Halloween

If anyone could recapture the vitality of this "slasher movie", it had to be Rob Zombie. That is something we suspected all along, even before Rob Zombie announced his interest in film-making.

Rob Zombie is the best musician that got the message (not sure if that's the right word) implicit in the psychokiller films that flourished in the seventies and reached their decadent glory during the eighties with the advent of a bunch of sequels of fundamental importance for anyone with an interest in mythology and supernatural aspects of serial murders, "Nightmare on Elm Street", "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween".

Rob Zombie mastered these standards, which became his medium, his language, his aesthetic parameter. He turned them into music. Rob Zombie did not need to watch them again to remember them: he somehow had them tattooed.

Of the three, Carpenter’s "Halloween" is probably the most mundane: A Halloween night of any given year, a six year old boy murders his sister in a rural Illinois town. The child, therefore, is confined to a psychiatric institution in which a Dr. Loomis tries unsuccessfully to aid him.

Fifteen years later, Mike, that's the name of the child, becomes a giant (two meters tall and with a massive force) and escapes from the asylum to return to his hometown with a mask on his face. His purpose is to chase several wayward girls that take advantage of such a day to get into bed with their boyfriends when they should be working babysitting.

After gutting the three of them, Mike looks for Laurie, but being her the chaste and healthy girl she manages to escape with the help of Loomis. In the end Mike is killed, although his body is never recovered. In this remake from Rob Zombie, we find out that Laurie is nothing more and nothing less than Boo, Mike's younger sister, who at the time of the fratricide was only a couple of months old.

Rob Zombie takes the story of Mike and, preserving some of the classic components, including the fabulous soundtrack, proposes a return to the beginning where he further explore the past and identity of the murderer.

This is a macabre game of manipulation, well done by Rob Zombie who is quite clever in this: bringing out the worst of the viewer, he manage to put us on the side of the beast. While in the original movie Mike Myers is nothing but a psychopath out of control, in the version of Rob Zombie he is a deranged person whose initial motives, if not tolerable, are understandable.

Instead of the simply rampage murder, Rob Zombie offers a crusade, fairly justified, in search of his past. Rob Zombie's Myers is an evil murderer that is crude, and at some times, touching.

Myers is a monster, but he is also a frightened child who may only want to protect, in a slow, drawn, calmly way his sister. We would like Laurie to understand him, to recognizing him, to save him, to react to his clumsy affection. But that's too much to ask to Laurie, you have to be realistic, you can only escape. Shoot, stab, kick, and then escape. Mike, we also know it, will never leave her alone. He is all patience.

Director: Rob Zombie

Writers: Rob Zombie (screenplay), John Carpenter (1978 screenplay)

Stars: Scout Taylor-Compton, Malcolm McDowell and Tyler Mane