Typical. The idea was to watch the theatrical cut here but I got saddled with the “uncut” version which, if anything, contains more random fluff than the workprint I saw earlier in the year. Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved the extra bits then. My fear was that the “theatrical” cut would excise a lot of the young Mikey stuff which I loved so much, not least because of the incredible Daeg Faerch. Apparently this isn’t so, and if anything this “uncut” version is just too much. The workprint left something to the imagination, I felt, something I couldn’t put my finger on. This has a ton of stuff that could easily be removed without anyone noticing. If the theatrical cut makes things even more vague than the workprint while keeping all the young Mikey stuff, I still hold out hope for this being even better than I originally thought it was. For now, though, though the different ending here is a little too drawn out for me, I loved the mirroring of the “Laurie in the closet” sequence of the original, and her scream fading into the slides at the end was almost worth the meandering. I think this is one of those movies I’m going to find a lot more in each time I watch. The 2-disc DVD is definitely a must. More when I finally see the “proper” version, lol.

4th September, 2007:

Yeh, yeh, naughty naughty watched the workprint. Normally I wouldn’t mention the fact, but in this case I understand there are too many differences between this pre-release cut and the one that’s hitting cinemas for me to get away with it, lol. I’ll almost certainly see this when it comes out here, especially if it’s around or, better still, on Halloween (what’s with releasing it on August 31st anyway? lol I’m sure there are reasons but it can’t help looking like there’s an idiot in charge of the studio calendar, lol)

What I can say for now is that I did think this would be pretty damn good from the moment I heard about it – I personally didn’t like Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses and I never got around to watching its sequel The Devil’s Rejects (definitely on the to-do list now, though), but I did like what he seemed to be trying to do there, and he seemed to be a perfect choice to remake this classic (yes it’s a remake, IMDb pedants, why does that word have to instantly make it bad?), and of course he made one of the more enjoyable contributions to Grindhouse (“Werewolf Women of the SS”).

I thought it’d be good … but not this good, not by a long shot. This thing made my skin crawl and neck hairs prickle like few recent horror movies – few horror movies ever – have. Zombie really sells the horror, as the best always have, through sound as well as images – many of them, along with the score, wisely taken practically unaltered straight from Carpenter’s original. Zombie’s movie is dirtier, shakier, yet almost a little studio slicker at the same time – I definitely want to compare it to the Texas Chain Saw remake (which I liked almost as much, again to my surprise) – its characters are more fully fleshed out than Carpenter’s exercise in simplicity (right down, of course, to his unforgettable minimalist score).

Whether this fleshiness is a good thing or bad thing, that’s the big argument people will have over this movie. I’m not too sure myself as yet (I don’t even know how much of this stuff remains, maybe they have butchered it to simplicity). On the one hand, I didn’t particularly want to see Myers painted the way these things so often go, “oh it was all in his upbringing you see – he was bullied, that’s why he killed,” etc, stopping barely short of fully excusing his crimes; on the other hand, the movie (in the workprint form, at least) does do this to an incredible extent (his first kill as an adult – and I’m told this has been removed from the theatrical cut – is an act of vengeance I’m sure few will frown upon; at the end, Malcolm MacDowell tells him in so many words, “It’s my fault, Michael; I let you down.”) but it barely bugged me at all. The ending (here, at least) has Laurie (played amazingly well by Scout Taylor-Compton, sometimes uncannily reminiscent of Jamie Lee Curtis in the original) crying over her brother’s body and it sort of reminded me a little of that weird emotional stuff that creeps into Prom Night (if my memory serves me correctly) at the end … it kind of works, but you kind of can’t quite bring yourself to let it in too far.

In the end, I feel like I can confidently say even of the as-yet-unseen theatrical cut, as an entry in the franchise, it works. The horror part, at least, definitely works, Zombie can do this almost as well as the old masters. The sound mix is terrific, the casting superb. The whole package has to be admired. I loved the kid who played the 10-year-old Myers, Daeg Faerch (so cute but so scary); there’s the cunning casting of Danielle Harris (who played Myers’ niece in parts IV and V and seems to have magically slowed her aging process somewhere in the mid-nineties, lol) as Laurie’s friend Annie; and how can you really argue with the replacing of Donald Pleasance with Malcolm McDowell?; in a nutshell, I’m astounded to read that anybody is disappointed by this, let alone so many … in my opinion it’s so much better than could’ve been expected that it practically tops the original. And I think they’d have to reshoot the whole thing with Renny Harlin to make it that much worse as I’ve heard in its official release format.