HALLOWEEN (2007)

title: HALLOWEEN

year: 2007

cast: Malcom McDowell

director: Rob Zombie

rating: **

Rob Zombie serves up human beings as fodder, most of them so overly vapid, annoying or evil they're just begging to die. The legendary Michael Myers gets a forty-five minute back-story as a little boy who's about as scary as Jodie Foster in those old Coppertone ads. He's picked on by bullies, has a stripper mom and a white trash cliche-spouting step-father, and eventually goes on a killing spree, gets locked up in an insane asylum, and fifteen years later resembles Cousin It on steroids. He breaks out after slaughtering more deserving-victims, returns to the dilapidated house of his youth, dons his trusty (and iconic) William Shatner mask, and like the John Carpenter film in which this is based: wanders the suburbs in search of his long-long sister. Malcom McDowell's Dr. Loomis is a greedy capitalist who, after having treated Myers for years, pens a best-seller and becomes like a double-agent in a CIA film: find Myers or lose everything. The character Laurie Strode, the focal-point of the original, is but a side-character. And her banal teenage friends, all written to be massacred with no interesting or memorable personality traits (each spouting forgettable filler dialog), become more pudding in the pie. How many times can one stab a human being, and how is this scary? Rob knows a thing or two about shock and gore, but doesn't build an eerie enough stage to merit genuine (implied) horror. Too much lightning without thunder.