factors such as his abusive white trash upbringing. This movie presents
the debate of nature versus nurture versus hunting knife. Hunting knife
wins.
Loomis then gets
a phone call telling him Michael Meyers has escaped, so he takes it upon
himself to track him down since nobody else seems to care when there are things
like transfats to worry about. Loomis figures Michael is heading back to
his hometown. It also happens to be October 31st, the day of
the Halloween festival, which is the same date of Michael’s first massacre when
he was a little boy. This is also a pretty wacky coincidence since the
movie is titled Rob Zombie’s Halloween.
There are other
parallels to the earlier section of the film. In the original massacre,
Michael’s sister was listening to Don’t Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult and
Michael kills her. In the modern times, another girl is listening to the
same song (it’s probably been remixed by Timbaland with some added hip-hop
grunts to show it’s modern times, but it sounded the same to me). This is
another layer of juxtaposition seeing as the people in this movie should
fear the reaper. But instead these girls take off their shirts and give
Michael a good unobstructed stab at their chests.
It’s really
strange, for the last fifth of this movie it kinda resembles one of those 80s
slasher movies. An odd jump in genre considering that up until this point
it’s been more of a Scientologist anti-psychiatry drama. If I had to
compare this film to another film I’d probably say it’s most similar to There
Will Be Blood in that you watch a crazy bastard become a bigger and bigger
asshole over many years until he ends up wrestling around on the floor with somebody
in a relatively undignified fashion.
I’d also say that
in many ways it also resembles Superbad in that it largely revolves
around trash-talking teens who live in some sort of 1970s homage trying to
obtain alcohol and have sex. Rob Zombie’s Halloween has more
handlebar moustaches and the kids having sex get interrupted by Michael just
showing up to stab them with a hunting knife. So Rob Zombie’s
Halloween has the edge in the laugh department over Superbad, but
both films deal with coming of age in similar ways.
During the
closing credits it mentions that this is apparently a remake of a John
Carpenter film, though I can’t figure out which one. I’d guess The Fog,
but there’s no fog in Rob Zombie’s Halloween. But maybe that’s
point, after all, Mr. Zombie has demonstrated a clear mastery of irony.
If they make a
sequel to this, I suggest Halloween 2 as the title. Ya know, keep
it simple.
If you liked
this, here are some other recommended articles:
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Cello: A Movie About an Evil Cello
Do you like Asian horror? This might be the best Asian
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Ten years after its release….I have an opinion on it.