There is one thing that needs to be stated about Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween right off the bat: It is essentially pointless. Zombie adds little or nothing of quality to Carpenter’s original film (though he adds much quantitatively), and it would be difficult to argue that Zombie does anything more for Carpenter’s seminal film than offer a very loud, aggressive, startling piece of film interpretation. Like Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Zombie’s film is like the product of a fanboy film appreciation society funded by millions and millions of dollars. It’s like a version of a film turned into a Universal Studios ride, amped up in every way, then refilmed for our consumption with all of the expected notes in place (or replaced).
But once we get that out of the way, and we heave a small sigh of relief with the realization that, for all its faults, it’s not utterly dreadful, Zombie’s film actually delivers in ways that one might not expect.
Sure, he gets significant things wrong: Michael’s white trash childhood is pure Rob Zombie and has little of the deep-seated terror of a simple middle-class suburban kid gone inexplicably awry. Getting this out of the way, and following it with some near-deathly scenes of one-on-one therapy with a distinctly post-Dr.-Phil Dr. Loomis (who here seems to exist as a poe-faced, semi-parodic cousin to the shrink at the end of Psycho), Zombie hits his stride with the boobs and blood, delivering to the audience every expected slash, gash, pummel, and crunch with disquieting and distinctly unexpected vividness and violence.
So, why is this the least bit compelling? Because unlike Eli Roth and the other Splat Packers, Zombie is a stylist. He realizes that all of this nastiness is only worth it when integrated into a discourse of images — of women’s bodies, of death, of abused children, of abused animals, and so forth. That, with each film, it becomes increasingly difficult to know what Zombie thinks of all this — whether he cynically thinks it is merely entertaining to fantasize about brutality (possible), whether he desires to imply some social message (unlikely), or whether he actually relishes cruelty, mental illness, death, and putrefaction (hmm …) — is what makes his films so consistently provocative (in, I would argue, a good way), their thoroughgoing transgression so deeply unpleasant. This is to say, by way of a privileged negative example, that if Eli Roth weren’t so cinematically illiterate or so shallow in his moralizing, his films might make us ponder the way the horror genre feeds us and feeds off us in the way that Zombie’s films do.
And it is this fact that, in spite of the film’s pointlessness in the face of the original, makes Zombie the perfect person to make this film. Carpenter’s Halloween is the archetypal slasher film; it is the very film that promulgated killer-cam aesthetics, that ought always to raise the hackles of feminist film theorists in suggesting the director’s (and then the audience’s) complicity in the punishment of female sexuality, in the sexualization of death and the mortification of women’s bodies. Zombie has nothing of substance to add to this debate; he has only style. But his particular stylistic obsession — his desire to vividly and relentlessly depict a bare-breasted woman being stabbed and bloodied, his utter lack of compunction about drawing our sympathies in one direction and then violently pulling them back — make him a worthy heir to Carpenter in the manipulation of viewer identification in the horror film. And he earns this place without a single killer-cam POV.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Dimension Films 35mm Print
03 Sep 2007 6:30 PM | Submit Comment