Little Michael Myers spends his days killing lab animals and photographing carcasses of dogs and cats picked up from the streets. The childhood of the little misfit passes at the mercy of a drunk and violent stepfather, a cruel indifferent sister, and a stripper mother who is definitely absent. On Halloween night, Michael grabs a kitchen knife and wipes out the entire family, leaving only his little sister Boo alive. The boy is taken to a psychiatric hospital, where he remains locked up for over 15 years, until, during a transfer on Halloween night, Michael kills the guards escorting him and escapes to the town, where he begins hunting Laurie Strode, a teenager preparing to spend All Hallows' Eve as a babysitter at the Doyle house.
"This is a new 'Halloween.' Call it a remake, update, reimagining, or whatever you like, but the sure thing is that it is a new beginning, completely detached from the saga. This is what interested me about the project." With these words, director Rob Zombie presented his 'Halloween' at the press conference preceding the film's release, and in these words lies the real key to reading 'Halloween – The Beginning.'
The brilliant director of 'House of 1000 Corpses' and 'The Devil's Rejects' is clearly a sincere fan of 1970s genre cinema and has demonstrated this with his two previous feature films and his participation in the 'Grindhouse' project. Therefore, reinventing a classic of the seventies like 'Halloween' must have been a great honor for him, as well as a huge responsibility. The film with which John Carpenter in 1978 revolutionized the way of making fear in cinema, in addition to being a classic, is a true masterpiece of suspense and is still a very current technical and stylistic manual of the genre. Therefore, comparing it with Zombie's film would be like embarking on an uncomfortable massacre game to the detriment of the second, which lacks everything that made the 1978 progenitor unique. Nevertheless, Zombie's courage in accepting this challenge and his personal angle with which to frame the entire story are appreciated.
As Zombie himself stated, 'Halloween – The Beginning' is indeed a new starting point for the saga, a restart that is not and does not want to be a remake of Carpenter's film, but simply the same story told in a completely different way and with elements absent in the first film.
Someone called it a newquel, but it is a singular approach to a film that horror fans probably know by heart, a rewrite from scratch of one of the greatest icons of postmodern horror.
Zombie decides to delve into the childhood of the 'monster' and clearly show the audience the reasons that led him to violence and murder, developing a nihilistic and disturbingly current vision of the social condition of some 'edge' suburban realities. Rob Zombie's Michael Myers has nothing supernatural about him; he does not possess that aura of pure and intangible malice that characterized the Michael Myers developed from John Carpenter's mind. The new Michael Myers is a real and realistic 'monster,' a product of the sick society that raised him and poisoned him with massive doses of violence, vulgarity, pornography, and sadism incitement. Michael is the direct reflection of the environment in which he grew up: a lower-middle-class family living in questionable hygienic conditions and composed of unsavory characters. The verbally violent, alcoholic, and slimy stepfather is an histrionic and excessive William Forsythe (Sheriff Wydell of 'The Devil's Rejects'), who pronounces sexual fantasies about the adolescent stepdaughter and continually finds reasons to question Michael's virility; the older sister Judith (the Hanna Hall who played little Jenny in 'Forrest Gump') is a seductive and emancipated teenager who shatters the brother's dreams and secretly represents his sexual desires. Even the stripper mom, played by the always fascinating Sheri Moon, hides behind a worn mask of parental affection an evident educational incapacity and a persistent physical and mental absence. In such a climate of degrading family dysfunction, where the only anchor of affection for Michael seems to be represented by the newborn sister Boo, to whom the boy devotes the most loving care, the ground is paved for a latent psychopathy that is all ready to explode.
Zombie weaves the entire situation with a wealth of details and measured narrative care, yet the long prologue that anticipates the killer's internment in the Smith's Grove Sanitarium seems to lack something, namely that spark that separates the monster from the child. Someone might venture that there is no division between the two faces of the same coin, but since Zombie seems so inclined to sociological analysis and showing the psycho-pedagogical formation of the serial killer, one would have expected a deeper exploration of that 'quid' that triggers the transformation from child Michael Myers to monster Michael Myers. Probably the reason for some lack in this regard is due to the need to tell the complex genesis of a distorted personality in about 40 minutes, and the same need is evident in the haste with which the remaining 70 minutes are carried out.
The big problem with 'Halloween – The Beginning' is indeed the desire to contain in less than 2 hours a story that is decidedly complex and rich in events, a prequel and a remake, two films in one. After Michael's escape from the psychiatric hospital, there is the need to tell in the little remaining time what Carpenter had comfortably done in over 90 minutes, and so the race begins. The film becomes frenetic, a succession of (short) stakeouts and murders, all a bit too standardized to the modern style of post-'Scream' slasher movies. We thus have a trio of friends among whom none stands out, neither for charisma nor for acting skills, the Laurie Strode of Scout Taylor-Compton (Zombies – The Revenge of the Innocent), a teenager certainly prettier than Jamie Lee Curtis from the first film, but less suited to represent the virginal and androgynous nemesis of Michael. Laurie's friends, who perform skits that curiously link them to the foul-mouthed protagonists of Tarantino's 'Death Proof,' are played by Kistina Klebe (Lynda) and Danielle Harris (Annie), who even returns for the third time to confront Michael Myers, since in the 1980s she played Jamie Lloyd, the serial killer's grandniece.
The last, hectic, 20 minutes of 'Halloween – The Beginning' return to represent a novelty compared to the original plot, resulting, moreover, definitely excellent. Everything is tinged with smashing action, but it is here that the new, gigantic Michael Myers truly emerges, an unstoppable giant, although completely human, capable of feeling an ambiguous sense of love/hate for his sister (the photography scene is definitely touching) and demonstrating all his ferocity as a true contemporary boogeyman. The hysterical finale, which partially pays homage to Hooper's 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' and partially to Craven's 'The Hills Have Eyes,' has an emotional and visual power definitely worthy of the best Rob Zombie.
A Rob Zombie who, unfortunately, does not always emerge in this 'Halloween – The Beginning,' a bit too far from the freak poetics of the director and closer to the modern slasher movie. The zombie genius especially emerges in the desire to focus the viewer's attention on the monster rather than the victim, as well as in some over-the-top dialogues and the choice of a cast to be included in the Guinness Book of Records for the largest number of genre character actors within the same film; yet the entire operation lacks the anarchic genuineness that filled the director's two previous feature films, so much so that one might hypothesize too tight supervision by the Weinstein brothers over the entire conduct of the project.
As of today, 'Halloween – The Beginning' is the weakest film in Rob Zombie's still brief career, although it certainly represents one of the most successful chapters in the saga inaugurated by Carpenter's masterpiece. A film that will surely divide the fans of the rocker-director and of Carpenter's 'Halloween,' a film that could have offered more.
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