Rob Zombie's Halloween - Review

Rob Zombie is back for more horror, and by that I mean both the content of his film and the execution of it. Rather than continue on with his maladjusted House of 1000 Corpses / Devils Rejects characters, Zombie is tackling a remake of a more classic movie: John Carpenter’s Halloween. The remake is very much in the vein of another recent remake of a classic horror flick: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In fact, the two remakes are so similar, at times I felt like I was watching that movie over again.

Michael Myers is the striking figure of the Halloween movies, not to be confused with the SNL actor of the same name. Over time and seven sequels Michael has been through a lot, although none of that really matters since this is a remake instead of another sequel. Zombie’s addition to the franchise is more time spent on the disturbed youth of Myers, which completely explains his sadistic behavior by surrounding the character with characters who curse every other word and fit as many sexual references into their speech as possible. The cursing is probably supposed to show the characters have no love, but it just comes across as sloppy writing that is desperately trying to show how horrible Michael’s childhood was. The result is yet another attempt to demystify an icon by showing their youth, a la Hannibal Rising and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning.

As a youth Myers slays his family and those who oppose him in several different gruesome methods, from beating them to death with an aluminum bat to slashing his sister seventeen times. Yes, in a Zombie flick the gore does flow, but it’s all irrelevant. Camera shots are so tight that the audience has no frame of reference for what it’s seeing a lot of the time, so that bloody mess on screen could be a broken face or a smashed cat, or possibly even just a nasty plate of spaghetti. Mixed with yet another movie that tries to make things “more real” by refusing use of a steadycam, the cinematography is one of the movie’s worst enemies. It’s called a “motion picture” but that doesn’t mean the picture should literally always be moving. Sadly, here, it frequently is, and with shots so tight the result is you have no idea what you’re watching or where characters are in relation to each other.

This becomes especially frustrating later in the film, as an adult Michael Myers breaks out of the sanitarium and returns to his family home for reasons unknown, pursued by his psychologist, Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell). Unlike the original, this time it’s fairly clear the pursued girl, Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) is related to Michael – after all, there’s an entire franchise that has established this and Zombie isn’t straying that far from familiar territory. What’s unknown is why Michael feels the need to return there of all places. Somehow, Dr. Loomis knows that’s where he’s going and follows, desperate to stop the killer.

Zombie damages his own attempt at a remake by exposing so much of Michael’s childhood. Frankly, once we’ve seen Michael commit such atrocities as a youth, there’s really nothing surprising or shocking about the acts he commits as an adult. It’s just a matter of time.

Unfortunately, time, or the pacing of the movie, is another serious problem. Part of Michael Myer’s threat is that he’s always been this slow, lumbering yet unstoppable force. Here he feels less like a lumbering character and more like a plodding one. Part of the reason is because the movie doesn’t really build towards any sort of climax. It’s just one quick encounter with Michael followed by an eternity of boredom. Instead of a curious terror we know nothing about, he’s far too familiar to us by the time the slaughter really begins, and the pauses in between that would normally heighten anticipation just kill everything.

On top of everything else, I really hate what Zombie attempts to do with the movie’s sound editing. Some scenes feature music with no sound effects, others feature sound effects and no dialogue. Michael’s typical threatening breathing is inconsistent, which, again, removes some of the menace from the character. It felt like Zombie just went into editing on a daily basis with a “this seems like fun today” approach. The result is just flat-out annoying.

I really didn’t mind Zombie when he was making cinematic disasters with his own characters. After all, he created them. Let him mess them up however he sees fit. There is no excuse for messing with this classic character, however, especially when so many sequels have already messed things up. If Zombie had decided to throw another sequel in, I probably wouldn’t have minded, but this needless remake is barely watchable, annoying on the ears, and a snoozer of a story that deconstructs another character that was better left as an enigma.

Delta Farce - Review

If you have to look at the rating I’ve given this movie to figure out that it deserves the lowest possible score, you just might be dumb enough to somehow enjoy the film. Even if that were the case, I would still tell you to avoid it at all costs. Should you decide to go see it anyway and find that it doesn’t completely insult your intelligence, that might be a good sign that you didn’t have any to begin with. I wish I could say that was the only thing being insulted by the film, but regrettably it goes on to backhand the men and women of the American armed forces. It’s not just stupid, it’s offensive.

I used to believe that the worst person to ever be unleashed on a major motion picture was Carrot Top. That thought is being challenged by Larry The Cable Guy. The one-trick-pony, red-neck comedian teams up with long time Blue Collar comedy partner Bill Engval and so-skinny-it’s-scary Hustle and Flow star DJ Qualls to stitch together round after round of painfully obvious jokes. The gags themselves aren’t really enough to make up an entire movie so first time screenwriters Bear Aderhold and Tom Sullivan had to come up with a plot, or at least something they could try and pass of as a plot. Apparently unable to come up with anything they decided to rip off a much better movie.

Larry (The Cable Guy), Bill (Engvall) and Everett (Qualls) are part of a Georgia Army Reserve unit that was sent to Iraq. The three somehow managed to avoid being shipped out but they still show up on base for their “weekend warrior” hours which generally consists of shooting stuff with shotguns and making beer runs. When their little secret is discovered they’re sent through a ridiculous three day training montage and then packed off on the first plane to Fallujah.

Bad weather during the flight forces the pilot to dump his cargo, which just happens to include the idiot trio who snuck off into one of the humvees to sleep. Upon waking, the guys discover they’ve been dumped in the middle of the desert which they mistake for Iraq. Instead they’ve ended up in the deserts of Mexico. I’m not sure how Mexico figures into a flight plan between the United States and Iraq but screwy geography isn’t the biggest problem the movie faces.

Once the guys figure out they’re in Mexico they decide to attend to their soldierly duty of “spreading freedom and democracy” by helping out a small village. The villagers are plagued by an evil bandito named Carlos Santana (Danny Trejo) who raids and pillages from time to time when he isn’t too busy with disco karaoke night at the hide out. The rest of the story more or less plays out like a red neck version of The Three Amigos taking the occasional break to make a joke about the Carlos Santana name or to give Larry the chance to toss in his tired trademark line “git ‘r done”. I don’t care who you are, it’s just not funny.

With the United State military serving under extreme circumstances around the world, it’s perhaps not the best time to make a military comedy. But even so, there are hundreds of ways it could be done without being offensive. Wartime or not, this movie smacks of complete disrespect for a military that works hard to do their job, which is particularly difficult since they don’t get to pick what job they do. Whether or not you like the current politics of the White House, I would hope you could agree that the armed forces deserve some respect for their efforts. It's not just the moronic starring trio, but most of the soldiers in the movie are portrayed as dopes and their fervor for the military generally comes across as lunacy. The biggest blow comes at the end when the credits actually dare to say that the movie is dedicated to the hard working men and women of the armed forces.

I’ll freely admit that I’ve watch the “Blue Collar Comedy Tour” and even laughed a few times during. But the format just doesn’t work when you try to translate it out of the trailer park. Add on that the plot is ripped off and the jokes are insipid and you end up with one of the fattest wastes of screen time since Larry’s last movie. I’d usually stop at saying that the filmmakers of such a pile of crap should be ashamed, but in this case I would add that they owe a lot of people an apology, and not just the audience.