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Halloween (2007) — Film Review
Years ago, when I saw the Willy Wonka remake, I spent hours afterward defending it to family and friends; I insisted that they needed to judge the film on its own and not in comparison to the original. I still believe this with a lot of remakes, but not with horror franchises. It could be different in the case of one horror film being remade years later, but converting a piece of a franchise that spanned decades is different. Horror franchises create and build a villain and a story throughout many (sometimes awful) films. By the time the viewer gets to the remake, assuming they’ve seen some or all of the original franchise, it’s simply impossible to judge the film on its own. And maybe this is unfortunate, and perhaps Rob Zombie wished it could be possible. Still, if he wanted to make a horror film to which viewers wouldn’t bring any preconceptions and expectations, he shouldn’t have remade one of the most notorious franchises of all time and called it the same damn thing. Halloween, released in 2007, five years after Halloween Resurrection, brings Michael Myers back to the big screen in a way we’ve never seen him before. While the film follows the same basic premise of Myers escaping from the asylum, returning to Haddonfield, and stalking his sister Laurie, it also takes the characters and plot in an entirely new direction, ultimately resulting in mixed messages, and movie viewers will have trouble sitting…
