“Halloween II” was not shown to press, but last night contributor Phil Fava attended a midnight screening just so he could file this report. Here’s Phil:

What was I expecting, here? I don’t know. I didn’t necessarily anticipate good taste or stunning craftsmanship, but I definitely didn’t anticipate this. Truth be told, I’m just angry. I was angry at this movie immediately. I almost want to forgo writing a review and send the director a list of my grievances instead. I’m not scared; I’m resentful.

Isn’t Zombie supposed to be a massive horror movie buff? Shouldn’t he be clued in slightly to what works and what doesn’t? I just wanna grab him and scream, “Stop trying to humanize your villain! Please! It completely works against you and serves no useful purpose!” Showing Michael as a small child with deep affection for his mother doesn’t make him scarier.

Anton Chigurh (”No Country for Old Men”) and Heath Ledger’s Joker were a thousand times more menacing than this limp juggernaut could ever be, and that’s because the Coen Brothers and Christopher Nolan had the good sense to avoid giving those characters lame expository passages to explain their behaviors. Every murder in this movie hits precisely the wrong note. Michael Myers is not seen as a malevolent force; he’s seen as an oaf with bizarre hallucinations who obeys his wraith-like mother’s every command.

When I see a human being murdering another human being, it doesn’t scare me. It just upsets me. It’s ugly and depressing. And honestly, even if this hacky, borderline-Oedipal character treatment had been done well, it still would’ve been counterproductive. But, for the record, it wasn’t. It was cheesy and embarrassing.

What else? Oh yeah. Nausea and fear are not interchangeable conditions. Carefully showing me a person’s stab wounds, again, does not scare me. It grosses me out. It makes me queasy. Never, ever confuse this with the kind of sensation experienced when watching a horror movie made with prowess and integrity (like, for instance, the original “Halloween”). He might as well be showing us feces.

Also, I’ve had it with the parade of grotesqueness. Another major self-defeating portion of this movie is attributable to Zombie’s penchant for giving us awful, insufferable, disgusting, scummy characters who exist merely so they can cease to do so moments later. This renders every killing totally inconsequential. Why should I care when Myers decapitates an ambulance driver who’s spent all his screen time happily discussing necrophilia? Why should I care when Myers bludgeons two men to death who’ve both just assaulted him for trespassing?

Even the color palette is completely inappropriate. The grungy look accentuates the wretchedness of these characters and augments the audience’s disinterest in their deaths. If the victims are cruel and arguably deserving and even the undeserving ones inhabit a dreary, unrealistic world, how can I conjure up any level of sympathy for them? How can I have a stake in their survival?

This is basic stuff, Zombie. Seriously, what the hell are you doing? Haven’t you made a few movies already? Have you learned nothing from them? Even if this were your first film, it’s not like you didn’t have an impeccable frame of reference. You’re remaking good movies and changing everything about them that made them so.

I felt a lot of things while I was watching “Halloween II”: depression, annoyance, discomfort. Mostly, it made me want to shower. This is an ugly, clumsy, surprisingly awful film. Like I said, I didn’t expect high art. But I definitely didn’t expect to hate it. And I really hated it. So did my fellow audience members. They, too, were disinterested. They didn’t scream. They didn’t gasp. They laughed when they weren’t supposed to. As a matter of fact, laughter was their only audible response. Let’s just say a prayer for Malcom McDowell and move on with our lives.

Tags: film, Halloween 2, Halloween II, movie, new, remake, review, rob zombie, zombie

Just got this in my inbox about 10 minutes ago. I hope he does something different with it this time because his “Halloween” remake was about half good.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK (December 16, 2008) — Dimension Films - the successful genre and specialty arm of The Weinstein Company - is pleased to announce that the company will make “H2,” the sequel to Rob Zombie’s 2007 reinvention of the horror classic “Halloween.”  Once again, Rob Zombie has been tapped to write and direct.  Malek Akkad of Trancas International Films, who also produced 2007’s Halloween with Dimension, will produce the sequel, along with Andy Gould of Spectacle Entertainment Group, Zombie’s long time manager and producing partner.  The announcement was made today by Bob Weinstein, Co-Chairman of The Weinstein Company.

Dimension’s “Halloween” scored the highest Labor Day weekend opening ever with a record-breaking $30.6 million in its first four days of release and went on to gross nearly $60 million at the domestic box office in 2007.

Zombie’s “H2” will pick up at the exact moment the first movie stopped and follow the aftermath of Michael Myers murderous rampage through the eyes of heroine Laurie Strode.

“H2” will be Zombie’s fifth written and directed feature.  Prior to the success of Halloween, Zombie released the critically-acclaimed film “The Devil’s Rejects” (2005), the follow-up to his cult classic “House of 1000 Corpses” (2004).  Zombie just wrapped production on his animated feature film “The Haunted World of El Superbeasto” due to be released in 2009.  Zombie, also an accomplished recording artist, has sold over fifteen million albums worldwide, making him one of Geffen Records’ top selling and longest running artists.

Bob Weinstein stated: “Following the success of 2007’s ‘Halloween,’ we are thrilled to be back in business with Rob Zombie, bringing a sequel to theatres.  The fans have made it clear – and we agree - that they feel the franchise is in great hands with Rob Zombie.”

Rob Zombie said, ”I am very excited to be working with Bob Weinstein again and returning to the world of ‘Halloween.’ The remake laid the groundwork, now it’s time to really take Michael Myers to the next level. I believe we’ve just barely scratched the surface of where we can take this series.“

John Carpenter’s “Halloween” launched the Halloween franchise in 1978 and Moustapha Akkad, founder of Trancas International Films, executive produced the original classic. Akkad’s son Malek has continued with the franchise, producing “Halloween” (2007), “Halloween H20: 20 Years Later” (1998) and now, “H2.”

“I am thrilled to be making ‘H2’ at Dimension, the home of the ‘Halloween’ franchise for the last 15 years,” commented Malek Akkad.  “I look forward to working again with Bob Weinstein, as well as a filmmaker of Rob Zombie’s talent and stature.”

Tags: 2007, direct, H2, halloween, Rob, sequel, to, will, zombie

Two months ago, Scene-Stealers sitegoer Aaron Hale submitted his Top 10 Zombie Movie list. Rather than do a list of my favorite zombie movies, which would be very similar to his, I thought I’d write about something that gets to the very heart of why we love zombie movies so much, even though sometimes we don’t even know it: The zombie metaphor.

Horror genres are known to go in and out of fashion. The slasher movie, for instance, is fading a bit right now, while (thanks to HBO’s “True Blood” and the upcoming “Twilight” movie) vampires seem to be having a bit of resurgence of late. One genre, however, that never seems to go away is the zombie movie. The reason is simple. Zombies are easy stand-ins for our lesser selves. Essentially, zombies are reflections of who we are at our worst. Or best, depending on what glass you are viewing the metaphor through.

George Romero is the undisputed king of the zombie flicks. A political filmmaker at heart, he is pigeonholed as a horror director because his zombie movies are full of such prescient social commentary. The original “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) was made for $114,000, and its doom-laden atmosphere and breaching of several taboo subjects have caused its legions of fans to perceive it as many different things. It’s a metaphor for homosexual repression, the civil rights movement, feminism, the counterculture, or an unwinnable war in Vietnam, depending on who you talk to.

However you choose to view it, there is no doubt that its budget limitations only lent more authority to the stark situations that it presents its protagonists with. As zombies overtake the land and nobody is able to stop them, an unfit society’s ultimate fate is to be devoured by, in essence, itself.

By the time Romero finally filmed a sequel, 1978’s “Dawn of the Dead,” he had turned his sights on rampant American consumerism. While stopping to outrun the ever-widening plague, Romero’s characters hole up in the one place they feel safe—the mall. A wickedly funny critique of the nature of consumerism, “Dawn” has its main characters not only taking refuge in a mall, but fighting each other for possessions and territory that is completely meaningless considering the apocalyptic situation outside. The humans celebrate what they think to be their final victory in ridding the mall of zombies with a festive orgy of meaningless “purchase power.” More zombies are soon discovered surrounding the mall, clawing helplessly at the glass and looking in on the humans. It is then that one of the partygoers has the astute observation, “They’re us!” while his companion shivers and pulls up the collar on her new fur coat.

Zombies are the lowest examples of the lower class. They shuffle forward in a hideous lurch; their brains are turned to mush; they moan and groan, producing no intelligible speech; and are driven by one simple, base desire—to eat human flesh. Nevertheless, they seem to overpower their faster, supposedly smarter foes in the human race due to their sheer numbers alone. In Romero’s “Day of the Dead” (1985), this class warfare is more evident than ever before.

“Day” takes place mostly in a military installation, where a sadistic and volatile Army commander—a satire that’s devoid of any subtlety whatsoever—lords with glee over captured zombies. His increasingly psychopathic behavior becomes a problem for scientists trying to study one the living dad to try to figure out how to stop them. Like any good classic horror film (see “Frankenstein,” “Freaks,” etc.), pity grows for the monster, and as military and science turn on each other, it’s the zombies we end up rooting for.

Rich humans are holed up in an indoor oasis and the poor humans must fend for themselves on the zombie-infested outside in Romero’s satire of Bush-era America, 2005’s “Land of the Dead.” One significant change from his past films, besides a bigger budget and some “name” actors like Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo, is that zombies are evolving. They begin to remember elements of their past human lives, and start to learn from their experiences. Of course, it is a disgruntled human who threatens the encased city with exposure, and when the zombies do eventually overrun, the humans discover—irony of all ironies— that the electric fence that previously kept the zombies out has become a wall that now prevents their own escape.

Rather than continue his continuing narrative, Romero re-imagined his zombie plague from a different perspective with this year’s ill-conceived “Diary of the Dead,” which attempted to address the current user-driven YouTube revolution and general societal mistrust of the government and its fear-mongering. There are some great ideas buried somewhere within, but the movie is too in love with its own out-of-touch, 60s-era sloganeering.

Famous directors like Peter Jackson (“Braindead” aka “Dead Alive”), Sam Raimi (“The Evil Dead” series), and Lucio Fulci (“Zombi 2”) have also put their distinctive marks on the genre, but it was Edgar Wright’s loving send-up/tribute “Shaun of the Dead” (2004) that ventured most closely into the metaphorical by presenting an appliance salesman who stands in for all of sleepy Great Britain. The scene where he goes down the block for ice cream, oblivious to the fact that his street has been turned into a zombie hell is a perfect metaphor for the way we can sometimes plow through our own daily routine with blinders on. Shaun eventually wakes up and fights to save his family and his relationship with his girlfriend—did I mention it was a comedy? The movie is now considered a cult classic and is partly responsible (along with “28 Days Later” and the “Dawn of the Dead” remake) for the recent resurgence in zombie films.

Which may explain why the King of Zombies, George Romero, is back in production again, this time on “Island of the Living Dead,” due out in 2009.

Tags: 28, alive, braindead, dawn, day, days, dead, diary, evil, george, island, land, later, living, metaphor, night, romero, shaun, zombie