'Halloween' Proves Greatness Doesn't Run in the Blood

"August 31 -- the day it came out" doesn't have quite the resonance of "Halloween -- the night he came home," and neither does Rob Zombie's take on John Carpenter's 1978 horror/slasher classic that introduced the world to masked boogeyman Michael Myers.

The last half of Zombie's film is essentially a remake of the original, with the requisite ramped-up violence and gore. The first half is attempted prequel, however, offering a back story for Myers -- something notably, and perhaps wisely, absent from the Carpenter mold that inspired seven increasingly dubious sequels.

Michael Myers wasn't even named in the original film; the credits listed him as "The Shape." He was simply an emotionless killer behind an expressionless mask, seemingly unstoppable as he picked up a murderous mission, which had been put on hold while he spent 17 years silently stewing in a sanitarium, planning his escape and revenge.

What set off 10-year-old Michael on Halloween that he so cold-heartedly killed family members and neighbors with kitchen knives and aluminum baseball bats (ping!)? Turns out to be that very same white-trash family, consisting of clueless stripper mom (played by Sheri Moon Zombie, Rob's Mrs.), her perpetually drunk and abusive boyfriend (super-scrungy William Forsythe) and Michael's trampy older sister (Hanna Hall). At school, bullies torment young Michael about his mom, and he's built up quite a Polaroid library of animals he's killed. Fuse lit, we think.

All that plays out in the first half-hour of a film that contains dialogue so nasty and stupid, you'd swear (right along with the characters) that the booker for "Jerry Springer" wrote it (Zombie did).

The bigger problem is that Little Michael is played by Daeg Faerch, a scraggly-haired head banger who, most unfortunately, looks like the porky little sister of those pop moppets the Hanson brothers. Sure, he's disturbing, but he's also weirdly . . . girlie!

He also grows up to be 6-foot-8 Michael Myers -- no longer The Shape, but instead incredibly In Shape. Big Mike is played by Tyler Mane, who does nothing to make us forget that he's a former professional wrestler. Not through acting, mind you: that white rubber mask covering his face obviates any need for subtleties or characterizations. He's the Incredible Bulk.

But what a friend he has in Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell in the ongoing role originated by Donald Pleasence, who died in 1995). When Sam meets Michael before his murder spree at age 10, he spots "a damaged young mind" (ya think?) and becomes his shrink in the sanitarium, a 17-year "second act" so short, it might as well be an entr'acte -- although it's just long enough to turn the hospital staff into hospital stiffs. Actually, Loomis looks and acts far loonier than his patient, who has gone silent after a guard suggests he "learn to live inside your head -- there's no walls there."

Or furniture, let alone exercise equipment that would explain Michael's strength. Guess making those masks builds muscles, and muscles wreak havoc as the sanitarium enables Michael's escape by transferring him in the middle of the night (decision and destination point still unexplained 29 years and nine films on). Since that happens right after Loomis ends their relationship, it's clearly separation anxiety run amok, like pretty much everything else in the film.

Myers heads home, with a truck-wash bathroom encounter sure to produce audience commentary in the wake of the Sen. Larry Craig incident. Once home -- on another Halloween night, wouldn't you know! -- Michael starts after the high school crowd (stalk, slash, stalk, slash, etc.), as well as a few adults for seasoning, all the while looking for the baby sister (now the babysitter) he left unharmed 17 years ago.

What Michael has in mind is open to interpretation (and more sequels), but while plucky Scout Taylor-Compton can scream and scramble with the best of them, folks are unlikely to feel toward her the empathy directed at Jamie Lee Curtis in the original.

Coincidentally, when I got home from the screening, Carpenter's "Halloween" was on the Independent Film Channel at midnight, as if to force comparisons. So . . . the original seems almost chaste -- a little nudity, almost no blood, but a lot of anxiety, anticipation and atmosphere. Zombie's take is full of nudity (much of it gratuitous), buckets of blood (it has a much higher body count), leaves nothing to the imagination and is far more intense and unrelenting than its inspiration.

Surprisingly, the new back story adds little (no "Batman," this; well, bat-man, maybe) and the 1978 edition of Michael is actually far scarier than Version 2.007.

For horror-genre fans, Zombie has cluttered his film with genre stalwarts, albeit mostly cameos so brief that if you blink, you'll miss them. And though composer Tyler Bates makes heavy use of Carpenter's genuinely creepy theme music, the new soundtrack is surprisingly lazy for a rocker-director: "Don't Fear the Reaper"? "Love Hurts"? "Only Women Bleed"?

Too bad, because Zombie showed with the excellent "The Devil's Rejects" in 2005 that he could write and direct a film that was disturbing, frightening, funny and surreal. "Halloween," however, feels like Zombie simply bit off less than he could chew.

Halloween (97 minutes). Rated R for strong brutal bloody violence and terror throughout, sexual content, graphic nudity and language.