When Rob Zombie was handed the keys to the Halloween franchise, I was excited. I thought House of 1000 Corpses was a promising start, and I flat out loved The Devil’s Rejects (and I still feel the same about those movies). I just knew Zombie would bring something brutal and interesting to a franchise I wasn’t a big fan of (at the time). I was half right.
Zombie’s Halloween is brutal and ugly, but I never find it interesting. In the first film, Michael Myers’s backstory is completely fleshed out. Michael has a terrible home life thanks to an all-time shitty stepdad who gives the dickhead dad from Curse of Michael Myers a run for his money and an older sister who doesn’t seem to care about him. He’s bullied. He mutilates animals. With no one seeking real help, despite a mom who seems to truly care about him, he does what we all knew he was going to do and kills his sister, his stepdad, and his sister’s boyfriend (and he killed a bully earlier, for good measure).
With that bummer of a beginning out of the way, we can get to the Halloween-type stuff now, right? Nope. Now we get a lengthy sequence of Loomis trying to get through to Michael. Spoiler alert: he doesn’t. Finally, there’s a time jump and adult Michael escapes, and the movie can really begin.
But we’re forty minutes in at that point, and I’m just exhausted. What follows is the fairly standard version of the first film, but much more brutal than we’ve ever seen. At the time, I thought this was just okay, but I would rather have seen an original film from Zombie. Watching it now, it’s one of my least favorite entries in the series because there’s no fun to be had, and it simply fleshes out shit I didn’t need or care to know about.
But what could Zombie do? Fleshing out Michael’s origin was the only way he could put his stamp on this story, so that’s not his fault. This just should not have been a remake. If they had gone the same route David Gordon Green went in 2018, then this would probably be a much more interesting and entertaining entry without all the backstory baggage. But I’m still glad this version exists. If you wanted a Halloween movie that went all in on the brutality, you couldn’t ask for a better movie. I just don’t want it, but for all you sick fucks out there: enjoy.
Zombie’s Halloween II, especially the director’s cut, is a whole new ballgame. Zombie has said in interviews since that they were going to make these movies no matter what, so he might as well be the one to make them, but the experience overall was a negative one for him due to constant studio interference. So for the second film, it seemed like he decided to say, “Fuck it,” and make the most batshit entry he could. Mission accomplished.
Once again, this is not an easy watch. Right off the bat, you get EMTs talking about having sex with dead bodies, who then slam into a cow in the middle of the road leading to Michael escaping and murdering them. Myers disappears into the countryside becoming a mythic creature following his ghost mom and a white horse. But his impact on the survivors never leaves. Laurie is a broken person, and this film more than any other in the series, attempts to show what trauma can do to a person. (It’s not that the other films don’t address it, but this film makes it a much more debilitating condition.)
This is all interesting, but it’s just not a fun watch. That’s not what Zombie is going for, though. I want a little bit of fun with these movies, so Zombie’s entries aren’t for me. But just like the first one, I’m glad this exists because it is different. In that way, this is much better than the first film because Zombie was able to tell a complete story of his own without having to stay within the bounds of the original storyline. Here, Michael can be a roided up Manson-looking motherfucker who rarely even wears the iconic mask and even talks at one point. I cannot get behind the talking part, though, especially since it’s just him yelling, “Die!” Isn’t Michael always implying “Die!” when he stabs people and shit? Anyway, this is a wholly unique take on Michael and Laurie.
In the end, I still wish Rob Zombie had kept making his own movies at this time rather than falling down the franchise rabbit hole. But Halloween is a more interesting series because of his involvement. These movies may not be for me, but at least they’re distinguishably different from the rest. You could show me scenes from the fourth, fifth, or sixth film and it would be a blind guess which one it came from. If I see a single shot from one of these, I will immediately recognize it as a Zombie film. In a series this long and rehashed, that’s an accomplishment.
Random Thoughts
I'm a pretty vulgar person, but the amount of cussing in Zombie's films has just become annoying over the years. Nearly every character cusses like an elementary school kid who just discovered cuss words. As someone who uses profane language in articles and Letterboxd entries, this has caused me to reevaluate the amount of cussing I do. I'll still use it when I find it necessary and/or funny, but I have been deleting a lot of it when I proofread these days. Thank you, Zombie.
I did like Malcolm McDowell's dirtbag version of Loomis, mainly in the second film. He gets to go full asshole, and he seems to be enjoying himself. I'm glad someone is in these movies.
I love that Zombie included a scene of Loomis buying a gun. It always cracked me up how trigger happy of a therapist Loomis was l, especially in the sequels. To see him buy the gun was a fun nod to that.
There's a lot of hate towards the casting of Sheri Moon Zombie (Rob's wife) in nearly every movie he makes. I don't hate her as a performer, but her characters are typically screeching, foul-mouthed annoyance machines. So it was nice to see her as a calm angel of death type character in the second movie.
Speaking of which, she may have been a loving mother to Michael, but she was painfully oblivious. Her response to the school finding a dead cat in Michael’s backpack: "Come on. Big deal. He found a dead cat." Yeah, people come across dead animals in the road and whatnot all the time, but we don't pick them up and keep them as toys! So it might be a "big deal."
