Having pulled in over $30 million, good for the top spot at the box office over Labor Day weekend, Rob Zombie’s Halloween is a bonafide success, and one that couldn’t come a moment too soon for the hit-starved, re-formulated Weinstein Company. It’s also a complete creative misfire, indicative of Hollywood’s backwards thinking with respect to how to build (or re-start) a horror franchise.

the Halloween franchise, but only in the most wan and nominal fashion imaginable. The manner in which traditional notions of development were clearly abdicated here speaks volumes about how and what Hollywood thinks of horror franchises — which is to say certainly not anything seriously, but rather only as a slick, goosing means to an end, that end being dollars. For the Weinstein Company, the notion of a Halloween movie directed by Rob Zombie — a not-untalented guy who’s made increasingly savvy use of his devil’s minion image in both music and film — clearly had more appeal than a Halloween movie directed by just about any other established filmmaker who could be coaxed to tackle such an assignment. The film’s box office results seem to bear out the fruit of this line of reasoning.

To that end, Halloween is a thrown-together mixture of Zombie’s usual company of actors (wife Sheri, Bill Moseley, Sid Haig, Danny Trejo, et al), other horror “faces” (Ken Foree, Dee Wallace, Clint Howard, Brad Dourif, Halloween veteran Danielle Harris, Udo Kier) and a few bizarre stunt cameos (Mickey Dolenz, Richmond Arquette), all then given a merrily depraved punch of gore and slashing. Casually misogynistic and at times almost comically over-the-top in its vulgarity, Halloween is essentially partially a yawning prequel exploration of the roots of a psychopath and partially a remake of the first film in the series, John Carpenter’s 1978 genre classic.

Zombie’s last film, The Devil’s Rejects, was unapologetically degenerate, but completely streamlined in its exploitative impulses. Here there’s a split focus. Halloween follows a recent trend of horror prequels, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, which delve into the back stories of genre icons, attempting to answer the “hows” and “whys” of a faceless killing machine’s inner motivations. The problem, here as in there, is that the answers to these questions are so perfunctory as to lend the franchise no additional psychological weight or menace. Furthermore, Halloween additionally undercuts their set-up by spending the first 25-30 minutes of its running time explaining how Michael is to some degree a victim of circumstance — and thus loving to his little sister, the one person in his life who causes him no pain — only to then hurriedly throw that conceit under the bus when it becomes most convenient. Credulity is bent to pretzel-like extremes, and because of the film’s elongated set-up we don’t know or care about these characters. Ergo, the violence and other acts of intrusion hold absolutely no meaning. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.