Halloween (2007)

Acting:		Partying:		Girls:
Blood:		Language:		Gore:
Violence:		Humor:		Sexuality:
Torture:		Predictability:		Overall:

Rob Zombie's 2007 re-imagining of Halloween is as edgy, grimy and sadistic as you would expect from the heavy metal front man and director of films with names like House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects. Unfortunately, it's also relentlessly grim, pretentious and un-entertaining, unlike his other films.

Michael Myers, the crazed slasher protagonist of the original series, has always come up short in the movie monster pantheon. He certainly has his fans, but his presence and methods are very similar to another masked killer of promiscuous teenagers, Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th fame. While this film attempts to show us deeper levels of Michael we haven't seen before, it still does very little to elevate the character or bring him out of Jason's shadow.

We first meet Michael as a small child in a broken and dysfunctional home. His mother is a stripper trying to make ends meet, his father is an abusive drunk and his jail-bait sister is far more concerned with herself than with helping the troubled child. The only family member he seems to bond with at all is his baby sister, Lori. Soon it is discovered that Michael, who frequently wears a clown mask to disguise what he considers his ugliness, has been killing and torturing small animals. Enter Dr. Loomis, a child psychologist contacted by the school to help Michael before it is too late.

Of course, it is already too late. Mere seconds after Dr. Loomis appears in the film, Michael moves up the food chain to humans, starting with a school bully who has been antagonizing him. From there, we see him take revenge at home, brutally murdering his father and then his sister and her boyfriend. Only baby Lori and his mother (at work at the time) are safe from his rampage. He is then ...

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